Could ARM's Cortex A9 Defeat x86 CPUs?

During our interview with Eric Schorn, VP Marketing for ARM's processor division, prior to the official release of the Cortex A9 MPCore, it was clear that the target of the nimble company was the lucrative multi-billion x86 segment where Intel rules.

ARM operates quite differently compared to Intel. Rather than owning the whole ecosystem, it only delves in selling intellectual property, essentially the building blocks, leaving its 200 partners to deal with the rest of the food chain including getting the samples and churning out the chips themselves.

Intel is still the biggest semiconductor supplier based on iSuppli figures with 2008 revenues of $33.7 billion. But then ARM has struck strategic partnerships with 10 of the other top 14 semiconductors firms worldwide which gives you an idea of the company's clout.

This allows more creativity, more flexibility and ultimately a more vibrant environment that supports a dozen operating systems and a multitude of derived ARM-based chipsets; a thriving competitive market with many niches.

This approach has helped ARM selling more than four billion cores in 2008, more than Intel has shipped in its entire lifetime and is reminiscent of what Linux did with the OS market (except that it is essentially open source).

But with the Cortex A9 MP core, ARM is looking even further; one thing that history taught us is that it is easier to scale up than scale down (eg: Nvidia vs ATI approach) and this is exactly what ARM is doing with the Cortex A9 MP.

The hard macro provided to its partners includes the possibility of scaling the processors to four cores officially. But I've been told that some vendors are looking even further with octo and 16-core models potentially coming up, depending on market demands.