Mobile Processor Market Driven by Next Generation Mobile Devices: In-Stat

A recent study from In-Stat shows mobile market is the highest growth end segment for the semiconductor industry.

 

The study, “Mobile Processor (News - Alert) Review: The Battle for the Next Generation Consumer Devices” finds the mobile market for merchant processing solutions is expected to grow at a 22.3 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2013.

 

The industry is driven by the huge demand for processors for smartphones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and mini-notebooks. These devices require higher level functionality, programmability and connectivity, so they are now shifting toward merchant market processors.

 

Merchant market processors are known for reducing original equipment manufacturer’s - OEM - cost while offering higher levels of integration and performance.

“Integration will be a key trend for future devices with multiple cores, graphics/multimedia acceleration, and I/O all continuing to be integrated into the processor,” says Jim McGregor, In-Stat (News - Alert) analyst.

 

Similarly, baseband functionality will also be integrated into mobile processors for all applications except PCs, which are less reliant on the connectivity and smaller device footprint, McGregor added.

 

According to In-Stat, the estimated value of the processing, graphics/multimedia, and baseband functions will all increase at double-digit growth rates over the next few years. Among smartphones, 87 percent will feature mobile processors with integrated baseband functionality by 2013.

 

By 2013, the market is projected to grow to about 775 million units, according to In-Stat.

The research also finds the battle for the fast-growing mobile semiconductor market will intensify in late 2009 with the introduction of new processors such as ARM and x86.

 

Intel (News - Alert) is planning to introduce processors that will reduce the power consumption of the x86 architecture to acceptable levels for smartphones and other mobile devices, In-Stat  said. Shortly after, many in the competing ARM camp, including Freescale, Texas Instruments, and Samsung (News - Alert) will essentially be scaling up performance with multi-core processors that maintain similar power levels to existing single-core products.

 

In-Stat’s study covers worldwide market for mobile merchant market processors, including CPUs, applications processors, and baseband processors. The study includes forecasts of TAM mobile processors by application, and market value TAM of silicon functions in mobile devices, through 2013.

 

In-Stat’s report also includes some vendor profiles such as AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung and Texas Instruments (News - Alert) among others.