Robert Pogson

“According to NPD, stores in the United States sold 13 percent fewer Windows devices from late October, when Windows 8 made its debut, through the first week in December, than in the same period last year.”

see Tepid Sales of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Point to Shaky Market – NYTimes.com.

No, it’s not the market that’s shaky. It’s Wintel’s monopoly on the desktop/notebook market. Competing technology has finally been allowed to compete and even though a Wintel desktop has much more computing power than an Android/Linux smartphone on ARM, the smartphones are pleasing consumers more than the Wintel product. After a year of this phenomenon, no rational person should believe Wintel is a growing technology. It’s legacy stuff and will die when the current machines running it die. Meanwhile, */Linux and ARM are ready to replace Wintel as the state of the art technology in IT.

This is amazing news. 14 nm is just a few atoms of width… At this level power-consumption is almost not an issue and devices will soon be able to run on body-heat, photovoltaic power or shaking.
“Samsung indicated that as part of its 14nm FinFET development process, the company and its ecosystem partners – ARM, Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys – taped out multiple test chips ranging from a full ARM Cortex-A7 processor implementation to a SRAM-based chip capable of operation near threshold voltage levels as well as an array of analog IP. The full ARM Cortex-A7 processor test chip tape-out represents a significant milestone for silicon manufacturing for the fabless ecosystem, Samsung said.

see Samsung delivers 14nm FinFET logic process and design infrastructure.

Besides trivial energy-consumption, this step allows ARM to compete head to head with Intel on performance should OEMs venture into the desktop/notebook markets for PCs. That started a couple of years ago and with the success of ARM for mobile computing should be huge in 2013. This will be the last nail in the coffin of Wintel.