For 30 years, the PC industry has treated Moore’s Law with religious reverence. Its immutable commandment — “Thou shalt double the number of transistors on circuits every 18 months” — created an enviable business model with consumers spurred to buy new, more-powerful PCs every few years.
The gospel according to Moore also drove Intel Corp.’s engineers to perform miracles of miniaturization over the years. Its latest achievement, the 2 billion-transistor, quad-core Itanium Tukwila CPU, is due for release in the second half of this year. Coincidentally, that’s when the greatest blasphemy to Moore’s Law — and the biggest threat to Intel’s dominance — is expected to make its entrance into the PC market.
U.K.-based ARM Holdings PLC had modest financial success in 2007, with $518 million revenue and a $2.1 billion market cap. However, the chip maker is wildly successful in the mobile device market. ARM’s chips are used in devices such as Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry and virtually every other cell phone, as well Lego’s Mindstorm robots and Japanese toilet seats that talk and squirt.
