Mobile Trends 2020

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: lots of different takes on the mobile future, and some common themes and echoes of some what I've been saying here...

Mobile Trends 2020

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Intel getting closer to phones with LG GW990

This looks like an over-sized iPhone, and is a cross between a tablet and an iPhone. It has a SIM slot, but it has an Intel Moorestown low power Atom CPU and a 4.8 inch screen. So it can run variants of windows and Linux.

I think that Intel needs at least one more generation of even lower power CPUs to get into direct competition with ARM, but this is the closest I've seen so far.

Here is the LG GW990 hands-on from Engadget Mobile at CES

Quad-core ARM and 2010 predictions

More than 1GHz per core, and now ARM has two and four core options. This is tracking my predictions from a few years ago quite well. The google Nexus One has a 1GHz ARM CPU with 512MB RAM. I expect that the rumored Apple tablet or iSlate is more likely to be a big iPhone than a small MacBook, so it would make sense for it to use a multi-core ARM and a Gigabyte or so of memory. This gives vendors a nice way to stratify their product, for example, Apple could support multi-core and background/multiple running apps in iPhone OS 4, release a two-core tablet now, then upgrade the iPhone to have a two core high end option in the summer, and push the tablet to have a four core high end option. If Apple doesn't, then the Android vendors will.

My other prediction for 2010 (that I made in early 2008) was that as ARM goes up market, Intel will come down-market to lower power consumption. So later in 2010 we may see Android based tablets and phones that use Intel Atom variants going head to head with ARM, as well as running more generic laptop derived operating systems.

http://www.marvell.com/armada/quadruple_core_arm_instruction_set/release/1363/

My millicomputing update ignite talk wasn't showing any text on the slides on slideshare, so I just re-loaded it.

ignite slides

http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/millicomputing-ignite-talk #millicomputing updated predictions

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

4G LTE Wireless data at 43Mbit/s

LTE trials have started in Sweden, and a laptop data card shows this data rate, with 5Mbit/s upload and 43Mbit/s download. At this point we are 1 to 2 years away from this in the USA.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/16/teliasoneras-43mbps-wireless-data-downloads/

Mobile Skype Video Calls via Fring on Nokia

It was just a matter of time, now it will spread to other platforms...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/24/fring-adds-skype-video-support-on-s60-threatens-to-make-front-c/

ARM CPUs for power efficient Web Servers - James agrees...

James Hamilton highlights the power efficiency of ARM for general purpose web servers. It's almost two years since I gave the first talk on Millicomputing at the HPTS Workshop (which is where I met James for the first time) so its great to see him talking up the principles. He also makes the important point that ARM uses error correcting (ECC) memory, while the Intel Atom doesn't, and thus the Atom is actually less suitable for configuring large numbers in low power enterprise server applications.

The systems at http://www.linux-arm.org/Main/LinuxArmOrg are relatively inefficient blades, they have archaic spinning rust storage attached which must dominate the power consumption. A flash based storage subsystem would make much more sense to me. Web content delivery workloads are very well suited to low cost read-mostly flash storage. They do have a 1.2GHz ARM CPU and 1.5GB of RAM per blade, which is the biggest and fastest ARM configuration I've seen so far.