There’s a certain category of World Series watcher who cheers for the Phillies simply because they support all-that-are-not-Yankees. It fits with the common American habit of rooting for the little guy – though all too often, particularly in Silicon Valley, yesterday’s underdog becomes today’s dominant power.
One company who’s remained a contender while staying scrappy is Freescale Semiconductor. It’s remained firmly ensconced in an also-ran category since the era of the 68000 and Power PC, when the company was the semiconductor division of Motorola. Freescale was an important supplier to Apple, but never broke out of the category of almost-great despite occasionally outperforming equivalent Intel chips.
And so it goes in ARM-based Smartbook accounts. Qualcomm and Nvidia are almost guaranteed a healthy market share. Everyone is watching the exciting new ARM contenders like Marvell Semiconductor and Broadcom Corp.
Meanwhile, Freescale continues to chug along with actual smartbook customers for its iMX family – Pegatron, for example. Today, four new low-power members of iMX were introduced, including the iMX512 and iMX513 for consumer applications.
Do we expect them to be game-changers? Not likely. But it’s nice to see Freescale continue to expand its ARM family, and nice to know that certain scrappy contenders will continue to punch along in the background – and occasionally, come home with a prize.
Loring
