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Why Mobile Innovation Outpaces PC Innovation
Sandrina sends in an opinion piece from TechCrunch that discusses why mobile systems are developing so much faster than the PC market. The article credits Intel with allowing hardware innovation to stagnate, and points out how much more competitive the component vendor market is for smartphones. Quoting:
"In PCs, Intel dictates the pace of hardware releases — OEMs essentially wait for CPU updates, then differentiate through inventory control, channel / distribution and branding. Intel and Microsoft win no matter which PC makers excel — they literally don't care if it's Asus, Dell or HP. In the smartphone world, it's the opposite. Dozens of component vendors fight each other to the death to win designs at smartphone OEMs. This competitive dynamic forms an entirely different basis for how component vendors approach system integration and support. Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple's graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?"
It's called cannibalization. When there's an established monopoly any possible invention "cannibalizes" the markets of established product groups and must be suppressed. It takes a long time because monopoly is tremendously profitable, but ultimately this is a stagnant path that goes extinct in much the same form as it existed when it achieved monopoly.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Man, complaining about Intel's market dominance and not even one mention of AMD? If Intel was holding everyone back with your proposed CPU and Chipset conspiracy, don't you think that would just prime the market for AMD to pair up with VIA or someone and just wreck Intel?
I'm no market expert but I think the author of this opinion piece overlooked a lot of things. For example, when you make a chip or chipset that is sold to Dell or HP or whomever to be put into another device, you're not directly fleecing the customer. You get smaller margins that way than you would if you were the manufacturer, marketer and distributor simply because Dell takes a cut otherwise. There's more money to be had in making complete phones because not only are you fleecing the customer but the carrier is willing to subsidize you to get the customer into a juicy two year data plan deal to the tune of $70/mo (at least in the US). I would assume this money spurs more rapid development and innovation.
Quite frankly, I'm curious how Intel decides the "bundling" of my AM2+ motherboard running my cheaper quad core AMD chip? And if they don't, why isn't my AMD motherboard outpacing Intel and "keeping up" with mobile devices?
My work here is dung.
Mobile innovation is outpacing desktop innovation because desktop innovation has been going on for 20+ years and mobile innovation has been stuck in its infancy for too long.
In simple numeric terms, any platform or group of platforms that is not very well
established is going to appear to experience explosive growth in it's own terms.
The numbers are so small and the features so immature that the new tech simply
needs to keep up.
While mobile devices certainly have some unique interesting features and they have
the virtue of being mobile, they still lag non-mobile devices in some key areas that
key features of those devices.
It's a lot easier to seem innovative when your predecessor is a 286.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The PC isn't innovating because it doesn't need to - it's already perceived as "good enough" by its users. Advances in computing power generally get asorbed by the ever-increasing needs of the OS and office applications. Smart phones, on the other hand, are so constrained by their form factor and their tiny user interface that innovations in UI, usability, battery life, etc. are very meaningful. Merely making a different set of trade-offs can produce real wins.
Because there's more money! In the handsets first (look how much the iPhone 4 will cost!), then voice services and texting and finally with data plans.
Are you really able to check the bills they send to you?
Are you really willing to do it?
Or you simply PAY?
This is why!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Because PCs have a headstart of decades?
It's like asking why China can have growth rates of over 10% while "Western" countries only get 1-3%. It is very hard to improve if you're already close to technical and physical limits and any made improvement won't look as impressive. Handhelds will soon enough hit the same walls that Desktop Systems currently try to tear down.
I don't agree with the premise at all. It's just that it only recently become possible to make screens that were good enough, and mobile CPUs that were fast enough, and memory that was small and cheap enough to push mobile devices into a large consumer market. Now that it's possible to make these new things that work reasonable well in way they didn't just 5 years ago, of course lots of different companies are going to be experimenting to see what they do better than anyone else. That will likely continue for 5-10 year in exactly the same way as it did with large computers until it gets to the point where any device is "good enough" and innovation will move on to a different aspect of technology.
Intel engineers will go out of their way to get a "design win", i.e. to get the developer of a new product to commit to using Intel parts as a fundamental part of the design. It is only once they get the design win that they no longer care about their customers. It is hard to be customer-driven when you've got a 5 year road map documenting the planned obsolescence of your CPUs for the next several years, but Intel marketing does try to be responsive to it's higher-volume customer's needs... but AMD is much more responsive.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Those who forget history are doomed to make poor generalizations.
Mobile developers keep reinventing the wheel. It's not unusual to find that the latest and greatest phone lacks elementary features which the predecessor had. For all the innovation that's supposedly going on in the mobile world, they quite frankly have little to show for it. The best they could come up with so far is a flood of proprietary ports of the PC platform with restricted user interfaces and wireless modems.
This is an interesting observation about competitiveness and innovation, because I always feel like I get more value from Intel CPUs ($2-300) and Windows operating systems ($2-300) than I do from smartphones ($3-500).
And not just by a little.
It could be because of the small screen, balky UI, limited data storage, and limited connectivity.
It could be because I'm somewhat ignoring the OEM contribution ($200 mobo, $60 case with silent power supply, $200 gigundo HD with raid striping for speed, $300 billboard-sized monitor).
Or it could be because what's driving these dozens of handset manufacturers to churn out so many new products is the low R&D cost and high unit margins compared to, say, trying to get into the CPU business.
The car market has gone the same way - they all look pretty much the same - dictated by the laws of aerodynamics. It means that other features have been developed to differentiate - things like economy, safety, electronics. While this is not necessarily good for the manufacturers - the number of players shrinks as the market consolidates, it is good for the consumers. So it will be with phones (or whatever they evolve into, they're the equivalent of an Atari, today). We have yet to see the major benefits emerge, despite what Apple may tell us.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The mobile manufacturers know that most people refresh their phones as soon as the contract is up and if there aren't "new and improved" features for the new lineup of phones, they are going to be left behind.
I also doubt intel is intentionally "allowing hardware innovation to stagnate"
Supplies!
The mac mini is held up by intels carp / nvidia lockout video and that is why they are stuck on core 2. At first they planed to have qpi on the i3 / i5 / low end i7 but they took that out to lock you into intel video + only x16 pci-e 2.0 lanes.
Maybe it's because people don't want desktops so much anymore and the market is shifting to mobile devices and the technology companies want to keep making money?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Do you think Intel does this for Dell?
Act like Nazi's? Maybe. Maybe not. Microsoft locked in some PC makers at one point.
Mobile devices are just going through everything PCs have already been through, but since PCs have already been through it mobiles can progress faster. We're seeing all of the same battles and developments play out all over again. Mobiles still have a ways to go to catch up to PCs. Though I'm glad to finally see the progress, nothing out there yet meets the vision of a portable hand held computer I had over 10 years ago.
Despite the fact that PC's are 20+ years old, the development cost of a new PC is substantially larger than that of a mobile device. The BIOS development alone is a substantial part of the NRE cost. Mobile devices use open source bootloaders or run natively and so such NRE costs aren't applicable. Then add prototyping costs for the hardware and things get very expensive in a hurry.
The use and availability of operating systems is an additional burden the PC must bear. There's an acceptance in the mobile market of devices that behave differently. All pc's running windows will behave similarly, despite the shape or size. There's an expectation of behavioral consistency between PC mfgr's. If HP could have different UI than Dell, then things might get more interesting. At this point, the only UI difference is Apple vs PC. Linux on the desktop isn't at a place where it can or will drive PC development (a different discussion entirely).
Actually, all modern machines should be running 64-bit OS only - simplified address space management and increased register count makes it a no-brainer.
As of Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has severely tightened its requirements for digital signatures on kernel-mode device drivers. So if you have connected a home-built or low-volume peripheral to your PC, the only way to run self-signed drivers without "Test Mode" always on top in all four corners of the screen is to run Linux on the bare hardware and Windows in a virtual machine. But how well do virtual machines support x86-64?
That's because enormous chunks of its operating system are not written in ancient, unmaintainable x86 assembly code. Everybody else is stuck with Windows.
Maybe it's because the PC market has already gone so far? In the last five years, handhelds have been gaining things--large color screens, powerful web browsers, built in wireless--that desktops have had for years. This stuff was physically impossible to do at small sizes five years ago.
Also, everyone in the world already has a PC, but people are just now buying large numbers of (only recently existing) mobile devices.
TechCrunch headline, June 2015: "Why implant innovation is blowing away handhelds"
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In order to stay in Apple's graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?"
To the best of my knowledge, dell is at most an assembler of parts, at their least they're a rebrander. I would agree there is utterly no point in stationing VLSI engineers and RF analysts at Dell, because those guys belong at the board level designers and board manufacturers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell#Manufacturing
It would be pointless overkill; like GM stationing a permanent automotive engineer at my local car dealership to oversee oil changes.
I also thought it interesting that Dell is closing the last of their assembly plants in the USA. Kind of hard to call it an American company if everything they do is overseas, except the expensive overhead of upper management. I would not anticipate a bright future for Dell because their only differentiation against their foreign competition would be extremely expensive upper management compared to their competitors.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I point to this fallacy:
Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple’s graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?
Dell is not comparable with Apple in this case. Apple develops the operating system software for the iPhone. Intel also has permanent engineers at Microsoft, just like Infineon has engineers at Apple. Microsoft develops the operating system software for the PC. Intel also funds many Linux driver developers, and has staff working specifically on Linux support.
There are multiple x86 vendors including Intel, AMD, VIA. The reason there is not more competition is that Intel exploits network effects leveraged by their market monopoly which lead to the current situation. It used to be at a time that the chipset was manufactured by different vendors than the CPU. This enabled more rapid progress in some cases (e.g. ALI and VIA had a chipset with onboard 3D graphics long before other vendors). This is no longer the case. In fact it seems chipsets are becoming increasingly irrelevant as more things get integrated in the same chip. Intel is starting to include the graphics card and high speed I/O in the processor chip. Eventually the chipset will be today's equivalent of a slow I/O south bridge. Perhaps it will even vanish completely.
Another reason that mobile devices will not leave the PC industry behind is that Intel has superior manufacturing prowess. Historically Intel has had inferior chip design capabilities: the 8086 was inferior to the 68000, the 486 was inferior to many RISC processors, the Pentium Pro was inferior to the Alpha, etc. None of this mattered because Intel had the ability to deliver in volume and price where its competitors could not. The Pentium Pro, for example, had similar integer performance to Alpha because it had superior manufacturing, even if the hardware design was worse. Today Intel enjoys a healthy manufacturing process lead over all their competitors. It is a matter of time until they develop a specific chip to attack the smartphone market, like they developed Atom to counter the rising MID market, or Centrino to counter Transmeta years before.
If you think "size and battery capacity" are "constraints that never applied to PCs", then I highly doubt that you have ever owned a laptop.
"Mobile" in terms of dumb phones actually isn't moving very quickly. Dumb phones have existed for a couple of decades, and strictly speaking call quality was better in the 90s then it is today. In terms of voice in remote places and durability, every phone on the market today is straight up worse then the Nokia 6160 I had 10 years ago. Voice is more of an afterthought these days.
The smartphone market on the other hand is pretty young, and is acting like a new market with rapid improvements and cut throat competition. It's also a market subject to fashion trends and full of users who will change phones as often as their contracts allow, which really isn't the case in say the PC market (where average users will buy a new computer when the old one dies and these days even gamers don't need frequent upgrades like they used to).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Mobile gadgets...
Relatively new field, novel user interfaces, more design/integration opportunities (gps, cameras, whatnot). Therefore fast (early) development.
"or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?"
Nah, Intel would employ local hookers.
Mobile architectures are now comparable to PC systems as they were in their explosive growth phase. C++ and Java are well-suited to these architectures.
On the PC side, we're going to many cores, and this is where the C++/Java paradigms begin to struggle. I suspect that when we make the leap to a language designed around many cores, tolerance of faulty cores, that takes into account the geometry of core, memory, and transducer locations, and that is designed around data dependencies and with a knowledge of how to distribute loads for heat as well as power, we will see a huge resurgence in the power and popularity of PC's, because they will be able to observe the loads we put them under and learn how to dramatically accelerate them.
In my Architecture class, our professor was always complaining about what a big kludge x86 was and how the "wintel" monopoly was holding the world back. Guess he was right.
When your goddamn phone can allow me to type long documents, edit a flowchart or even watch a movie at a decent size, I'll declare the PC as dead.
An unfortunate fact for all these hyperbolic tech wankers is that actually, phone innovation (in terms of the handsets and apps) is pretty much flat now. The new iPhone has what? thinner, slightly better screen, a better camera?
I'm not saying these aren't improvements but they're just gradual improvements in the same way that processors or things like SSD drives are.
And because they don't care about backwards compatibility. Try running an old PPC version of Photoshop on the latest Macs. I can still run many Win95-era apps on the latest Win7 PC.
The A4 is not an Apple processor. Samsung reportedly uses the a same processor in its own cell phone models. That would make sense, as they actually make the damn thing for Apple. Let's not forget that the A4 is based around the 'old' ARM instruction set - and is still 32 bit. Seeing as how manufacturers are shipping models with 512 MB RAM, it'll be very soon when the A4/ARM hits the 4 GB wall.
"A great example of this [stagnation] is the notable lack of GPS chips in laptops."
Or maybe it's because Intel did some research and found that 99% of people use their laptops indoors 99% of the time.
"Today's 3G wireless chipsets integrate GPS, Bluetooth, and 802.11n on a single chip."
And they do so at great expense because size and power consumption are an order of magnitude more important in a handheld than on a desktop. And single chips cost more to revise than individual components. But speaking of desktops, have you seen the Mac Mini? Tiny little motherboard with a two-core CPU, wired and wireless networking, bluetooth, SATA, two types of digital video output, FireWire, USB, an SD card reader, audio in, and analog and digital audio out. When the first Mac Mini came out five years ago it lacked the cardreader, had one video out, only had analog audio, and BlueTooth and 802.11 were physically separate add-on cards. Progress has been made.
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It's going to be interesting to see how "tablets" go. Will they come downward from Windows PCs, as Microsoft wants, or up from phones, as Apple is doing? Or will an accepted interface not from either world be developed for them?
It's going to be interesting to see how tablets develop as business tools. Tablet machines for special purposes, like the one every UPS delivery person has, have been around for decades. Tablets for doctors, cops, and others who need info in the field are coming along. The tablet as the general business tool for those who primarily consume, rather than create, information may be the future.
Enormous chunks of Windows are not written in x86 assembly code. The NT kernel was written from the start to be portable across architectures.
The distinction between mobile and PC is way fuzzier than Microsoft wants you to believe. The only difference is where the content gets created, and as mobile devices begin to encroach on laptops, and as the mobile OS's start to resemble lean and mean Desktop OS's without the legacy crud, we'll start to see a few things happen:
1. Mobile OS's beginning to invade the thin and light notebook category after it's done pillaging netbooks.
2. Content creation tools begin to migrate as companies like Adobe realize that Photoshop would work just great on iPad 2, Mega Nexus, Dell Super Streak, etc/whatever.
The PC is dead. The only way we'll might afterwards be saying "long live PC" is if the PC industry admits and accepts that it's just an out-of-shape mobile device.
Why this is news? Mobile innovation is going "faster" because handsets become obsolete in 12 - 18 month, vs 24 - 36 months for PCs.
.
The stagnation in the PC industry has far more to do with Microsoft's monopoly-maintaining innovation-stifling policies than anything else. At least Intel had some marginal competition in the form of AMD. Microsoft had no real competition for over a decade, and the entire PC industry and its customers suffered.
Because mobile processing ala smart phones hardly existed until 2000, and when you suck as hard as those gadgets from a decade ago, it's hard not to significantly improve.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
>> Apple is good at switching its chips out.
>>
>
> That's because enormous chunks of its operating system are not written in ancient, unmaintainable x86 assembly code. Everybody else is stuck with Windows.
>
Nope. It's because a good portion of Apple's core user base will take any amount of abuse that Apple dishes out and gladly take it with a "Thank you more sir".
Sensible portable MacOS is a fairly new phenomenon.
The iphones don't count as an example of this phenomenon because they use a separate API from MacOS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
RSI sufferers would disagree. I love my trackball and recommend it to anyone. Seriously, use one, you won't want to go back to a mouse.
It might not be that common as it's a niche. Many disabled people need them too.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Because PCs sit at home while mobile devices, being mobile, get trotted out in public. They are a fashion accessory and fucktards will pay gobs and gobs of money, every fucking year, for useless, backwards shit and not give a crap about the actual good shit.
Because when you start from zero, you've got nowhere to go but up. All the useful innovation is simply copied over from the PC realm when mobile devices can handle it (size, performance, battery).
Because when you've got a "new" market, there is no status quo with regards to who owns that shit. Companies will scramble to get a good seat as a top supplier. When the smaller players get wiped out, the big players will become Intel & MS & IBM - actively attacking innovation until someone scrapes up enough money (debt) and effort (3rd-world / open-source slaves) to challenge them. The small players will enjoy some success until the big players finally react with the budget of a million SUNs and make them irrelevant again.
There's something I don't get, though: Who are the fucks that see innovation in the market? I see shitty devices that can't do a tenth of the shit that my PC can, and I see them following the same pattern as PCs did decades ago, for better (features, performance) and worse (players getting big, competitors dying off, innovation being choked). There is no innovation here. Everything has been completely predictable, completely shitty compared to existing offerings, and completely expensive.
It`s called commerce.
In a few years Apple won't be using the A4 anymore. I just wonder if it's going to be called Letter or Legal.
I know, I could write that every decade or so.
When I started with computers, processing audio was hard and clunky, and video unheard of. But, increasingly, non-computer devices are getting more intelligent (in terms of really being computers under the hood), to the point where they look and feel like computers, with different peripherals.
When I first viewed video on a computer monitor, it was clunky, and in a window. Even in full screen mode, one would eventually escape back to the windowing UI, that made the TV stop looking like one, and more like a computer. 10 foot interfaces have changed all this, of course. And yet, if one does want to switch from a video entertainment device "mode" to an "internet browsing" mode to view YouTube videos, for example, the computer UI looks normal and not out of place. We are getting used to the browser being our interface to the world around us.
The point is that computers are becoming ubiquitous. From TVs to phones, to ebook readers, to netbooks, and iPads, we are using computers to present content as well as organize it. If I were to desire a "universal" remote control, I would seriously consider a netbook for the purpose because it could add so much more functionality over a universal "remote", and actually costs less than many of them! Why we still have 38khz IR remote controls instead of web-based UIs available over 802.11b/g/n escapes me, but I am sure that will start to change with the first "networked" remote, and "IR hubs" with 802.11b/g/n in and IR blasters "out" for legacy equipment. Why can't I use my smartphone as a remote? Oh wait! I can!
Just look at how UpNP has shaken out into DNLA-based equipment.
I just retired a 400 disk CD/DVD changer and replaced it with a MythTV box. I had done that before, but with false starts, and things weren't smooth enough to really retire the changer. Now, the MythTV box is quiet enough, and powerful enough, to make the thought of actually handling media for anything more than "one of" playback archaic.
Look at HDMI, at least the latest incarnations. Not only does it integrate uncompressed video and audio in a single cable, 100 Mb/s datalink layer ethernet, and SPDIF "back channels" are included. Literally, "one cable to link them all". And, it's not an expensive interface, only found on high end equipment: it is becoming the standard for computer monitors and televisions (the difference really becoming blurred).
So, certainly because of competition and "technology catchup", phones and consumer electronics are evolving at a dizzying pace, whereas computers have stagnated. but, perhaps we've reached the point where computers already do everything we want them to: compute, process, store, and retrieve data. As far as presentation of entertainment content goes, a traditional computer offers little more than storage, and second rate display: it is non portable and the display or audio capabilities are poor compared to alternative: smaller display but complete mobility in phones, netbooks, and iPads, and massive displays in flat-screen TVs. And these are the areas where we are seeing advances.
In Liberty, Rene
One thing to also consider is how we interact with our PCs is pretty entrenched so new methods are slow to enter the market and gain acceptance. With mobiles the field is wide open and the means of their use still has plenty of openings. Consider that mobiles are much more "personal" in their interaction that PCs ever were. We hold them in our hands, that and their size requires new ways of thinking. I expect some of the usability available through mobiles to move to PCs but be interpreted in slightly different ways during that migration.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The real innovation in terms of hardware capabilities are driven by process scaling which is an industry wide phenomena. Mobile platforms just happen to benefit the most due to severe space and power limitations inherit in mobile handsets. The entire industry benefits from process scaling due to cost savings related to die area shrinkage.
Intel is far from the only x86 compatible chipset vendor so I don't see the authors point.
If my PC were 10 times faster and had 10 times the amount of memory I don't know that I would really care all that much given what I use my PC for currently. As mobile platform gets more and more capable more and more technology will be ported from the desktop platform. Its much easier to port existing technology than it invent it from scratch with no basis.
Rapid advancement in mobile is often attributed to the natural disruption by which emerging industries innovate quickly, while established markets like PCs follow a slower, more sustained trajectory.
But there are deeper fundamentals driving the breathtaking pace of smartphone advancement.
Rapid advancement in mobile is often attributed to the natural disruption by which emerging industries innovate quickly, while established markets like PCs follow a slower, more sustained trajectory.
But there had to be some way for me to create buzz for my blog so I came up with some convoluted explanation.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
Just maybe, it's that circuitry is miniaturizing with the advances in 45nm and smaller processes such that the amount of capability available to tiny IC's like the ones used for cell phones is increasing so fast that what you could not do in cell phones 9 months ago is now trivial. Graphics rendering on cell phones is just about caught up to where PCs were 15 years ago. What will be interesting is seeing how long it will take cell phones to catch up to where PCs are today (in terms of processing/rendering power).
Why does your device do that required it to have a Kernel-Mode driver
From UMDF FAQ:
In other words, any homemade input device has to implement HID, any homemade storage device (such as Retrode, a reader for SNES and Genesis cartridges) has to implement USB mass storage and the FAT file system, networking between the Windows host and a virtual machine guest is impossible, etc.
Innovation in a new technology outpaces innovation in a multi-decade old technology. This is news? Say it ain't so!
The "innovations" taking place in the PC world are innovations of software. The chips are powerful enough to run pretty much whatever anyone can throw at them. At this point the instruction set has been pretty well defined. Developers are focused on developing applications. Look at OSX versus Windows. Both are running on x86 hardware. They deliver different user experiences, while doing fundamentally the same things. Ie, they run similar applications to do similar things like checking email, browsing web, producing documents and the like.
In contrast mobile devices are new. Mobile device devs don't have the luxury of having insanely powerful chips to run their applications on. They have to contend with pesky variables like battery life, interface irregularities, screen sizes, and a whole slew of other things. Therefore it is easier to "innovate" because the landscape hasn't settled yet. For all intents and purposes the foundation is still being poured. Just look at how Apple, HTC, Nokia and the like are suing each other over patents. They all want to do more or less the same thing, so they're looking to the government to punish the competition.
Everything you need to know from TFA...
"Guest author Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies."
"it seems like mobile devices and platforms are innovating at about five times the pace of personal computers."
"Intel's monopoly in PC processors and peripheral chipsets has caused PC innovation to stagnate."
"A great example of this is the notable lack of GPS chips in laptops."
"Sure, PC makers could add a separate GPS chip to the motherboard, but why hasn't Intel"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Isn't ClearType implemented in assembler? I seem to recall some part of it was.
Before IBM created the standard platform there were a plethora of competing chips, architectures, "operating systems" approaches, price-points and failures. The phone market is in the same situation now.
Correct.
Just as soon as some manufacturer starts to dominate and everything becomes standardised two things will happen: the software will become much more important and the hardware will start the spiral down to commodity status.
WRONG... for the following reasons.
1) Consolidation is always bad for the consumer, because it limits choice. Single manufacture=monopoly and monopoly=bad remember?
2) You actually have it backwards. In the early 80s everyone was trying to sell hardware and they decided to hop on the IBM PC bandwagon the moment Compaq reverse engineered their PC. Then everyone saw that hardware would sell and software wasn't important. IBM was dominant and the clone makers wanted to hitch their wagon to a sure thing. It wasn't until everyone was on PCs that we suddenly understood how important software was.
3) Android, iPhone, webos, etc are all tied to their hardware. No one is going to be able to reverse engineer both the software and hardware like that, at least not legally. Hopefully competition will drive down prices, but these companies will fight tooth and nail to keep from being commodities and "cloning" will not be allowed.
The car market has gone the same way - they all look pretty much the same - dictated by the laws of aerodynamics. It means that other features have been developed to differentiate - things like economy, safety, electronics.
Bad analogy, because software really has very little analogy in the physical world. The closest analogy here is that all cars run on the same gas. Gasoline has specific standards you must adhere to, but it's pretty much the same thing with little variation. And now, gas is controlled by a few powerful companies which make huge obscene profits at the detriment to us as consumers... (insert anti BP references here).
While this is not necessarily good for the manufacturers - the number of players shrinks as the market consolidates, it is good for the consumers.
Again wrong... WRONG WRONG WRONG. Consolidation=bad! Have you learned nothing from Windows?
So it will be with phones (or whatever they evolve into, they're the equivalent of an Atari, today). We have yet to see the major benefits emerge, despite what Apple may tell us.
Wrong again. Again, the phone manufacturers will not allow it to happen, and we have indeed seen benefits. Regardless of whether you like iPhone or not, it has changed the landscape significantly in just 3 years. The state of the art 4 years ago was the motorola RAZR. That was a cute looking flip phone but it wasn't advanced. Now we have these super powerful smartphones which are computers in our pockets with REAL cameras, REAL screens, and REAL interfaces. This is what competition does, not consolidation.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Foolscap.
Usually failing hardware from vendors is sent in to Intel's customer lab where it is debugged on-site at Intel. There are circumstances where Intel engineers go out to other sites, but this is less common. Sometimes, bending over backwards is necessary to build rapport, ensure a relationship continues, and after all, learning opportunities are presented, and knowledge such as pitfalls to avoid are discovered.
Where to start? To quote, "Do you think Intel does this for Dell?
/rant
Why, yes as a matter of fact Intel does do this for Dell, and probably for HP, and probably for anyone else that is a major supplier of systems that use their products. AMD does this as well, so maybe the author should do a little more research before he asks rhetorical (and ultimately stupid) questions.
First of all, he states (as fact) that Intel "decides" 90% of what goes into a next generation system. I'd like to see his basis for that 90% figure. For instance, I know for a fact, that Dell expends a lot of time and money deciding what goes into their next generation of systems, not Intel. Companies like Dell have a tremendous influence on what the feature set for the next generation of Intel and AMD processors/chipsets will ship with.
I am now stating my opinion and not trying to make it appear as fact; There were times when PC innovations were coming at the consumer at a dizzying pace, but now the PC has become so ubiquitous that there is not much left that would constitute an earth shattering innovation. The mobile phone market, on the other hand, is still very young and there are numerous opportunities to innovate and differentiate company X from company Y. That could be a reason that phone innovation is outpacing PC innovation.
Yes, a notebook computer was designed to be more mobile than a PC, but it was never intended to be as mobile as a cell phone. So to compare a feature like GPS in a notebook vs. GPS in a cell phone is comparing apples to oranges.
Large PC makers usually have second, third, and even fourth sources for their components. There are many reasons for this, but the two main reasons are; In case a component maker cannot sustain the necessary supply levels needed to manufacture the systems. And if a component supplier's product does not meet specifications, the system maker can (and does) restrict that component from that vendor. Now, that doesn't work so well with CPU vendors, but their product's launch could be delayed if CPU/Chipset vendor X, does not fix the problems in their offerings.
Steve Cheney may have been an engineer in the web and mobile market space, but it does not appear that he really has any idea how PC's and related hardware are developed and how feature sets are driven back and forth between PC makers and the component vendors.
Why "literally" don't care?
Could you figuratively not care?
Do you think Intel does this for Dell?"
+10 ROFLMAO
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Apple is the company that created this situation for mobile devices. Prior to the iPhone, the mobile handset market was very stagnant, just like the PC market.
I am not an Apple fanboy saying that Apple is great; but Apple sees the end user as their customer. Before Apple entered the handset market and shook it up, handset makers saw the carriers as their customer, the same way that Microsoft and Intel see the OEMs as their customers.
Here's a Forbes Blog post from Henry Blodgett, CEO and Editor in Chief of Business Insider: Could Microsoft Collapse?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A great example of this is the notable lack of GPS chips in laptops. The fact that I have to type in my starting address on Google Maps on my $1,500 MacBook Air serves as a constant reminder that PC innovation has plateaued
hate to point out the obvious, but a $1500 macbook pro doesn't have a GPS chip because GPS doesn't work inside, and most folks aren't walking around outside using google maps on the laptops.
That just goes to show you that no actual revelant knowledge, understanding or insight is required to be a guest author at TechCrunch.
Mobile is Sexy - PCs are "old news" - it is as simple as that. Marketing is saying that the future is mobile - so everyone is focusing their efforts to product mobile - PCs as we know then are dead - I would not be surprised if you will not be able to buy a PC as we know it in 5 yeas time. Nick
It's even simpler then that.
PC's and x86 are mature technologies that have been in widespread use for decades. ARM and smartphones are just beginning to enter widespread use. Its logical that there is little room for innovation in x86-64 because it already meets needs thus has no impetus for rapid change. ARM on the other hand has a need for change, requirements are outstripping existing ARM processors and chipsets. Not just a need for more speed but also lower power draw.
There is innovation on the x86-64 side, it's just not that fast because its a mature technology. AMD has been working on fusion for some time, Intel have released the Core i3/5/7 architectures, die sizes have shrunk and new kinds of multi-core chips are released (tri-core, six core).
No conspiracy here, just a market that's been around for a long time. It's like saying you don't see any innovation in Microwaves yet they keep getting cheaper and higher powered. An industry always reaches a point where it can no longer advance in leaps and bounds and starts taking smaller steps forward instead, this happened with PC's and will happen with Mobiles in a few years.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I find this confusing. Centrino was a marketing ploy -- essentially saying "use these chips in combo for best wireless laptop performance." Did you maybe mean Celeron? If so, isn't Atom just an embedded Celeron? Even so, I still have no idea what Transmeta has to do with this (a virtualization chip, essentially). Unless you're looking at the Unobtanium as having similarity.
Intel development, well, they're more intelligent in many ways. I found myself in a video conference with desktop sharing with an Intel instruction set engineer within hours of filing a request. How much did it cost? Nothing as a matter of fact. We worked together for several hours and optimized some code dramatically, in fact, by a factor of nearly 2200% since we counted cycles and calculated cache misses, etc... It was a VERY productive session.
.NET and (heaven forbid) Java, the amount of code which needs to be developed architecture specific is decreasing rapidly. Even now, I would say that compiling games with LLVM would be better in most cases than compiling nativ
Why did they help? Well, we needed the help. That's why. We didn't give them any money. Whether they helped us or not, we'd still have shipped the product, though it would have taken longer. But in reality, they helped make our product MUCH better and it might have even decreased their sales for the year since people wouldn't have to upgrade their PCs to run our stuff.
Comparing Intel to Samsung is painfully stupid though. It's better to compare Intel to ARM. ARM is getting fat and lazy and their support of the GCC or LLVM project is mediocre at best and their compilers are some of the worst I've ever encountered. Where Intel depends on companies like HP, Dell, etc... to make sales and they don't care who wins the war, ARM depends on Samsung, TI and others to make their sales and they don't care which one wins either.
ARM is in fact probably killing the mobile market just as badly as Intel is killing the desktop market. In the mobile processor market, you can choose between ARM and... well that's it. Why? Because you have to run ARM to be compatible with the Android store. You have to run ARM to be compatible with the Symbian applications out there. You have to run ARM to be compatible with the Windows Mobile market. ARM dominates all these markets and if Intel will ever make it onto portable devices, it will be running Windows 7, not Windows CE.
The PC processor market is controlled very much by Intel (and to a much lesser extend AMD), but let's face it, noone else is even trying to compete. PC emulation works these days. It's entirely possible to write an x86 emulator in software. It's not going to be as fast, but with it is possible to design an instruction set perfectly suited to improving performance to the degree that it's competitive. Using the same technologies that Rosetta (power PC emulation for Intel Mac) is based on, it should be possible to run x86 programs at near native speeds on ARM (thanks to similar endianess). All you need is a company like nVidia for example to pay the license fee to Microsoft to port Windows 7 to ARM, pay IBM for the Rosetta emulation, then jam 4-12 ARM cores into a single die with nVidia technologies on top and you'll actually have a non Intel x86 system without the need for hardware based instruction set licensing.
Problem is, no one wants to bother. It's just not worth the effort. Back in the 90's and early 21st century, Microsoft used to get like $121 million (the number rings a bell in my head) annually for maintaining a port of Windows, Office and Visual Studio for a separate platform. In 2010 money, that's probably up to $200 million. Windows 2000 was in fact very portable, Windows 7 shouldn't be too difficult to port.
I don't think we should be blaming Intel for these problems. The problems are identical on the mobile platform. The competition for design wins in that market is based on power consumption and component integration, NOT on the technologies similar to what Intel offers. I think you'll find that Intel still struggles to sell their integrated graphics platform. In fact, there are still a lot of people that won't by netbooks unless they can get Ion graphics on them.
On the desktop, the hold up on competition is due to lack of initiative by ARM and/or nVidia to develop a competing architecture against Intel. With techologies like LLVM,
> It is a matter of time until they develop a specific chip to attack the smartphone market
That may be what intel wants us to believe - the general "intel always comes out with the best" thing. But that seems more like their marketing paying off, not actual predestined reality. They've failed in other initiatives before (that overly complicated server architecture some years back, their extremely manycore promises more recently) and made damaging mis-steps before (the overly long pipelined P4 paired with the overly expensive rambus RAM).
Their specific problem with smartphones is that they have so much x86 baggage that they insist on carrying everywhere they go. Everywhere else, that made sense for compatibility reasons. But it hammers them in the low power chip market, and there's no magic technological fix that can make up the difference. Intel is a step ahead of average in chip fabs, yet the competing ARM designs can be a step *behind* and still deliver more performance per milliwatt. And the smartphone buzz is resulting in more ARM designs being made with current fabs.
If intel instead goes for a new architecture for smartphone chips, they lose their compatibility edge, and it hurts them double - first for the other x86 stuff not running on it, second for the ARM stuff not running on it either. They could just license the ARM designs and push them out through their better fabs, but that won't necessarily hurt the other ARM chipmakers. It'd also be an unsustainable tactic from intel; their better-fab plans have always been to build the next new thing first *and charge a huge margin on it*. But you can't sell a smartphone CPU for $400 more than the next closest competitor and expect to get anywhere.
When I was working a temp job in Intel product validation - we did a lot of testing for Dell (among a ton of other OEM's) - and from what I understand they worked very closely with Dell (and other OEM's) to build systems. There's a ruddy good reason that desktop, laptop and server motherboards look extremely similar to each other from vendor to vendor... When I had a job at a famous software company in San Jose - Intel had a lot of full time people there as well doing testing on site. Same with AMD.
Just because you don't think it may happen doesn't mean its not a possibility.
Intel has nothing to do with mobile technology moving faster than PC tech. I've got two laptops and a desktop, all with various numbers of cores, and various intel CPU's released in the past couple years. They all perform as well as I need them to. Sure, video transcoding is faster with 4 cores than with 2, but OSX/Windows 7 perform very well on any processor that's come out in the past, oh, let's say 3 years.
I can't say the same for phones. The phone I got two years ago doesn't compare to the phone I got this fall, which doesn't compare to whatever phone I'll be buying this year.
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH INTELZ OMGZ>. If my phone could run VMWare and play Batman Arkham Asylum the same way my PC could, then I'm pretty sure we would see mobile progress slow down too. Seriously, what more do you want out of your desktops? How much more could we possibly expect from Intel/AMD/Apple/Microsoft/Linux?
I'm posting supporting stats before /. archives the story, to prove how culturally independent from company commitment the US is. I just wish I had stats for Japan, which is supposed to have a high loyalty rate and very personal tie between work life and personal life, where your kissing up to the boss after hour is expected. Anyway, age apparently drives people to be loyal; it's either a generational gap, or the likely fear of older people putting family mouths in danger by moving around or switching careers.
From the lion's mouth (US Bureau of labor statistics) is an interesting document on tenure for employees
Only 27% of US workers 16 or older were at their employer for more than 10 years. For people over 55, more than 50% have 10 year of tenure. "The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2008." You can imagine the curve joining these two endpoints, or just read the first couple pages of the report above, which is all I've done.
Decisions in this most influential country on earth are made without much expectation of being there to account for them. For anyone with a little time, poke around the historic values for 2006 and 2004.
PS: Some later searching shows that recent stats are paywalled by academic sites. There is the short pdf (tables around [scanned] page 726) with data from 1979, showing japan had a mean of 8 years (4 for the US) and 25% tenure for 10+ years, compared to 15% in the US. Google books shows that Japanese workers were the highest tenured in 1990, followed closely by Germany, France and Spain. The US was last in a list of around 10. I also found a forum comment citing that the Phillipines have the 2nd highest turnover rate in Asia-Pacific, which is bone-chilling seeing how we think Indian callcenters suck, and how Americans are switching away from India to cheap pinoy labor. I could not confirm if India has the highest rate or not, but it still gives me a chill.
As a bonus, since I'll refer to this in the future, here's a short general article on employee retention and company culture.
Actually Intel does have engineers on site at Dell. Just like they do at HP and others. You think developing a motherboard around a A0 stepping processor doesn't require some help from the processor vendor in a timely manner? I'd argue this is much harder than writing software on top of this proc...
Intel tried to crack the Smartphone market. Many times. (They bought Marvell to do just that, then had to spit them out again.) They could never get their design teams working fast enough to make their chips competitive; they were turning out designs after 2 years of work when their fabless competitors were turning out a new chip every nine months.
I mean the Pentium M processor. Codename Banias. Centrino was the Intel logo marketing for a system with a Pentium M processor and an Intel chipset capable of WiFi. Intel managed to do two things in one stroke with Centrino: one was to get a competitor processor to Transmeta's in the mobile sector, the other was to kill off chipset competition. Only if you bought the Intel CPU/chipset combo could you apply for the logo program, having the Centrino logo meant your company got a money kickback. Even when Intel's WiFi support got long in the tooth (only 802.11b, not 802.11g support), manufacturers still went for the Intel chipset because of the money kickbacks.
Pentium M was based on the old Pentium III design with some optimizations. Atom is a CPU design made from scratch by Intel to be low power. Atom is an in-order processor, while Pentium M was out of order. Atom basically uses older style CPU design (similar to original Pentium), with some new tricks (like Hyperthreading), to have high CPU performance per Watt and less heat dissipation. Think of it this way: the mobile Pentium 4 had a 70W TDP, the first Pentium M had a 27W TDP, while the first Atom had a 3W TDP. So Atom consumes like 10x less power than the first Pentium M processor.
Intel used to have an ARM compatible processor, named StrongARM, which they got after their lawsuit with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). StrongARM was used in the Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC PDA among other things. Later it was renamed XScale. Then Intel sold XScale off to Marvell. IIRC Intel still has an ARM license. However the XScale designers left Intel a long time ago.
A lot of people have claimed they have lower power, or higher performance designs than X86 due to some purported instruction set design advantage. Historically they have eventually been proven wrong time and again. Compare the TDP of Pentium 4 Mobile with Pentium M and Atom. Intel pushed like a 20x reduction in power consumption along the way. ARM is allegedly lower power still. This is due to ARM smartphones usually being done using an ARM based system on a chip processor. However I believe it is a matter of time until Intel integrates more components on chip. Plus ARM processors are often lower performance in some ways, so they need less transistors (e.g. ARM FPUs are usually awful). AFAIK Intel only needs another 2-3x further power reduction, after they integrate more things on die, in order to have a processor with equal performance per Watt to top of the line ARM processors used in smartphones.
Dell does not manufacture motherboards. Those are manufactured in China by some Taiwanese company, like Pegatron (ASUS), Gigabyte, MSI, or ECS.
Dell does not even manufacture the cases, or many of the systems. Laptops are manufactured in China by some Taiwanese company like Foxconn or Qanta. What Dell does do is have assembly plants nearer the end market (such as the US) to change the hard disk, or video card, or memory (you know the things you can select at their website to add to the system). I do believe there are Intel people at Dell. Just do not think Dell, or for that matter one of the other hardware OEMs, actually does much at all other than box shifting...
Agreed. Dell doesn't manufacture motherboards. Dell designs motherboards and then gets other people to manufacture them. Trust me, I know several board layout people at Dell. I have a friend who was AMD's on site engineer for several years. On the lower end boxes you're probably right, I'm sure they just by components and slap them in a box. But on the higher end stuff, especially servers and workstations, Dell does do design work.
The mobile market was pretty boring until recently. One Blackberry was pretty much like another, same with Palm and Microsoft WinCE/PocketPC/WinMo.
It was really Apple legitimizing the "Consumer Smart Phone" that's got everyone out there now scrambling for position in this space. Which, curiously, is exactly what happened in the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s in the world of personal computers. Back in the 70s, there were dozens of companies making proprietary hardware, operating systems, etc. You could have something come along, like the Apple Macintosh or the Commodore Amiga, that entirely changed the market in one shot.
Since then, PCs have more or less grown up. The level of complexity is such that it's very difficult to do anything interesting at the system level... it has to be part of a new chip design. That raises the risk threshold significantly, as well as time between new generations of CPU, GPU, or PC system chips and architectures. Even Intel is slow moving on these things. As a result, most of the stuff that gets called "innovative" in the PC marketplace is little more than "same, old, same old" in fancy casework (Apple), or increasingly small incremental improvements what was pretty damn fine last year (Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc).
The powers that be are pretty settled... Intel rules in CPUs, and is only likely to move that forward fast enough to keep AMD stumbling along.. they don't benefit from delivering new CPU technology any faster. This summer's $1000 CPU becomes next year's $200 bargain, but that only works if they can make a suitable replacement by next year. Without sufficient challenge, it's actually best for the company to keep this pace something they can optimize... one reason why the kind of shortages of parts we used see, say, around the 1GHz mark, rarely if every occurs these days.
Software too... we're so used to waiting years for Microsoft to properly support new hardware standards (USB, Firewire, AGP, 32-bit, 64-bit, etc), that not much attention is really given to new hardware ideas. Microsoft, largely, gets to claim they're "mainstream", and until they do so, they effectively aren't. This is a stupid way to manage an OS... the very existence of the OS as hardware abstraction layer is supposed to make adopting new hardware faster, not slower. But MS always need a carrot to dangle for upgrades. They use hardware wherever possible.
The hand-held market is booming for several reasons. One is simply that the opportunity is now undeniably real, but the powers that will be not entirely settled yet. This means everyone in the PC, Telco, and CE markets can jockey for a position in the new order. This happens every so often in tech... digital cameras is a good example. The pace of the film camera market was pretty settled: Nikon and Canon accounted for 80+% of all SLRs, Kodak and Fujifilm made most of the film, etc. But enter digital, and now film companies have to become sensor and camera companies, traditional camera companies have to get digital and electronic very fast, if they haven't already (or team with with CE companies, like Leica-Panasonic and Zeiss-Sony), PC companies look at this as Yet Another Electronic Device, and as well a PC peripheral, so you have them in the mix (Epson, HP, etc). The dust from that is settling, but for handhelds, it's just getting to the fun parts.
And as with cameras, companies are looking at their future in new ways. Motorola never cared all that much about smart phones when it was just business people buying them, but as soon as it's looking like everyone will be involved, they had to think intelligently about where they'd be in 5 years, selling largely only dumb and "feature" phones. Palm finally woke up, a bit late, but they did. Android seems to be in the position held by MS-DOS in the PC days, only implemented better (open source, a decent enough design, Linux roots). And Apple's been making a fortune on this stuff, though still concentrating on form over function. It's not exactly the wild and woolly days of the PC indu
-Dave Haynie