May 25th, 2008The battle for the brains of your mobile
In case you missed it (we did) Ars Technica posted a great (if a little geeky) article on RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era which is worth a read. CISC vs. RISC are two different chip architectures, and once, one of the great nerdy flame-war debates of the 80s-90s era internet. Basically CISC won.
CISC, for anyone without a computer engineering degree, is the architecture or essentially the language spoken by Intel and all PC chips. RISC was spoken by many server chips, mainframes and Apple computers (in the 604 and G4/G5 days) and by tiny embeded CPU designs like ARM.
Everyone pretty much admits that RISC was/is, in theory, more elegant than CISC, especially when considering the significantly fewer number of transistors you had to cram on to a chip to make a RISC CPU actually work. In the end though, thanks to Moore’s Law and market forces these differences became marginalized and Intel/CISC pretty much swept the market. Even Apple (wisely) switched to Intel. Except for the iPhone.
The last holdout for RISC has been mobile. In mobile and embedded applications (like the little CPU in your home router) every transistor and square millimeter of silicon counts because of cost and power requirements. You’d need a fan and 2pound battery to run your cell phone if there was an Intel pentium or centrino in there. CISC/Intel CPUs have never been able to compete in the mobile space. Until now.
Intel has just launched the Atom processor for mobile devices. The Atom is still a ways off (0.25W idle power to 4W active) in competing with ARM(Risc) cpus in power (0.01W-0.25W) but this is a lot closer than the typical maximum 9Watts to 35Watts (depending on model) required to power your laptop’s centrino chip.
RISC-speaking ARM or MIPS type chips will continue to rull the mobile market for a while, but clearly the barbarians are at the gate. In the next few years Intel has every intention of driving down the power requirements of Atom processors to compete for handsets.
But the ARM makers aren`t sitting still either. They have some pretty impressive looking designs on the not-too-distant road map. Quad-core processors in your handset anyone? Interesting times and interesting capabilities are ahead, my friends.
Significance for WirelessNorth.ca readers: What can you do with significantly more processing power in a mobile? Think better graphics and better/faster video encode/decode capabilities. Think useful voice recognition, image recognition, people/landmark recognition and other computer vision applications. Forget ordinary geolocation, with enough transistorized brains, your phone could do echolocation. heh.
We’re all for bringing on the mobile processor wars. :)
