…and everything with a user interface will trend rapidly toward Internet connectivity. It is getting cheaper and cheaper while the benefits and value are increasing.
WiFi digital photo frames are already in hand, though not yet super popular. Chumby is an oddity today, though it has an RSS reader suitable for this blog’s feed. Your TV is next – imagine Yahoo Widgets running at the bottom of your big screen TV. Actually, don’t imagine it, read Walt Mossberg’s review and have a look at Yahoo Connected TV.
These 3rd party applications aren’t typically native code, so not locked to a particular CPU architecture. However, significant amounts of porting effort is required for the underlying infrastructure. Think JITs for example. This work is very expensive and in the economic environment will not be undertaken lightly. Real volume must be in the short-term view.
Our saving grace is that in the very near future, more people will access the Internet via mobile devices (think ARM) than desktop/laptop (think x86). We are quite close to 30% today. While much of the past’s codebase is developed on and for the desktop, the future is most certainly mobile. There is no single Wintel in mobile, and ARM volume is *massive*. So developers are thinking about portability and ARM from day 1.
This will obviously challenge other processor architectures with lower volumes to amortize the cost against.
Great! Thanks for taking this inniative Eric. It should be of benefit to investors like me to share your insight from the inside, as indicated by your job title VP marketing, processor division. I have to admit that after holding a rather large number of ARMH shares that I have accumulated beginning in December, 2002, that I am becoming impatient to realize the decent return that has seemed inevitable for ARM’s technology and business model. It has always seemed to me that a mere 1 cent increase in royalties per core would do wonders for the bottom line and the stock.
When can we expect some well deserved bang for our stock?
By: George Teichman on April 7, 2009
at 4:48 AM
Didn’t he say this was a personal blog?
By: Jeff Deneill on April 17, 2009
at 11:48 AM
I did indeed. This is likely the most interesting aspect of my days…unless folks want to read about my 7yr-old’s rugby adventures. Can do that too!
By: eschorn on April 17, 2009
at 9:04 PM
[...] “gets” the trend that everything with a screen will be connected to the Internet over time. In particular, I like the Stellaris® Ethernet-enabled [...]
By: Luminary Micro « Eric Schorn’s Processors for People Blog on April 29, 2009
at 7:32 PM
[...] common thread is the movement of connectivity towards the center of the value proposition (think: everything with a screen, everything without a screen). Things like JITs and interpreters are indeed specific to a processor [...]
By: ARM, software elephants – APPLICATIONS! « Eric Schorn’s Processors for People Blog on December 15, 2009
at 9:00 PM