ARM co-founder says Intel has 'wrong business model'

Dr Hauser made the comments in The Wall Street Journal and added that the value of chips which ARM collects a royalty on has overtaken Intel's microprocessor revenue this year for the first time. "The reason why ARM is going to kill the microprocessor is not because Intel will not eventually produce an Atom that might be as good as an ARM, but because Intel has the wrong business model," Dr Hauser told the publication. "People in the mobile phone architecture do not buy microprocessors. So if you sell microprocessors you have the wrong model. They license them. So it's not Intel vs ARM, it is Intel vs every single semiconductor company in the world. "If you look at the history of computing there was mainframe, which was dominated by IBM, then came the mini computer dominated by DEC, then came the third wave with workstations dominated by Sun and Apollo, then the pc, and now it's the mobile architecture that is going to be the main computing platform at least on the terminal side. "There is no case in the history of computing where a company that has dominated one wave has dominated the next wave and there is no case where a new wave did not kill the previous wave — as in obliterate them…the people that dominate the pc market are Intel and Microsoft." According to Dr. Hauser, Intel's recent purchase of the Infineon was an attempt to re-position the company away from microprocessors and towards producing baseband processors, the key component of the mobile phone. "Whether they can morph themselves into a baseband company remains to be seen," he said. According to The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for Intel said: "We're not sure why the ARM folks have become so vocal lately as everyone agrees that billions of devices are coming online, and there's room for many to be successful. We'll just have to see how things play out."