Date: 15/07/2009

Embedded and portable electronics saying bye bye to Intel x86 architecture

Intel x86 architecture created processing revolution in 80s and 90s. But the battery operated electronic systems demanded far more smarter and different processors.

For some years laptop and desktops followed Moore's law, where at some fixed price these computers were available with improved performance every year like Pentium -1 -2 -3 - 4, dual core, but now the raw processing performance has taken back seat. The physical features, cost, power consumption, mobile/wireless communications features, security and media-content handling are driving the market. Also low cost phones and computers for the emerging market prefer non- X86 architectures.

Added to this, Windows Vista is no way comparable to the success of Window XP in sales and appeal. Google is fully ready to launch its new Chrome OS, which is open source OS designed for multiple hardware platforms. Google is not leaning to any specific PC or phone manufacturer.

The desktop processor market will diminish in size and any portable gadget with LCD display will pack increasingly more interesting communications and computing features. It can be a phone, video/audio players, or any version of e-books (micro notebook, mini note book/net book, normal laptop, smart phone).

All these past years, Intel had focused its eyes more on desktop and server processors, it has blurred its vision on the portable electronics market. Intel's Atom processor is doing well. An Atom based laptop charged in the morning can now run for 8 hours without recharging. Still it's not enough.

Processor IP Company ARM is also faced with new challenges of making its processors powerful enough to handle PC kind of operation. ARM is yet to make any processors comparable to Intel's multi-core processors.

Its same story with other processor companies Freescale, Renesas, NEC and Texas Instruments.

Most of these above mentioned companies serve a specific market, where the growth opportunities are dried up. It gives a major opportunity for all these processor companies or some startup firms to develop a new disruptive processor architecture, which can handle the demands of convergence market. This processor architecture should be just like an open source OS, it should not be tailored to any OS or software and it should be flexible enough to scale up or down by processor performance.

In the embedded systems domain, ARM is the architecture of choice by experienced professionals in embedded systems domain. There are many other proprietary architectures doing good. 8051, though popular among learning folks but is at the end stage of its life cycle. 8051 is still surviving due to its popularity and wide availability of learning material. In Indian engineering colleges still the students are more practically trained in 8051 rather than other architectures. Overall 8051 and any such non-DSP capable architectures are loosing their share.

Finally it's all about designing a processor closer to a human brain. It's never ending process.