Thursday, September 29, 2005
The Death of ARM? Don't Bet on It
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 07:00 AM
"One interesting announcement was a .5 watt part that is x86 based. There was no mention of ARM on stage; this suggests Intel is finally responding with a similar strategy to the x86 everywhere initiatives from AMD and VIA. While this doesn’t bode well for ARM in the long term, it does suggest that Intel is moving back to a strategy that they should have been leading since the beginning. While they didn’t showcase any new products using this part, it is in development; you could imagine it wherever ARM currently is, including phones, hand-held computers, portable media players, and navigation systems. It heralds a new age of portable devices that are much more similar to their PC counterparts than they have been; that change should result in lower prices for products that are easier to use. Neither is a bad thing."
Rob Enderle wrote an interesting piece for DesignTechnica a while back - it covers the Intel's Developer Forum, where Intel is talking about their processor strategy and next-gen parts. Most of the article focuses on Intel's dual-core designs and their new Viiv media vision, but the above quote certainly applies to us in the Pocket PC and Smartphone world. Is ARM really going to fade away? Will future devices be running a slimmed down version of Windows Vista? Pundits have claimed exactly that for several years now - that Windows Mobile has a limited future because everyone wants "real" Windows - but I'm not so sure.
When you think about the strength of any platform, for most consumers it's the applications. To developers and geeks, it might be the underlying architecture and APIs, but for most people it's "What can I do with it?" and "Will it run this application?". Let's suppose that two years from now Intel has developed an x86-based CPU that can give us the same performance and power ratio as the ARM CPU powering most of the devices today. I think that's the easy part - the hard part is the software.
Let's suppose Microsoft were to somehow hack away at Windows Vista and produce a version that would fit in a reasonably sized Flash ROM chip. So you have the x86 hardware and the x86 operating system. What about the applications? Just because your favourite accounting software is now capable of running on the CPU in your handheld or phone, doesn't mean it will actually work or be an enjoyable experience. Application design for small-screen devices is dramatically different from desktop application design, as any Windows Mobile developer will tell you.
Will mainstream x86 software developers be willing to make the investment in designing small-screen user interfaces for their applications? Not unless there are tens of millions of devices out there, and a significant amount of those users want to run desktop accounting software on their phone. And will consumers buy these devices by the tens of millions until they can run their applications on them? Somehow, I don't think so.
Rob Enderle wrote an interesting piece for DesignTechnica a while back - it covers the Intel's Developer Forum, where Intel is talking about their processor strategy and next-gen parts. Most of the article focuses on Intel's dual-core designs and their new Viiv media vision, but the above quote certainly applies to us in the Pocket PC and Smartphone world. Is ARM really going to fade away? Will future devices be running a slimmed down version of Windows Vista? Pundits have claimed exactly that for several years now - that Windows Mobile has a limited future because everyone wants "real" Windows - but I'm not so sure.
When you think about the strength of any platform, for most consumers it's the applications. To developers and geeks, it might be the underlying architecture and APIs, but for most people it's "What can I do with it?" and "Will it run this application?". Let's suppose that two years from now Intel has developed an x86-based CPU that can give us the same performance and power ratio as the ARM CPU powering most of the devices today. I think that's the easy part - the hard part is the software.
Let's suppose Microsoft were to somehow hack away at Windows Vista and produce a version that would fit in a reasonably sized Flash ROM chip. So you have the x86 hardware and the x86 operating system. What about the applications? Just because your favourite accounting software is now capable of running on the CPU in your handheld or phone, doesn't mean it will actually work or be an enjoyable experience. Application design for small-screen devices is dramatically different from desktop application design, as any Windows Mobile developer will tell you.
Will mainstream x86 software developers be willing to make the investment in designing small-screen user interfaces for their applications? Not unless there are tens of millions of devices out there, and a significant amount of those users want to run desktop accounting software on their phone. And will consumers buy these devices by the tens of millions until they can run their applications on them? Somehow, I don't think so.
