Does Intel Architecture matter?

SAN FRANCISCO--The broad outline of Intel CEO Paul Otellini's keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday was largely familiar. A single Intel Architecture (IA--which is to say x86) spanning servers in the data center to electronics embedded in a television.

This is a self-serving argument coming from Intel. After all, Intel already holds commanding share throughout much of the traditional PC and server space. Translating that success into newer and developing areas of the market where Intel has not historically played--or where, in many cases, the market has not even historically existed--would be a huge win.

But Intel argues that it's not purely a matter of its own interests. Rather, developers and, ultimately, end users benefit from an architecture spanning the small to the large because it lets them leverage common tools and other software.

In the past, one of Intel's proof points for this claim was to demonstrate issues associated with browsing Web sites on smartphones and other devices running non-IA processors. However, such an argument wouldn't be very convincing today in the light of the generally high-fidelity browsing experience offered by products like the iPhone despite the fact that they don't use IA-architecture processors.

Intel even undermines its own argument for commonality when it admits--as Otellini did in his keynote speech--that "handhelds have to rethink the user experience," a comment followed by a demo of a prototype interface running on Moblin. Moblin is an open-source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices.

Commonality as a benefit and principle is hard to argue against in the abstract. But handhelds differ in many ways from PCs. User experience, given differences in screen size and the way users interact with devices that don't have a full-size keyboard, is one obvious area. However, optimizations around power usage, performance, and component integration are also much different.

In short, software that runs across a wide range of device form factors and types will hardly be common across that range even if the underlying processor architecture is. At the same time, many of the software technologies visible to both developers and users--including Flash, browsers, and Linux--increasingly span a range of processor architectures.

None of this should be taken to suggest that Intel's Atom--the processor family that's spearheading the company's push into Netbooks, handhelds, and consumer electronics--won't succeed. Perhaps as Otellini suggested, in five years, Intel may indeed sell more system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors based on its Atom  processor than traditional microprocessors.

However, to the degree that Intel succeeds in this area of the market, it won't primarily be because Atom is x86. It will be because Atom beats out its competitors on metrics such as power efficiency, cost, size, and the ability of Intel partners to leverage it for their own custom designs.

A good software development framework on Atom matters too and building from an IA foundation will help there. But ultimately it's about the chip, not the architecture.

[bigpicture]

"It will be because Atom beats out its competitors on metrics such as power efficiency, cost, size, and the ability of Intel partners to leverage it for their own custom designs"

Or on how many OEMs that Intel can bribe into installing it.

[techman21]

Don't forget it has to run available software, and that's where architecture matters.

[ghaff]

That's very important with PCs and servers. Less so with handhelds. The software needs to be optimized for the form factor anyway and recompiling isn't a big deal. iPhone is a particularly obvious case in point but any number of mobile devices run some variant of ARM or other non-x86 processor.

[denkile]

Intel vs AMD CPU ARCHITECTURE: Dynamic memory connects directly to the CPU with AMD,
but with Intel memory operates from the chipset.
Also, AM2 and AM3 benchmarks seem to be "locked" in that memory bamdwidth (speed)
is about half the theoretical bandwidth where AM1 (socket 939) performed near
the theoretical max. Is this because of an imposed standard ?

Can a knowledgable system engineer comment and inform us on this ?

[Pishkado]

Whether or not this is so, what does this have to do with the article? Haff was discussing the software-visible aspects of the architecture: registers, instruction set, and so on. At this level, AMD supports the "Intel" or "x86" architecture.

[gordianknots]

There's a difference between architecture and micro-architecture.

[Nicholas Buenk]

Of course Intel Architecture doesn't matter, developers and users never really see the architecture, Apple shows how you can manage it for a consumer with universal binaries. And Linux etc shows it doesn't matter at all for developers, just recompile it and it runs. x86 has overhead, why wouldn't you pick something like ARM or PowerPC.
Ohh that's right, you want to run Windows.
Actually Intel is a great company, they've managed to out do the competition in many cases while having an architecture that gives them a lot more overhead, brilliant amazing engineers.
I just don't see Intel having much of a chance against ARM though, it's established architecture that's great for energy efficency, it has plenty of R&D cash behind it and is in a class of devices where no legacy x86 OS is important...

[ghaff]

Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel certainly demonstrated that dynamic binary translation (Rosetta in that case) really can work at this point. There are other situations where binary compatibility remains important. But, as I said, I don't see handheld space as one of those. IMO, it does come down to competing against ARM (andSnapdragon etc.)