In A report on News.com quotes Gus Richard as saying that in the brave new world of tablets and smartphones, chip competition isn't so much about Moore's Law but rather how the "blocks" of circuits are put together and the nexus with the software that runs on those circuits.
Richard is a senior research analyst at securities firm Piper Jaffray.
"More specifically, tablets and smartphones use silicon called system-on-a-chip, or SoC, that doesn't always use the latest and greatest chip manufacturing technology but gets the job done," says the News.com article.
Of late, the focus in chip-making has changed from plain-vanilla PCs and notebooks to the increasingly popular tablets and smartphones - devices that are still not up there in compute power and office-related applications but getting a lot of traction from consumers and businesses alike.
However, Intel continues to be the dominant player in desktops and notebooks - which are either stagnating or growing sluggishly compared to small form-factor devices.
"We believe that a general purpose processor cannot compete with a purpose-built SoC with dedicated IP blocks like the A5," the News.com report quotes Richard as saying.
Nevertheless, Intel is moving quickly to close this gap, according to the article. "Its Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge (coming next year) processors are more akin to an SoC than traditional Intel chips and this trend will become even more pronounced with the Haswell chip, due in 2013, which is expected to be Intel's first SoC for mainstream laptops--not to mention tablets and tablet-laptop hybrids running on Windows 8," it notes.
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