Intel's Shane Wall (left) and Pankaj Kedia probably shouldn't apply for jobs at Apple anytime soon.
(Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet.com.au)Updated 4:30pm with additional background on the ongoing saga of Apple and Intel.
Intel issued a "correction" Thursday regarding comments one of its executives made earlier this week slamming the iPhone as incapable of working correctly with the Internet.
It's hard to see this as anything other than an formal apology to Apple and ARM for comments made by Intel's Shane Wall and Pankaj Kedia at the company's Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, as reported by our sister site ZDNet Australia. Among other things, the executives resurrected Intel's lame "ARM chips can't handle the Internet" argument and singled out the iPhone as an example of a smartphone that could be really awesome if it only used one of Intel's low-power x86 architecture processors, known as Atom.
But in a posting to Intel's Chip Shots blog Thursday afternoon, Anand Chandrasekher, the head of Intel's low-power efforts, threw his fellow executives under the bus in admitting that Intel's current low-power x86 processors don't even come close to matching the power consumption numbers--a vital design parameter in smartphones--of those made by ARM's partners, which are used in smartphones like the iPhone and over 90 percent of all the mobile phones in the world. The post follows in its entirety.
Anand Chandrasekher issued a correction on comments made by members of his team yesterday at Intel's Developer Forum in Taiwan. As general manager of the Group responsible for Intel's ultra-mobility products, he acknowledged that Intel's low-power Atom processor does not yet match the battery life characteristics of the ARM processor in a phone form factor; and, that while Intel does have plans on the books to get us to be competitive in the ultra low power domain - we are not there as yet. Secondly, Apple's iPhone offering is an extremely innovative product that enables new and exciting market opportunities. The statements made in Taiwan were inappropriate, and Intel representatives should not have been commenting on specific customer designs.
Whoops.
Apple has made it pretty clear that it doesn't buy Intel's argument that since the PC-based Internet experience runs on x86-architecture processors, the best way to bring that experience to the mobile world is to adopt x86 processors. Apple purchased the engineers of P.A. Semi earlier this year to start working on processors based on ARM's cores for future iPhones and iPod Touches, rather than waiting for Intel's Moorestown product--the chip Chandrasekher was referring to in his post--to arrive.
Intel has been making this argument for over a year, but it had avoided slamming high-profile ARM-based smartphones such as the iPhone during extremely public events like IDF. And now we know why; a certain Apple executive said to be close friends with a certain Intel executive was unlikely to be pleased by Intel's comments just as Apple was reporting blowout iPhone sales.
The apology raises the question of just how strained the relationship between the world's largest chip maker and Apple, who have now been partners for a little over three years, has become this year.
For the most part, the relationship has been mutually beneficial. Apple got the notebook processors it desperately needed to upgrade the iMac and the MacBook, as well as a totally committed chip partner, and the results have been stellar. For its part, Intel hooked up with a partner that wasn't totally dependent on the chip company for innovation and that had dramatically more sex appeal than Hewlett-Packard, Dell, or Acer.
Ever since June 2005, Intel executives have been positively giddy about their relationship with Apple, p romising that all sorts of whiz-bang-cool gadgets would soon arrive jointly developed by the style wizards in Cupertino and the engineering wizards in Santa Clara and Oregon. The two companies were said to have engineering staffs that bonded over a common love for innovation, and Intel salespeople were ecstatic at showing off how their technology could be used in leading-edge designs.
But Apple doesn't toe Intel's line the way the rest of the PC industry does. It doesn't need Intel's marketing war chest, it doesn't need its cadre of design engineers, and it doesn't need Intel's brightly colored stickers to help sell its products, as CEO Steve Jobs reminded the poor reporter who dared ask last year why Apple doesn't participate in the Intel Inside program.
Apple has shown that it is quite willing to follow its own path. The purchase of P.A. Semi was a clear signal that Apple had taken a look at Intel's future road map for low-power processors, and decided it had to take matters into its own hands regarding future chips for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And while Apple is unlikely to dump Intel's processors anytime soon from the Mac lineup--especially given the struggles of Advanced Micro Devices this year--its decision to use Nvidia's integrated graphics chipsets in the newest editions of the MacBook underscores what everyone in the PC industry knew anyway: Intel's integrated graphics chipsets are the bottom of the barrel.
Meanwhile, the Intel-based gadgets co-designed by Apple and the chipmaker are nowhere to be found. Intel had probably hoped that it could sell Apple on the Netbook or Mobile Internet Device concepts that it has been flogging for the past two years, but Apple has sensibly concentrated its efforts on the iPhone and Mac rather than helping Intel get its ideas for mobile computing off the ground.
So where does that leave the two companies? They'll be fine, although Intel is sleeping on the couch tonight. This week's exercise, however, is an interesting example of how much power Apple wields over one of the most important and historic companies in technology.
Intel has never apologized for slamming IBM's Power server chip--a competitor to its Itanium processor--while simultaneously selling IBM Xeon chips for a different class of servers. But one offhand remark surfaces about Jobs' iPhone, and Intel bends over backward to smooth things over.
What do you want in a mobile computer?
How much performance do you want to give up for longer battery life? Would you buy a clunky mobile computer that can run anything you throw at it? If you're the envy of the digerati when you walk down the street with your new phone, but you can't use it to make reservations at Nobu, are you still cool?
Chipmakers are struggling with these questions as well as how to adjust their recipes for the future of mobile computing. It's not so much the about chips themselves, but how you use them.
The current model for smartphone chip design used by companies like Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Freescale Semiconductor is to minimize power consumption by relying on an ARM applications processor for many tasks, but spreading much of the work around smaller components called accelerators that are activated only when needed.
To get an iPhone-like combination of battery life and sleek design, ARM's partners use several specialized chips.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Intel acknowledges the special role that hardware accelerators play in this market, because a modern general-purpose processor like the Core 2 Duo simply won't fit into a handheld device. But it argues that the role of accelerators should be somewhat limited to maximize software compatibility, and that the processor, such as its low-power Silverthorne and Moorestown designs, should be able to take on a great deal of work.
So which approach is best-suited for the next generation of mobile computers? Modern smartphones offer snappier performance and can run all day, but the increasingly sophisticated software that people want on these devices can overwhelm the system and cause compatibility issues. Running a wide variety of software won't be a problem for devices based on Silverthorne and Moorestown, but Intel still has a ways to go to allow its customers to build devices that are design showpieces like the iPhone.
One of Intel's most important goals over the next five years is to establish itself as a silicon supplier to future manufacturers of ultramobile computers, whether those are smartphones, Mobile Internet Devices, UMPCs, or some other design that emerges from that soup. It's already tried this once, attempting to break into the mobile phone market with an ARM-powered chip that was a model of integration, but a flop with customers.
ARM and its partners enjoy almost complete control over the current smartphone market and are eyeing the evolution of the platform just as closely. This is the next growth engine for personal computers, something made extremely clear last year with the steps taken by outsiders such as Apple and Google to gain a foothold.
Eye on power consumption
The mobile phone chip suppliers evolved their strategy by focusing first and foremost on power consumption, a luxury they were afforded by the relatively simple software run by most mobile phones up until fairly recently.
The basic idea is that most of the time, your phone or mobile computer isn't doing a whole lot. But every now and then, you need a performance boost to fire up a video clip, download something from the Internet, or take a picture. In the ARM community, chip companies deliver this performance with a complicated concoction of multiple processing cores that only handle one specialized task, such as video encoding.
"What happens is that each task runs on the specific engine that is much better optimized from a power generation standpoint," said Avner Goren, worldwide director of cellular systems market for TI. "Offloading video from a central CPU to a video and imaging accelerator decreases the power generation."
Intel is used to integrating as many of those kinds of functions as possible into its PC chips and might have been expected to bring that same approach to this new battleground. But as it prepares to roll out Silverthorne, and later Moorestown, power consumption requirements are forcing Intel to acknowledge that it can't do everything with a single chip.
"We don't expect everything to be done by the general-purpose processor," said Ticky Thakkar, director of Intel's ultramobile group platform architecture and an Intel fellow. "(But) you need it for compatibility reasons; you need the same software that runs on a PC to run on a handheld device."
Intel hopes device makers will build sleek and powerful designs with its Moorestown chip
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)As with many decisions in chipmaking, the question is one of engineering trade-offs. ARM, TI, and the other smartphone chip companies are trying to step up to build more powerful computing devices, while Intel is trying to cram a PC into a handheld. Their respective starting positions dictate the philosophies to a great degree.
Why should you care? TI argues that its approach results in better battery life and can actually improve the responsiveness of the hardware, since the various accelerators band together to spread out the load.
"When you are using an architecture of multiple cores and multiple engines, and you offload the multimedia tasks to the coprocessors, the ARM (core) is more responsive because it's not loaded," TI's Goren said. This approach also has power benefits that allow device builders to push the envelope of slim and stylish design.
Thakkar concedes that point, but notes that a more powerful CPU can handle popular software-based codecs like Flash or Javascript that don't need an accelerator. Flash is hard to find on a mobile phone. The alternative is Adobe Systems' Flash Lite technology, which isn't bad but isn't the same as the PC version of Flash.
This is the heart of Intel's pitch to mobile device makers like Nokia and Apple: we'll be able to support anything you currently enjoy on your PC, on your mobile phone. Not necessarily at the snappy performance levels you're used to on a Core 2 Duo laptop, but Intel wants to deliver a PC-like experience on a mobile phone.
A smartphone is no PC
As advanced as smartphones have become, they're not overtaking the PC on any benchmarking applications anytime soon. And as Intel's manufacturing operation continues to crank out smaller transistors, and integrates more and more of them onto a processor, Thakkar thinks it's going to be hard for other players to match Intel's combination of software compatibility and performance.
But then again, is that what you want from a mobile phone, a little PC? "A laptop is not a cell phone. When I boot my laptop, I've trained myself to go get coffee. When I switch on a cell phone, I expect that I can make a call in seconds," Goren said. Running PC software might be nice in theory, but TI and the mobile phone companies think that software written for the PC is too bloated for the phone environment.
This isn't a one-size-fits-all market. Consider just how many types of mobile phones there are, from iPhones to Voyagers to BlackBerrys to Hiptops. Those phones all require a different balance between performance, power consumption, battery life, and software requirements. But for the most part, the laptop form factor isn't all that much different between a Pavilion, an Inspiron, or a MacBook.
Phone makers like Nokia, Motorola, and Apple will decide how this battle plays out. For smartphones to really evolve into mobile computers, they'll need to ensure that software written for one operating system will run across many devices--which isn't always the case now and is a large reason why Google is getting involved. But for Intel to find the elusive source of growth outside the PC market it so desperately needs, it's going to have to deliver on the audacious goals it has set for power consumption.
Silverthorne, due out in the second quarter, isn't quite the answer. Moorestown, which is expected to arrive around 2010 and consume 10 times less power than Silverthorne, could be. If Intel can pull that off, it would put Moorestown down on the milliwatt range currently occupied by ARM's chips, with performance that should rival anything from TI, Samsung, and the like.
"We've made these jumps where we've taken order-of-magnitude leaps," Thakkar said. For Intel to find the next big source of growth that has eluded its grasp this entire decade, it will need to do that again.
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