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Winners and losers as mobiles disrupt hardware and software industries
One British company looks like winning whichever technology comes to dominate the emerging market in MIDs – Intel's term for pocket web-enabled devices. Our story yesterday highlighted the fact that this format, and even the slight-larger ultra-mobile PC format, could see Intel going head to head with processors using cores from ARM.
One of the most promising of these is TI's ARM-cored OMAP 3430 system on a chip, which supports 720p playback. It also uses PowerVR graphics technology from Hertfordshire-base Imagination Technologies.
It turns out that the sister chip to Intel's new Atom processors, which are designed for MIDs, also uses PowerVR.
So do ARM-based Samsung chips. Freescale's iMX31 , NXP's PNX4008, and NEC NaviEngine 1, Imagination's Dave Harald tells. Also using it are some Freescale chips based on the PowerPC architecture, and several Renesas chips using MIPs cores.
Talking of which: AMD may have missed a trick in selling off its Alchemy business unit in 2006. It specialised in MIPs chips that might have allowed AMD to compete better in this market.
Personally I don't like the term MID, which is simply a new label for an old idea: a connected pocketable handheld. I'd say MIDs are distinct from ultra-mobiles less in their size than in the fact that they do not have a heavy-duty input system and are therefore primarily for content delivery rather than work on the move. This distinction may disappear as the technology and especially the user interface matures.
The format is already being disruptive. Cheap mobile devices are at last allowing open-source to squeeze Microsoft in the consumer market. Note that the company has reprieved XP for this format, which is traditionally the domain of Windows CE.
Wince runs pocket apps that cannot compete with open-source applications. Microsoft is bundling its poor man's office suite Works with the new Asus ultra-mobile. And it has dropped consumer prices even of its flagship Office suite: you can get the Home version, bundled with a notebook, for £80 complete with three licences, making it less than £30 a copy.
And open-source runs on a wider variety of platforms than Windows, opening markets up to non-Intel manufacturers. There are already mature toolsets and a large pool of developers for architectures like ARM and MIPs.
Posted by Clive Akass on April 4, 2008 | Permalink
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