Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Those who forget history are doomed to make poor generalizations.
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
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?
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"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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
ah, but think how much they get from you.
iPhone : $$$ plus monthly voice, text and data tariffs and then you go and buy another one in 1-2 years time.
Dell: $300 for a desktop PC. One off payment.
There's money to be made in the mobile marketplace, whereas the desktop one is saturated with lowest-possible-price units.
.
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.
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,
*All* processor architectures are putting lipstick on pigs. Every so often a new "clean" RISC architecture comes out where the instruction set is supposed to look like the actual hardware. Then within a couple of CPU generations, the hardware landscape shifts and they slap ugly layers of abstraction between their backwards compatible instruction set and the actual new hardware. (Many years ago I listened to a pitch from a guy at MIPS, who was touting their chip named for "Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages". Guess what they added to the next version of the processor: Interlocked pipeline stages!)
Intel themselves tried the hardest to get out of this cycle by making the hardware extremely visible to the instruction set with Itanium, trusting compiler technology to handle the resulting morass. Result of this experiment: Epic fail.
At the end of the day, X86-derivatives run at speeds in the same ballpark as any other CPU architecture that can be programmed with real-world tools by real-world coders, and they do it at a fraction of the cost. Why break all of the code out there if there's no big payback?
In the low performance efficiency market, ARM currently has advantages over X86. But by the time they bloat up ARM with a few more generations of "innovation" to get into the X86 performance range, it probably won't have that much of an advantage in size or power.
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
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