NXP and Freescale merge into a single company

    On March 2, 2015, it became known that NXP Semiconductors is acquiring Freescale Semiconductor for $ 11.8 billion.
    Let's discuss the significance of this event for the microelectronics market.

    Combining NXP and Freescale into a single company will create the fourth largest producer of processors and other complex microelectronics on the planet, with total assets reaching $ 40 billion, and with a total annual turnover of more than $ 10 billion - see: “NXP buys Freescale” , and “ NXP will become the king of the roads. Dutch manufacturer of microchips buy Freescale for $ 11.8 billion. " .

    The first place in the market traditionally belongs to Intel.(annual turnover ~ $ 53 billion), Qualcomm today ( second place ~ $ 24 billion), Texas Instruments third (~ $ 11 billion turnover), and the combined NXP-Freescale (~ $ 10 billion turnover ) takes fourth place.

    It should be noted that all three of the abovementioned Intel's largest competitors combined Qualcomm, TI and NXP-Freescale have an annual turnover of ~ $ 45 billion (while their annual turnover is constantly growing, while Intel is falling). And these three competitors produce processors on the ARM architectureOf course, they all try to concentrate on different markets, but nevertheless it turns out that the ARM architecture is moving to the market with three competitors (Qualcomm, TI and NXP-Freescale) with approximately equal annual turnover with Intel.
    Also, in terms of the number of ARM chips produced today, ARM architecture is, in fact, de facto becoming the main and main processor architecture in the modern processor market.

    This can be judged from the fact that at the end of 2014, smartphone shipments totaled 1.30 billion units compared to 1.02 billion in 2013 - see: “The total share of Android and iOS in the smartphone market exceeds 96% .

    - I.e. over the past two years, 2.32 billion units of smartphones have been sold , 90% of which contain exactly an ARM chip.

    Plus, in 2014, 229.6 million tablets were sold, and this market grew by 4.4% over the year compared to 2013, in which 219.9 million tablets were sold - see: “IDC: for the first time on the tablet market recession . "
    And of all this number of tablets, 93% work on Google Android and Apple iOS (in fact, on ARM chips), and the share of Windows devices for the year rose from only 4 to 7%.

    - I.e. again, over the past two years, 0.45 billion tablets have been sold , 90% of which contain exactly the ARM chip.

    As a result, we have only on the smartphone and tablet markets ~ 2.5 billion pieces of ARM chips sold over the past two years.
    Plus, chips for any multimedia, automotive, network, integrated, etc. are added. technicians that in 80% of cases work all on the same ARM architecture (although MIPS chips are sometimes used in these markets ).
    And the competitors Intel (Qualcomm, TI and NXP-Freescale) for the most part share the profit from the huge market of ARM chips.

    There clearly is a business problem for Intel over which its management should ponder.

    And of course, the microprocessor giant Intel is trying to do everything possible to get into this huge market of mobile gadgets - smartphones and tablets, and the market of all built-in equipment. But Intel still can’t take at least a significant share in these new-fangled markets (stubbornly promoting chips on itsx86-architecture ) :(
    That's why, fearing to lose to the competitors from the above three (Qualcomm, TI and NXP-Freescale), Intel already in 2014 began to cooperate with the Chinese companies Rockchip and Spreadtrum, but the real result in the form of a significant market share so far still haven’t achieved it, but only makes huge plans - see: “Intel has shared plans for launching SoFIA platforms for smartphones and tablets .

    But the dawn of a new huge market of robotics , computer vision and autonomous systems (which quite possibly but also targets the newly formed united company NXP-Freescale) - and which probably also on ARM-chips may become the de facto standard!

    For chips for the robotics market, computer vision and autonomous systems, see the articles:
    1. “MWC 2015: Freescale introduced a chip for a trouble-free car” ;
    2. "NVIDIA talked about working with Google to use the Tegra K1 chip" ;
    3. "Started supplying" NVIDIA Jetson TK1 "supercomputer for embedded systems . "

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