Actually their website claims: "Nufront since 2006 started its R&D focus on new generation of highly integrated, full function and lower power consumption computer system chip."
Moreover, they had zero experience in this field. From what I can tell, they only did software and some broadcast tech. They seem to be doing a lot of apparently totally unrelated stuff with just 200 people total. I dont know how many of those worked on their SoC or what their background is, but this seems to be the semico equivalent of a handyman building cars in his garage.
2006 wasn't necessarily their first IC design experience; they've had considerable experience with cutom FPGA designs with embedded applications before then. I don't really know how many personelle would be working on their design team, but with ARM design source code for cortex, it won't take the same amount of resource as a full blown x86 design; but the time to market will still be in the same range.
And I wouldn't count them in as a major player yet. Most of their offerings right now are targeted at traditional form factors and servers. And the 2W figure that you hear are cortex reference, which may or may not be the actual TDP of their 2GHz SoC (actually likely not); so their power consumption figures might actually climb into oaktrail territory when it's said and done. This is actually typical of relatively new entries into ARM design, as the ISA and reference design are not the only factors in power consumption.
I disagree. This market is only just beginning, its not nearly mature.
Moreover, the current players do not overly impress me. Texas Instruments is a big player, but frankly, hasnt ever done very well outside embedded markets and seems to be dropping the ball pretty hard (omap4 was announced in early 2009). Samsung has the right pedigree and might be the one to beat, but it has reportedly placed a 2-$300M order for Tegra's which cant spell much good about Orion. Both Marvell and Qualcom seem to struggle to keep up on both the CPU and GPU front. Apple doesnt exactly have a long history as semico and intel chose to bring a truck to a kart race.
TI has had a lot of experience in VLIW inplementations of ARM, as well as in DSP design, I certainly wouldn't count them out. Their designs have traditionally had somewhat higher IPC than most others in the low power market, and can easily find some niches where the uptake of their products are better. OMAP3530 would be a good example of that type of integration.
The most formidable players seem to be Samsung and Qualcomm, although that might change over time. The bit about Orion and tegra doesn't really make sense, as a company size of Samsung certainly can source certain designs from external, if it fits their particular product requirement; this actually makes sense as Tegra 2 is the devel target for Honeycomb, so no surprise there. It's like saying that IBM should not be using intel chips since they have Power, or Sun would never use x86.
Qualcomm also seems to be pretty on schedule with their latest multicore designs. Marvell recently got selected for playbook and the XO3, and a number of other devices (like the entourage edge), I don't see much weakness there. Apple is Apple, and they will put PASemi's resource to good use, and probably have the most cost effective amortized development of ARM based chips.
If I had been in charge of AMD, this is the market I would have concentrated my efforts on. Id even go for it now, better late than never, rather than spending billions on highend x86 which long term future seems destined to shrink significantly, and where you are not gonna beat Intel anyhow.
Yes, I definitely agree; however, with out their former mobile units, that window of opportunity is closing very rapidly. And some might argue it's actually game over already. As I said before, a lot of us in the industry expected this eventual shift, but few expected the shift to accelerate to this extent that we have seen in the past 12 months. Depending on the forecast, AMD may or may not still have an opportunity here; and even if there is some chance, the odds of AMD surviving long term as an independent company either against the ARM onslaught, or be an also ran in the space, is not good.