ETJ

Poor AMD: Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

The company best known as "that other PC chipmaker" and the firm that serves as a big Get Out of Jail Free card in Intel’s high-stakes game of Department of Justice Monopoly, is about to get squeezed from another angle. Say hello to my little friend ARM.

That's too bad, because AMD does a lot of things right and makes chips that actually emphasize the characteristics engineers seem to be asking for. So why, oh why, is the company on the skids?

There was a time when Intel and AMD were friendly partners and ARM didn't even exist. Back in ye olden tymes, chipmakers would often second-source their chips, willingly licensing the designs to other firms so that customers could be assured of two (or more) sources of supply. That was back before x86 processors were hugely popular; having a backup supply reassured skittish developers that their chip would always be available from somebody.

When I was a kid, the garbage men would come into our backyard. Every week they’d park the big truck out front, hop down from the cab, let themselves in through the side gate, and walk around back to where our round metal garbage can waited on the porch outside the kitchen door. One burly man would hoist the can onto his shoulder; if we filled two cans that week, they’d both carry one. They’d retrace their steps, dump everything into the back of their big truck and make a final round trip to replace the empty can(s) on our back porch.

Fast-forward forty years, and the situation has changed completely. The galvanized metal can with the round lid (you know, the kind Oscar the Grouch inhabits) has been replaced by three color-coded plastic bins: one for recyclables, one for yard waste, and one for actual garbage. Significantly, the garbage bin is the smallest of the three. I now do the work of hauling the bins out to the street, placing them by the curb in a neat row, adequately spaced with clearance between each one and well clear of parked cars or other obstructions.

You knew it had to be about ARM. It's always about ARM. So it’s no big surprise that ARM is elbowing its way into the formerly sacrosanct halls of server farms. You know, those big echoing hallways filled with racks upon racks of server blades, all humming along as they power the Matrix—er, the Internet.

Server racks have traditionally been the domain of big, burly, he-man microprocessors from the likes of Intel, Sun, or IBM. Only the beefiest, most power-mad processors need apply. "This is man’s work, sonny, and no little sprouts are welcome here. See what we’re doing here? We’re building the future! Why, we eat Google searches for lunch! Step aside as I process another million Amazon transactions."

Will you still need me / Will you still feed me / When I’m 64?

Ah, the lads from Cambridge have finally grown up. Time to join the big kids at the grownups' table.

Last week ARM began a long striptease by lifting the veil from its newest CPU architecture. The new design doesn't even have a name yet, it's just called "ARM version 8," or ARMv8 for short. The coming months (and perhaps years) will see a series of ever more-revealing announcements as ARM shows us a bit more of what ARMv8 has to offer. For now, we'll just have to drool and use our imaginations.

The first ARMv8-based chips are a year away, so it'll be some time before this new CPU has much of an effect on the market. When they hit, they'll herald the arrival of ARM to the 64-Bit Club, a group that includes PowerPC, x86, SPARC, MIPS, and others. At long last, ARM will have made the big time.

If you ask the average person to name the world's biggest computer chip company they'll say Intel. In reality, Intel makes only about 2% of the world's microprocessors and microcontrollers. The rest of the business is scattered among dozens of other CPU and MCU makers. ARM-based chips, for example, are five times more popular than Intel’s x86-based chips, yet few normal people know anything about ARM.

Intel wants to change that. Not the ARM thing—the 2% thing. Intel wants a bigger slice of the embedded-processor pie, and it's been eyeing the mobile market hungrily. ARM ate Intel’s lunch, so to speak, totally devouring cell phones and tablets, two areas where Intel has just about zero appeal. But if cell phones and tablets are going to replace PCs as our computers of choice, Intel needs to get moving. And get mobile.

Evil geniuses and aspiring global overlords, your prayers have been answered. It's now easier and cheaper than ever to keep tabs on your legions of subservient minions. From the safety of your secret lair in the hollow volcano, technologies like personal tracking, GPS, and location-based services are yours for the taking. Cackle away, master.

A case in point is a company called Spime, which has just updated and improved its SUPL (secure user-plane location) software. SUPL follows the Open Mobile Alliance's recommended approach for passing user-location data over a wireless IP network, thus making your planned global deployment of personal tracking easier than shooting deathrays at do-gooders.