Posted on Thursday, January 28 2010 @ 6:05 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
ARS Technica takes a look at how ARM beat Intel to the punch in consumer electronics, thin clients and the cloud. You can read it
over here.
Intel, in contrast, is currently in the netbook, is aiming at the smartphone, would've liked to be a game console (they had an internal team pursuing a win with the erstwhile Larrabee GPU), and has yet to signal any interest in the booming and ARM-only e-reader market (though the chipmaker does have a kind of e-reader for the blind).
My time on the show floor of CES 2010 brought home for me in a dramatic way the fact that the Intel vs. ARM war isn't really a hardware war or an instruction set architecture (ISA) war—in fact, it's not even a war at all. It's more like another fundamental turn of the wheel from fat client back to thin client—a redivision of computing labor, brought about by the ubiquity of network bandwidth, the availability of cheap wireless radios, the rise of the app store distribution model, and the cloud infrastructure build-out. But this time around, the turn has a few important twists.
