Last week at the SMART TECHnology World conference in San Francisco the International Data Corporation (IDC) Semiconductor research team issued a report that smart systems – those with programmable processor cores, high-level operating systems (OSes), and IP-capable connectivity – will consume more than 12.5 billion processor cores representing more than $100 billion in revenue by 2015, more than double the number of cores that shipped in 2010. Moreover, that number is set to nearly double again by 2020 to an estimated 24.6 billion cores, according to IDC.
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The IDC study also predicted that, excluding mobile phones and PCs, unit shipments of IP-connected embedded systems will grow from approximately 1.4 billion in 2010 to over 3.3 billion in 2015 exceeding the number of PCs that ship in the same year by more than 6x.