Conducive rivals

The Economist had a good article last week about these rivals, but, in my opinion, here are two of the more important pieces of information.

ARM…has 270-odd licensees with 830 licences. Between them they shifted perhaps 8 billion ARM-based semiconductors in 2011, half of them in mobile phones and mobile computers, the other half embedded in consumer items and elsewhere. According to IDC, a research firm, the market for PC-powering chips that use Intel’s x86 processor architecture, which Intel dominates, was about 400m last year.

Arm’s market is twenty times larger than Intel’s.  That’s a lot of room for profit.  But, realizing it may be years away, as, for Pre-tax profits from Jan-Sept, IBM generated nearly 77 times what ARM generated in 2011.

Also,

Today more than 95% of the world’s mobile phones contain an ARM-based chip.