There were some advantages, of course, from the PC industry's decision to settle on a single operating system so early in its lifetime. It gave application developers confidence that they could build an application once and know that it would work on all the PCs running Microsoft's Windows and on Intel and AMD's processors. While ARM is the predominant instruction set used in mobile phones , there is a wide variety of software and chips that are used in those devices.
Not every chip company implements ARM's cores in the same way, and so Texas Instruments, Marvell, and Samsung, among others, have to do a lot of work with operating system vendors to make sure applications will run across a variety of phones that use the same operating system. The process of making sure software works across different smart phones has multiple steps and involves a lot of collaboration, said Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing for ARM's processor division. ARM provides its customers with low-level code that works with the ARM core design that will wind up in an applications processor.
But those companies often choose different types of chips to run the other parts of a mobile phone's motherboard, and each of those chips can require slightly different code to make sure the operating system understands what it's working with. That's where the operating system vendors come in, companies like Microsoft, Symbian, Palm, MontaVista, Access and, of course, Apple. Leave aside Apple for a moment, since third-party applications aren't authorized for the iPhone and Apple has only one iPhone design out there.
But take the Symbian operating system, the most widely used smart phone operating system in the world. Not all Symbian phones use the exact same implementation of an applications processor to run the software, a digital signal processor to handle other tasks, and the countless other chips in a mobile phone. Each separate implementation can require different drivers to make sure applications written for the Symbian operating system can run across multiple phones, and that can be quite the balancing act between Symbian, the phone builders, and the chipmakers.
"That's the complexity of software in developing these devices," Schnor said. "It's not in the ARM processor, it's in the rest of the chip, exposing the graphics and the video channel to the operating system." Outsiders like Intel think that could be a selling point for their products.
Intel's vision for ultramobile computing is still evolving, but one of the tenets of the pitch is that phone makers and software developers won't have to deal with that complexity if they use x86 chips like Silverthorne, Intel's 2008 ultramobile processor, which would be part of a standard platform of chips. The idea is that would free up software developers to focus on making great software. But do PC developers properly appreciate the working conditions imposed by mobile computers?
Jim Lilly, the chief operating officer of Mozilla, the open-source developer of the Firefox browser, thinks developing software for PCs and developing software for mobile devices requires different techniques. The company's Mozilla2 project is heading in that direction with goals of making the Mozilla code at the heart of Firefox smaller and faster. "Right now, it has to be a fat phone to get Firefox on it," Lilly said.
He meant it has to have a powerful processor and lots of memory to handle the requirements of Firefox, but he might as well have been referring to the physical size of a phone that would have to accommodate all those high-powered components.
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