ARM model is "broken", argues Intel Europe chief
Published: 3 June, 2009
READ MORE: Intel | Europe | ARM
In the mobile world, Qualcomm managed to grab the first headlines from the Computek event in Taipei - the showcase for the Taiwanese electronics industry - rechristening the 'netbook' as a 'smartbook' and enhancing the Snapdragon platform to support this. Intel bit back though, announcing its own new silicon for what it still, of course, calls netbooks. And if the serious intent behind the 'smartbook' name is to imply a new category that is partly differentiated by extremely low power, Intel insisted it was closing the power efficiency with ARM-based implementations rapidly. What's more, its EMEA region chief, Gordon Graylish - not in Taipei but in Amsterdam at the WiMAX Forum congress - went a step further and told Rethink Wireless: "The ARM software model is broken".
ARM and its many licensees have attracted much attention recently as they push the architecture up from phones into netbooks and other categories, taking not just Linux and smartphone interfaces with them, but even stalwarts of the PC industry like Adobe. But Intel does Linux and low power too, argues Graylish, and has an ecosystem rather than a collection of customers. "We tried hard with ARM," he said, referring to Intel's XScale business, which used the ARM license it acquired with Digital Equipment's StrongARM unit, but which it later sold to Marvell. There are many possible reasons why XScale did not become a significant presence in smartphones, many of them political, but Graylish portrays the retreat to x86-only as something very positive. "ARM licensees have to differentiate, and that goes against standardization and encourages fragmentation. The software model is broken because software has to be ported to the different platforms. That's a huge cost we don't have, because we don't have to port anything. ARM is not an ecosystem because that implies commonality across devices."
Comparing single-vendor x86 with a widely licensed processor architecture is hardly a like-for-like exercise, but Graylish makes an important distinction that haunts all areas of device technology - a strong, unified platform under the control of one vendor, but with a broad ecosystem; versus a widely licensed platform with many implementations, but the risk of fragmentation. It's an argument that echoes down the halls of technology history - Microsoft versus Unix/Linux being a recurring theme - and perhaps one that Google believes it can win on both sides, with an open source software platform over which it has firm control (so far at least).
On the product front, the message from Intel executive VP Sean Maloney, in Taipei, was that the future is "ultrathin". He introduced an ultra-low voltage (ULV) processor, three new Core 2 Duo mobile processors, and a low power mobile chipset. All are geared to the market for superslim notebooks, less than one inch thick and at "more affordable price points". Maloney also demonstrated 'Pine Trail', an Atom-based platform for netbooks and nettops. Combined with WiMAX, such devices would be important in bridging the digital divide, he said.
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