Is the 1-chip PC looming in the future?

By _EDA360 Insider

July 20, 2011

The blog entry I wrote yesterday about the IHS iSuppli report on PCs and ARM processors set me on a thought path about PC design. (See “IHS iSuppli predicts that ARM CPUs will grab 25% of the PC market by the year 2015. Believe it?”) If the report is correct about ARM processor penetration into the PC market, then I think we can expect to see much faster development of the “1-chip” PC from both the x86 PC processor vendors and from the ARM processor chip vendors. Now such a PC wouldn’t really have just one chip. It would have a logic SoC with the CPU and a variety of IP subsystems including video and graphics controllers, memory- and storage-management controllers, and networking peripherals. Bulk memory in the form of DRAM and NAND Flash memory would still be off chip because commodity memory continues to be less expensive when packaged separately. This integration path isn’t very different from the one already occurring for mobile phone handsets and set-top boxes.

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