TechPulse 360

VMware CEO Paul Maritz case study of the evolution of Intel's X86 architecture

Despite the fact that the first X86 chip started its life as a microprocessor for watches, Intel’s architecture is just not fit for mobile devices.

“It’s a power hog, it loves electricity, all those [unused] gates are basically consuming power,” said VMware CEO Paul Maritz in a keynote at the last Tiecon conference in Silicon Valley.

For the former Intel executive, the problem boils down to Intel’s instruction set inherent complexity that has accumulated over the years to support functions that nobody uses anymore.

“It’s all junk silicon,” Maritz adds.

Intel first jumped on the ultra-mobile device bandwagon experimenting with the ARM processor but finally decided to bail out from that market.

“These devices were kind of low end, low power, low profit. And eventually Intel decided to get out of that business and go back to their roots of high performance, complex microprocessors,” explains Maritz. “But they made a mistake leaving that market alone as it got better and better and now this ARM thing is a real problem.”

And probably an insurmountable problem for Intel, as ARM increases its domination of the ultra-mobile market (from feature phones to smartphones and soon MIDs).

Here’s a video excerpt where VMware CEO Paul Maritz explains why the X86 architecture is just not fitted for the cell phone market:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 6:45 pm and is filed under hardware, wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.