CES 2011: Chip Porn
In the opening keynote for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft unveiled the next generation of chipsets designed to run full versions of the Windows operating system powering ultra portable devices.
At a show where many vendors begin sealing their holiday season purchases and decide what the next big thing is that consumers will want to buy in their stores, talking chipsets is anything but sexy and exciting. That said, the embedded video will show you that when new devices come to market that support this "system on a chip" (SoC) approach, consumers will indeed benefit from devices that are faster, cooler and smoother running, and, at the same time, a whole lot smaller.
By engineering the operating system to run on the chipset, Microsoft opens up possibilities for thinner devices with lower power requirements, removing the need to have that noisy fan Windows users are familiar with today.
The other benefits for consumers (ultimately) of this approach is that it is easier to get smaller devices to perform like bigger ones, providing smoother playback of high-resolution video, because the processor can operate with greater efficiency using a native, embedded operating system and drivers.
You can see in this video, recorded at the All Things Digital mini conference held at CES, a demonstration by Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Hwang, of high performance 1080p video running on a handheld device.
As Ars Technica points out, the move to systems running directly on the chip may be exciting for what it can enable, but this solution requires a robust eco-system of third-party software compatible with the ARM architecture to make it compelling for real world use.
Changing how an operating system works on a different chipset is no trivial task to execute, and one need look no further back in history to the challenges Apple faced when transitioning from PowerPC to Intel for its CPUs. However, in that example, Apple and its customers received an eco-system boost by leveraging third-party software development already architected to support the Intel solution.
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