The director of Intel’s mobile products
division, Mike Bell, has leveled some interesting charges at the
company’s ARM-using competitors in the Android smartphone market. Bell,
an engineer who spent time at both Apple and Palm before moving to
Intel, claims that the major smartphone players have done precious
little work to optimize their software for multi-threaded environments.
According
to Bell, Intel’s own investigation into the state of multi-processing
support in Android turned up a number of deficiencies. Some of the
problems can be traced back to manufacturing and the difficulty of
controlling current leakage, but others point to poorly optimized thread
schedulers and inefficient data structures.
“The way it’s implemented right now, Android does not make as effective use of multiple cores as it could,” Bell told
The Inquirer.
“I think — frankly — some of this work could be done by the vendors who
create the SoCs, but they just haven’t bothered to do it.”
Intel
is scarcely a neutral third party, but in this case, we’re inclined to
take Bell at his word. His background is in engineering, rather than
PR/product evangelism, and the comments themselves make sense. ARM and
Android have become ubiquitous precisely because they allow Samsung,
Qualcomm, TI, and Nvidia to reap the benefits of research and product
development without being directly responsible for the implementation.
Intel’s massive software development resources exemplify the opposite
approach, and the company’s silicon is
quite competitive with ARM devices.
Intel’s
software advantage isn’t really x86 compatibility, at least not
primarily. The company’s true ace card is the expertise of its software
engineers and the scale of its development environment. The fact that
its many forms of expertise revolve around the x86 instruction set is
nearly incidental. Of its competitors, only Nvidia has much experience
in low-level development.
The other reason we take Bell’s
criticisms fairly seriously is that they make logical sense. It’s easy
to forget that Android is a very young operating system. Dual-core
phones are everywhere these days, but the first DC devices shipped less
than two years ago. The kind of ultra-low-level optimizations Bell is
discussing aren’t something Google can build for each and every device
manufacturer — they depend on the specifics of the SoC and, in theory,
would be custom built by the relevant OEM. Relying on Google may have
worked to date, but it’s unlikely to be effective for much longer.
These
type of optimizations become more important as core counts increase. It
can be more power-efficient to use four slow cores rather than two fast
ones, but only if the OS is efficient enough to leverage all four
threads. If it isn’t, the consumer gets a slower device with worse
battery life.
More than anything, Intel’s comments are a sign that the company is deadly serious
about matching and exceeding its competitors. Medfield demonstrated
Intel’s commitment on hardware, but discussions of low-level software
optimizations are a different animal. To date, other OEMs have gotten
away with limited software customization thanks to ARM and Google. [[Our robot thinks you might like some software for only $14.95]] Everything we’ve seen to date suggests that Cortex-A15 and 28nm are the last low-hanging fruit
vendors will see for several years. With Intel planning dual-core
Clover Trail tablets for later this year and a 22nm Silvermont refresh
dropping in 2013, the various ARM vendors will need to look to such
optimizations to continue competing effectively.
