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Published: 17 November, 2008
As the cellphone and PC converge to form the 'mobile internet device', significant new stand-offs are emerging in the semiconductor market, notably Intel Atom versus Qualcomm Snapdragon, and Intel's x86 processor architecture versus the dominant platform in mobile devices, ARM. As Intel creeps into the handset space, with mobile Atoms planned for next year, ARM is heading up the food chain, working with open source software majors to penetrate the mobile computing base.
Moving towards a fully fledged mobile computing platform, ARM has announced that its latest processors will fully support the Linux-based desktop operating system, Ubuntu - ironically, also a key partner for Intel's Moblin mobile Linux initiative, and a popular Linux alternative to Windows on the new breed of netbooks. Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has optimized the Ubuntu Desktop OS for the ARMv7 architecture.
As Intel has been concentrating on lower power consumption to make Atom suited to small devices, so ARM has been focusing its efforts on boosting processing power to target the netbook and MID sectors - although it will also benefit from the fact that these product categories are much simplified compared to full PCs, and require less processing horsepower.
Kerry McGuire, director of strategic software alliances at ARM, says the processors incorporate functions such as graphics processing that would require separate components in a PC architecture, which saves power - and supports the single-chip MID strategy of major ARM customer Qualcomm.
ARM is increasingly a strategic partner in the bid by Qualcomm and other chip giants to fend off Intel in the mobile and hybrid markets. Its next activity will be to form an alliance with Adobe to optimize the latter's Flash Player 10 for mobile devices, in-car systems and televisions.
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