There are two companies fighting for 100% of the smartphone market. Do you know which?

Here are two (one, two) very interesting articles about one of the most interesting battles to emerge in the mobile computing space.

ARM and Intel with their competing processor architectures are fighting for the big jackpot that mobile computing has become. With around 290-300 million smartphones being sold this year and the market growing around 30% per quarter the silicon providers and the silicon manufacturers are fighting for the largest computing market that has ever existed (for comparison, the other fast growing computing segment is the netbook with sales around 34.5 million units in 2010).

On one corner we have Intel with the x86 architecture that is focused on performance but has difficulties scaling down the power needed to achieve that performance.

On the other corner we have ARM and it’s licensees. Unlike x86 the ARM architecture has always been very much optimized for power efficiency. Still today ARM delivers more processing power per watt-hour and that’s what makes it the preferred platform for mobile computing and in some cases server hardware.

The two articles are really worth a read if you want to know more about the upcoming hardware platform battle for the mobile devices.