Rumor is that ARM will target Intel

Chipzilla tortoise everything we know

People are still wondering why Japanese giant SoftBank paid over the odds for plucky British chip designer ARM earlier this month.

And they’re also wondering why SoftBank has pledged to increase jobs and increase investment at its Cambridge HQ.

Analyst Mark Hibbens at Seeking Alpha reckons that Intel faces a challenge on the data center from a new and revised ARM and may see a raid on its still lucrative server business.

Hibbens points to people thinking that ARM will find itself in the position of a fully fledged semiconductor business – a sort of a Qualcomm.

But that’s not what Hibbens reckons.

He thinks that ARM wouldn’t be able to match Qualcomm’s commodity model. Intel taking over ARM rather than SoftBank would have led to a furore, given Intel’s near monopoly position on the server front.

ARM, he points out, doesn’t have a server approach, but he believes that the server market and the PC market are obviously targets for a SoftBank bid to topple Intel in the data center market.

The internet of things isn’t going to be a mega market for ARM. Nor will it be huge for Intel.

I believe Hibbens may well have it right, and a SoftBank ARM combo could easily dislodge Intel from the data center, given the right strategy and approach. Intel is a slow moving tortoise despite the decimation of its staff earlier this year, and like IBM in the old days will find it hard to turn itself into a really nimble player.