Segmenting smartphone market over next 5 years

Earlier this week, Simon Segars, EVP & GM Processor and Physical IP Divisions (www.linkedin.com/pub/simon-segars/2/2a0/556) presented an excellent keynote at an invite-only, executive dinner event around the CDNLive India 2012 http://bit.ly/TxallC organized by Cadence. His theme was around the low power requirements in modern mobile devices (understandably, as the market needs this topic and who is in a better position than ARM can talk about this – being at the center of most of those smartphones!)

One of the most interesting parts of his keyonte was the smartphone market segmentation he showed. IIRC (If I Remember Correctly), this was  Gartner backed market estimates/data on how the smartphone market is evolving in the near future.

While several enthusiasts around the world are going gangnam about the new iPhone5 which is a high-end smartphone,

                   

He showed slides that predict the market quickly dividing into 3 price-ranged smartphones:

  • Entry level < $200
  • Mid-level $200 - $350
  • High-end $350 (the likes of iPhone5)

It was really interesting to see that the market for the entry level is predicted to be as large as that of the high-end. Next Simon showed how ARM is well positioned with its family of Cortex (TM) cores to support its customers (the mobile semiconductor chip makers – a la the Samsung-s, HTCs of the world).

As of today, ARM provides Cortex A-15 like cores for the high-end devices:

image

 

Quickly ARM realized there is a strong need for low-energy, low-cost cores too to serve the entry level smartphones – here comes the ARM Cortex A-7

 image

In a well drafted, upto-the-point, picture-centric presentation Simon did a great job of explaining what ARM’s big.LIITLE architecture is all about! Read that as a separate blog entry if interested via: http://www.cvcblr.com/blog/?p=585

 

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