ARM will lose on software front, says Intel

ARM-based mobile devices will lose out to those based in the classic x86 PC architecture because software is much harder to adapt than hardware, Intel's vice-president for Europe told journalists yesterday.

Gordon Graylish said a wealth of software was already available to deliver the internet on a handheld device. "The task of the mobile industry is to take their current very fragmented environment and come up with the ability to run that software."

He said there is a problem with the variety of systems-on-a-chip using ARM processor cores because software has to be tweaked for each product.

"Changing hardware is a lot easier than changing hardware. A good example is in the past few weeks we've seen how many app stores opened up? And if you look at those app stores they are incompatible. You have app stores for Windows Mobile, for Symbian, for Android, for Palm… I'm sure I have missed a couple… All of which are in effect asking: 'Develop for me'.

"The economics of that has never worked on the phone. To be blunt I don't think it is possible to show a single mobile company that has been successful over a long period of time. The reason is that they have to keep writing the software for all these devices."

That is a really big problem, Graylish said. "We're in a much better position, giving our engineers the task of getting the power down to so many milliwatts, and the size down to so many millimetres. We think that is a fixed, reasonable challenge and we are going through this change."

Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, admitted last year that the company had a fight on its hands with ARM, which he described as a "good architecture". Intel has drastically reduced the power consumption of its Atom chips, but cannot yet match the frugality of ARM systems, which allow devices to be thinner as well as having a long battery life.

Intel is developing systems-on-a-chip using x86 rather than ARM cores. But the first, the CE 3100, is designed for home devices like set-top boxes, on which power consumption is not critical.

Graylish's talk, at a formal briefing of analysts and journalists in London, appeared to be part of an attempt to shift the focus from silicon to software. But he got some backing from an EE Times report that engineers are having trouble with poor support for web video and fragmented software.

ARM and Adobe are working together to optimise Flash for the platform, but there is no word yet on how this is going.