Fighting talk
Intel has been making a fair bit of noise about its roadmap for low power processors recently, specifically in the form of Medfield, and how it expects to become a major player in the smartphone market before long.
While Intel dominates the PC CPU market, the brains of the vast majority of smartphones are built around designs licensed from UK outfit ARM. Rob Coombs, ARM's director of mobile solutions, read our recent article about Intel's smartphone plans and felt moved to respond.
In his exclusive interview with HEXUS.channel, Coombs first addresses Intel's claim that it has an intrinsic advantage, with the Internet being built on Intel Architecture (IA) as opposed to ARM designs. A key manifestation of this is the inability of ARM based processors to run Adobe Flash 10 player, says Intel.
"The Open Screen Project from Adobe is working to bring optimised Flash 10 to ARM architecture," said Coombs, supplementing his words with slides from a recent ARM presentation. "In a few months Flash 10 will be sorted in an optimised manner, so if that's all they can throw at us then it's a bit pathetic really."
Fighting talk from Coombs there, and he wasn't finished on the matter of IA. "A lot of what you do will be done on a browser or on some kind of Java desktop client," he said. "Windows Mobile only runs on ARM, our solutions are more integrated, cost less and are lower power."