Intel Corp (INTC)

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Chromebooks swinging in the direction of Intel processors

[See quote below from Samsung product manager! HP is also ditching Exynos and going with Celeron for Chromebooks.]

While a smartphone or tablet is virtually guaranteed to have an ARM chip inside, that’s no longer the case for Chromebooks, which appear to be swinging in the direction of Intel processors.

Case in point: Samsung's new Chromebook 2, announced Friday, which has Intel's Bay Trail M Celeron N2840—not one of Samsung’s own Exynos dual-core ARM chips. Earlier Chromebook 2 versions shipped with ARM processors and will continue to do so, but in a briefing with PCWorld, Samsung product manager David Ng said Chromebooks are quickly trending toward Intel components. "More than 50% of Chromebooks sold these days have Intel processors," Ng said.

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Intel: from zero to hero

Two different analyst firms confirmed that Intel is indeed winning. “I can say that the [Intel] X86 share was close to zero 18 months ago, and the surge happened late in 2013 and it’s been steadily climbing since with no evidence of slowing,” Dean McCarron, an independent analyst tracking component sales, said via email.

Although McCarron tracks component sales, not systems, he said his research would allow him to make a “soft” estimate that about 75 percent of all Chromebooks shipped with Intel X86 chips inside as of the third quarter, while the remainder included Samsung Exynos ARM chips. If there’s any race to be run in Chromebooks, it’s between two Intel chips: the Celeron 2955U—which McCarron said accounts for almost two-thirds of the Intel designs—and the “Bay Trail” N2830/N2840 chips, which essentially make up the remainder.

NPD, which tracks retail sales, also reported similar results. Specifically, an NPD spokeswoman said that from Sept. 2013 through August 2014, Chromebooks with Intel chips inside outsold Chromebooks with ARM chips inside more than two to one, with Intel chips commanding 69 percent of the market.

Why Intel has succeeded, and ARM has slipped, isn’t exactly clear. In September, however, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich offered one reason: ubiquity.

“One of the great things about building on an Intel architecture is you can build the same platform and it will work off almost any operating system,” Krzanich said. “So you can build one platform, it can run on Windows, it can run on Chrome, it can run on Android, it can run on Tizen, it could run on any of those operating systems. We’re about the only ones who can do that.”

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2834764/arm-vs-intel-why-chipmakers-want-your-chromebooks-brains.html