I had an interesting conversation the other day that might interest you--one that will certainly interest Intel, the maker of the chips that power your iMac, MacBook, Mac Pro, and Mac mini. Lucian Shifren of SuVolta told me about a new type of transistor that his company has introduced. While the deep-geek details on the low-power, low-cost chips that can be built from it are fascinating (check out bit.ly/udPp29 for a rundown), one non-techy thing he said stuck in my mind: “The market’s now moving to a point where you’re really going to be driven by the $10 chip and not the $200 chip.”
The $10 chip that Shifren was talking about would be based on the ARM architecture that runs all your iOS devices and nearly every other smartphone and tablet on the planet. The $200 chip? Guess who makes that one? Why do you need a lot of muscular Intel-level power in your desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone? The easy answer is that you don’t. As wireless broadband speeds increase, it makes more sense for more work to be done in that good ol’ “cloud,” and for your personal device to just manage the traffic. Think about Siri, for example. Do you think your iPhone 4S is handling all that complex natural-language processing? Not on your life--a lot of the hard work is done in the cloud. Your iPhone is merely the traffic cop.
If you’re one of the rare Mac users who needs a lot of local power for, say, high-end audio editing, you’ll certainly need a potent processor. But even consumer-level video editing might be done over tomorrow’s wireless broadband--you’d use compressed preview files to build an edit decision list, then have those edits and transitions completed in the cloud and sent back to your device to be mated with the unaltered video.
Will Intel’s powerful processors be able to hold off the onslaught of cheaper chips?
But most of us aren’t creators of media-rich content. We browse the web, watch video, play games, read email, maybe write reports or create presentations--all tasks that ARM processors can handle quite easily, especially the more-powerful ones that are on the horizon. And there’s no reason why there couldn’t be plenty of storage space on your mobile device to store your stuff. As 2011 drew to a close, IBM announced a flash-memory chip that could stuff 128 gigabytes into a package that fits on your fingertip.
I was at an event last year where Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that one reason Intel would survive any onslaught from ARM’s less-powerful chippery was the huge installed base of software using the Intel architecture. Now, I’m no multimillion-dollar CEO, but I think he’s wrong. Outside of IT admins, it’s the rare user who cares about the provenance of the software they use. Think about it. How much does it matter to you--really--whether the software you’re using is running on iOS or Mac OS X? All you care about is whether you can get stuff done and have fun.
Today, robust productivity and content-creation apps for iOS are few and far between. But if Apple, as is widely rumored, should ship an ARM-based MacBook Airier, expect those apps to appear in a New York minute. And those IT admins? ARM is coming at them in the data center, as well. The new hotness among big-iron junkies is ARM-powered microservers running on chips built by Tilera, Nvidia, Calxeda, and others. Even such enterprise-level software as the open-source Xen hypervisor virtualization manager is going ARM.
The chip wars are getting interesting again, aren’t they?
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Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.
