The Inevitability Of X86/X64 Smartphones

I've been watching the slow drip of news and details about Intel's upcoming low power-consumption mobile CPU, codenamed "Moorestown" more closely lately. Granted, details are few and Intel is still focused on promoting their Atom processor.

But in a previous post (Rise of Smarter Smartphones... ) I talked about the near-future of smartphones, and how they're morphing into general purpose mobile computers. I've also read the ongoing debate between people who think ARM (a RISC-architecture mobile CPU used in iPhones, T-Mobile's G1, the HTC Touch Diamond, and most other smartphones) is the future of mobile computers, and those who think the x86 architecture will eventually triumph.

Well, while I think ARM is great - my Touch Diamond runs on a 528 MHz ARM chip - the history of alternative architectures for widespread computing is pretty grim. The DEC/Compaq Alpha chip (also a RISC processor) was the first 64-bit CPU to run Windows. Most people never even knew there *was* 64-bit windows on non-x86. And the once-vaunted Alpha chip? It's design was eventually sold off to Intel, who put it to pasture as soon as they could.

The Alpha, Sun's Ultrasparc, Intel's own Itanium, the Motorola/IBM/Apple 68000-series, and so on are all now either dead or niche products. If Intel can't get people to adopt a new architecture - and they tried, but AMD read the tea-leaves right and offered 64-bit x86 - then it's hard to see how ARM will fare much better, when the two architectures start to compete in the same space. And that's not yet - but by 2011 or 2012, we're going to see the high-end smartphone market moving en masse to x86. Count on it.

Sun's Ultrasparc, and the Alpha chip both survived fine - until x86 started showing up in servers and competing with them. For now, Intel's Atom is still too power-hungry to compete with battery-loving ARM chips, but Moorestown allegedly draws 1/10th of Atom's wattage when "idle." If it's even close in power consumption to ARM chips (comparing watts/flop, or whatever - doing equivalent tasks) then building x86 smartphones becomes a no-brainer. OEMs won't have to re-write device-drivers, and software companies won't have to worry about hardware incompatibilies. Apple's OS X already runs on X86, so creating an x86 iPhone would be pretty straightforward. Ditto for Android (based on Linux).

Plus, we've already seen some interesting near-smartphone x86-based phone/devices... these are the "Newtons" of the x86 smartphone market - not ready for prime-time, but a demo of the concept.

So - that's my stake in the ground. Whether it's Moorestown, or some AMD mobile-ized chip, or the next-gen chip beyond those, eventually the x86/64 architecture is gonna be in your hands.