Thanks to Beyond 3D for their Handheld CPU report. Me: Its Stacks vs Silicon now.

Arun Demeure (Twitter:Arun Demeure) has written a must-read article about CPUs for handheld products over at Beyond 3D If you have any interest in the current ARM vs Intel battle, check it out right now.

It goes into detail that you might not understand -  “When ARM moved to an 8-stage pipeline (2xFetch/2xDecode/3xExecute/Writeback) for the ARM11 in 2002 (4-5 years since the ARM9!) they added dynamic branch prediction (supposedly 85% accuracy) inch but there’s a great summary and some interesting information about power consumption and processes, multi-core and hyperthreading.

I finished that article thinking, OK, so both Intel and ARM will have comparable solutions in a similar size with similar power and performance characteristics and when I mean ‘similar’ I mean ‘below the radar in terms of the average user.’

If you break down the power profile of an actual handheld product you will see that CPUs are tending to less and less significance. LCD backlighting (and OLED screens showing a typical white-background web page) take huge amounts of power and when you move to tablets where a 10 inch-er can add 2 watts to the power drain and when you consider that using 3G with chatty, uncontrolled data services adds more and that memory, storage, speakers and indicator lamps are all involved in the equation too, you realise that it’s not about the CPU any more. If the product can deliver a web page in under 10 seconds, a customer will be happy. If the battery life is about 6 hours real-world usage, a customer will be happy.

Success in handheld devices is very much to do with creating a complete stack from hardware to services. It’s one of the reasons Apple creates successful products.  While someone like Intel may not want to create their own end-user products, what they can do is create a working stack. CPU, GPU, radios, core software, user interface layer, software and content delivery and hand it over on a plate. It becomes very attractive to a Samsung or a Sony who want to quickly turn round a product at low cost and risk. Add in features like Intel Insider, WiDi, on-board FPGA and security and the stack becomes even more attractive. ARM are trying to do this too with their GPU, security, Linaro, their Android solution center and of course, in the future, Windows will be an important part of the stack but they haven’t got the control that Intel have and I think that’s one of the big differences that put Intel in a better light. ARM works with partners, Intel has bought a set of partners and brought them in-house. Having a ‘stack’ rather than ‘silicon’ is becoming the key to success.

All these things need to be taken into consideration but still, take a look at the Beyond 3D CPU report first!

Via twitter.

Hmm, why did I write this article title like a Twitter message?