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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.
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.
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?
AMD tried hard. They introduced 64-bit x86-compatible CPUs. And Microsoft wouldn't support them until Intel caught up. On the other hand, Microsoft supported the Inanium until 2004.
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.
The "dominance" is the x86 instruction set. Intel and Microsoft have locked us in; AMD is just a second source for chips that use that instruction set.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Incorrect.
AMD introduced a 64-bit/32-bit hybrid CPU as a competitor of the Itanium for the server market. Opterons were and still are quire successful in that market, especially with the new g34 socket and 12-core processors (up to 48 cores per server and no tier-BS - all processors can run 1-4 SMP configuration) Microsoft viewed AMD's technology as *superior* to Itaniums because it allowed for seamless migration from 32-bit to 64-bit platform. Microsoft essentially *told* Intel that they will only support *one* 64-bit CPU and that will be the AMD instruction set. Intel had no choice but to incorporate AMD's instruction set into their processors.
Microsoft doesn't care if AMD or Intel catch up to each other as long as their software runs on those processors. They didn't "wait" for Intel to catch up. It simply took many years to migrate Windows from 32-bit code to 64-bit clean code. There was XP 64-bit, but how many people used that? Hell, lots of people didn't even get 64-bit Vista because of perception that if you don't use more than 4G of RAM you don't need it. Actually, all modern machines should be running 64-bit OS only - simplified address space management and increased register count makes it a no-brainer.
If you want an example of a company that still fails and fails hard at 64-bit software, it would be Adobe. They recently dropped support of the 64-bit plugin. Not sure, maybe they are still "waiting for Intel to catch up"?
Don't forget that the mobile market gets to take advantage of knowledge and research done for the server/desktop market. Sure, there's new tech going on in there, but it's the whole trickle down approach, too. The mobile market is *catching up* to the desktop market, so there's a lot of acceleration just from using all of the prior knowledge. Building multi-core processors isn't easy and how many mobile phones do you know that are sporting them? Zero that I know of. And what about Intel's turbo processing (dropping cores and overclocking the remaining cores when not needing as many cores), how long do you think before a mobile phone will have that technology?
The innovation in a lagging area (mobile) seems faster only because the innovation has already been researched in the leading area (servers first and consumer second). It takes longer to figure out something the first time than it does to figure out how to make it "smaller" (smaller in the sense that it is for the mobile market, it may be a smaller die footprint or power footprint or whatever).
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.
PCs are failing hard at something the same vendors have figured out is really important for mobile computing, and that is UI responsiveness.
My experience is this:I upgrade on a 4-year average, and I usually do so because I can no longer run a recent Adobe CS at a usable speed. Every upgrade allows me to work on more complex and bigger files, for sure, but the responsiveness of the UI has definitely gone down. Illustrator CS5 feels slower on my 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb of RAM than Illustrator 9 did on a 500Mhz G4 with 256mb of RAM. This is true even working on very simple stuff. Launch times are absolutely atrocious, cancelling a mistakenly called operation (like say, applying a texture) still virtually impossible (why the hell do they even bother with the "cancel" button on progress bars?). It's not just Adobe, Apple's never managed to claw back the responsiveness of the classic Mac OS, and Microsoft Office... well, it's got seriously nasty.
Big-ticket software has made using a modern computer like wading through molasses. Yeah, it gives you a lot speed for some things that are processor intensive, but pressing a button, opening a menu, or bringing up a dialogue are all going to be slower. In some cases, much slower. This is EXACTLY the opposite of what I want. I don't care if a filter that was going to take two minutes takes four, if I can go and do something else without everything being as slow fuck. Even as I type this, the computer occasionally failing to keep up. I mean really, typing words into a web browser while playing an MP3: I was doing this in 1998 with no lag.
If I really believed there was still innovation in PCs I would say that instant-response UIs--where cancel buttons worked and processes just got slower rather than stepping destroying responsiveness--were going going to be the next big thing. However, I don't think anyone gives a shit, because all the software vendors have gone down this road.
turbudostato is missing the point.
I shit you not, my mod point expire and then I see this post that needs an insightful mod.
In 1995 there was the beautiful CPU called the Alpha. It was faster than anything offered by Intel. It was RISC and not CISC. It didn't boot into 16-bit mode and then require the OS to do work to access 32 bit registers. It was a 64 bit CPU when all the Intel and AMD processors were 32. It had 32 registers for both floating point and integer arithmetic. That is 64 registers for data, people. Even today's Intel CPUs don't have a data register count like that. It was a shining example of a beautiful CPU that was not based on old tech and trying to be compatible with something from 1981. It was good. It was right. It was the furture. It was the best, fastest general purpose CPU on the fucking planet.
And what happened? That is right! It fucking died because Intel's crappy Pentium had all the market share and there was no volume on Alpha sales. The monopoly's shit tech won and the better CPU disappeared down the hole. Mature, "stablished" means good-old-boy in the context. In the tech world, we pick tech because it works better, not because it is the kind your daddy used back in the day. Your comment is that of an asshat, turbidastato, an asshat.
Randomluser, thank you for wisdom to the unwashed massed of Intel ass-lickers. LONG LIVE THE ALPHA! GET OFF OF MY LAWN!!!