Why Intel will not leave the mobile market

I was always wondering why the MWC conference, which I recently wrote about in Habré, is taking place in Barcelona. And I think I found the answers. Just as the answer to those who believe that Intel will not stay on the mobile market. After seeing the new products from Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Huawei and others, I returned to the pavilion with software, and I realized that besides Samsung and Intel no one pays so much attention to the developers and tools to make their lives easier. Without pretending to analytical reasoning, I will try to speculate about what Intel brings to the mobile device industry, and why developers are becoming addicted to x86 platforms.



After several days spent in the city, I realized how much people here are committed to mobile and wireless technologies. Even at the most domestic level. Why are only semi-criminal shops with mobile phones in the doorways in the area of ​​Rambla Street - Moscow “Gorbushka” would simply envy their assortment and awareness of “sales assistants” about technology. And the street musicians of Barcelona are simply brilliant: the sound pickup from a violin or guitar transmits the audio stream via Bluetooth to a smartphone with a working media mixer, carefully attached with tape to a trolley with a car battery and a sound amplifier, and providing musical accompaniment to the soloist. Here it is true mobility.





If anything, this is Xavi Malacara.

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I will name three reasons, but you can already argue with me and even speak a little here, because the topic is hot and interesting, and supporters of ARM do not want to admit the existence of a serious competitor.

The reason is numerically uno

Development tools consultants. Walking through the huge pavilion of Samsung, I felt a pleasant feeling of being surrounded by such charming consultants in the means of the developer for the Samsung Galaxy. I did not understand what they were talking about, probably I was not attentive. But he came out with a feeling of deep satisfaction, although without a clue about these very means.









In the pavilion of Intel, too, there was someone to look at (the first picture), but these are our organizers, who redirected the guests to the stands on the subject of interests. If you look at Intel consultants, you’ll rather tune up in a serious way, because even though they look clumsy, they will load you with a lot of technical information and will tell you in a few minutes so much that listeners are puzzled because Intel produces so much software. In general, the stands were only boring and abstruse engineers. By this, the company shows that developers will not be left alone, and will always be supported and will receive assistance from specialists on the platform of the Intel Developer Zone. Several visitors from companies developing cross-platform high-performance software using native C / C ++ convinced me that none of the major chip vendors of ARM architecture eager to help them, and have to be mostly content with open source tools.





Alex knows almost everything about low-level programming and debugging of the Linux kernel on Android. He also consults developers in the Intel Developer Zone

The reason is numerically dos

Quality applications and services. Already in a week of trips I missed my two-month-old daughter. I really wanted to look at her, even as she begins to consciously smile, involuntarily drool and make the first sounds except for “aaaaaaaaa” (dads, I think, will understand me). So, in spite of the sufficient speed of the channel on both sides, in Skype from my “normal” smartphone I see an image with a strange color rendition and terrible discretization, which does not allow to see delicate facial features, and even with a booming sound.





I complain about this to my colleague, a happy daddy of two children, to which he leads me to a booth with the demonstration of the new video conferencing engine ooVoo . This project uses hardware coding, available on both Intel laptops and tablets with SoC Baytrail, and will allow me to see my child in 720p resolution, with excellent sound for the tablet.





Chen is one of the ooVoo developers demonstrating video conferencing.



On the basis of the Intel Pavilion, various applications were demonstrated that, despite the non-unique functionality, provide a much higher quality: if this is a photo from a mobile phone, then processed to “DSLR-level”; if text recognition and graphics, then working in real time and in business or creative applications; if it is a toy, it does not require poking on the screen, but controlled by gestures.

And finally, the reason is numero tres

Enterprise applications also want to work on mobile devices. Chat, social networks and toys, although very common, have already saturated the market. Users do not care what kind of chip in their smartphone, and rightly so. But there are applications that do not care. They have always existed in the PC world, used the power of Core processors and felt at ease in 64-bit space. Imagine a large enterprise, as usual, with warehouses, invoices, taking into account incoming and outgoing written documentation, reports, protocols, and other logistic joys. And it all works under the control of solutions, for example, from SAP or Oracle. So, a huge amount of costs comes from semi-manual input of information, special and simple scanners, remote readers, etc. But all this functionality can be placed in the usual smart phone for $ 300, which would have each employee (camera and NFC-chip as sensors). It is enough to place on it a front-end application that will do all the work without special expensive devices, and all specialization will be determined by the software allowed on a particular phone, with access rights, protection and other necessary attributes.



To implement this idea, it remains only a little - to port already ready and x86-optimized applications on ARM. True, not a good idea, as well as the transfer of all the functionality in Java? Yes, you can leave the interface part on the device, and place the rest of the functionality on the servers, but the servers are also not cheap, and the applications are already written, and if you could just transfer the native code to a mobile device, simply recompiling ... Soon it will be possible. In the news from the MWC, a lot was mentioned about the plans of Qualcomm and others for the release of 64-bit chips. Intel already has ready devices on 64-bit processors. And very few people paid attention to the modest booth with Intel's 64-bit Android kernel running on the phone and showing a 15% increase in the performance of the ray tracer'a out-of-box. Fifteen percent of the MWC visitors are not impressive. But in fact, Intel wanted to show that the 64-bit ecosystem already exists, and it includes not only 64-bit operating systems with the kernel, drivers and the Dalvik virtual machine, but also all the development tools for applications. And while we are waiting for Android Art 64-bit, the companies lined up to this ecosystem, “who is the last?” In which they are already asking far around the corner. Everyone wants to be the first in such a promising market segment.





Programmers rarely approached this stand, but often CTO companies.



From my personal experience with clients, the largest manufacturers of medical logistics solutions dream of abandoning the huge semi-automatic accounting, workflow, special devices, in favor of solutions that work on devices that are in the pocket of any employee of the medical institution. All that has stopped them so far is the need to port current projects.







In conclusion, you need to make such a remark. As it seems to me, Intel is unlikely to enslave the mobile market as it happened in the world of PC and servers. Our competitors are great companies that are serious about technological innovation and great products. This makes Intel move and, as an employee, makes me happy that in connection with such a move in the market we have creative and active people in demand: this means that there are opportunities for real growth of specialists in many divisions of the corporation.



Well, as a bonus for those who read to the end: