Mobile Computing

By Adam Hartley

Intel’s family of Core i7 chips, which are among today’s most powerful desktop processors, have as many as 774 million transistors, with channels just 100 silicon atoms across. The chips have four to six 64-bit computational cores that run at clock speeds of up to 3.3 gigahertz. In volume, one costs about $1,000; correcting for inflation, that’s about what the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004, cost in 1971. Incredible advances in silicon technology over the last 40 years have made computers ubiquitous in homes and offices.

Microprocessors have also become commonplace in mobile devices such as cell phones, but until recently there was a vast gulf between the simple processors embedded in such things and their more complex cousins in personal computers. In the last few years, however, mobile processors have vastly increased in capability. Today, a smart phone might have a one-gigahertz processor and gigabytes of data storage, roughly equivalent to the computational power that a high-end desktop computer had in 2000. The implications are immense. The multi­media capabilities of modern cell phones are enabling millions of people in poor countries to access the Internet. And new mobile applications, such as location-based services and augmented reality, are moving into the mainstream.

The surging demand for mobile computing power is changing the way the semiconductor industry thinks about chips (see “Mobile Chips Threaten High-­Performance Manufacturers“). The constraints of batteries mean that performance per watt is replacing processing power as the metric that chip makers like to brag about. And the emphasis on networking and multimedia applications in mobile devices is moving manufacturers’ focus from general-purpose processors to those that have specialized circuitry for tasks such as handling audio and video (see “Designing for Mobility“). Manufacturers are also working out how to accommodate the limitations of silicon, which are making it harder and harder to deliver ever more processing power at an ever lower price (see “The High Cost of Upholding Moore’s Law“). Yet some of the biggest performance gains we’ll see in the next few years won’t come from new ways of making chips but from new ways of programming them (see “Multicore Processors Create Software Headaches“).

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will investigate whether Apple Inc.’s business practices harm competition in the mobile advertising market, Bloomberg reports.

It appears Apple’s refusal to allow third-party firms access to analytics, as well as the apparent refusal to allow some competing ad networks access to Apple mobile applications, are contributing to the FTC’s concern.

Regulators want to know whether moves by Apple will result in less competition in the growing market for ads on handheld computers and phones. Separately, Apple has barred applications using Adobe Flash, requiring all apps to use HTML5 for video.

This may not be the only antitrust investigation Apple faces. Justice Department lawyers recently contacted companies about Apple’s practices in the music business. The Justice Department could forge ahead with that inquiry independent of the FTC’s investigation.

The Justice Department is already investigating whether Apple and a range of other tech companies improperly agreed not to poach each other’s employees, the Wall Street Journal says.

The starkly higher attention Apple has drawn suggests how Apple’s role in several businesses–from content and devices to advertising–seems to have changed recently.

Apple recently surpassed Microsoft Corp.’s market value, a sign of its growing power in the technology industry.

Apple also controls around 70 percent of online music sales and has more of the overall music market than Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to market research NPD Group. Apple’s MP3 player market share is well over 70 percent, and its share of mobile phones is growing steadily, not to mention the explosive debut of its iPad tablet device.

The fear seems to be that Apple could be headed for such outsized domination of high-end mobile phones, a possible new tablet device category, and mobile advertising, now viewed as a key revenue source for mobile applications.

Some antitrust enforcers say that if they wait until a tech company has cornered a market, before moving to limit its power, it may be too late. The technology sector has powerful “network effects” that, some say grant outsize advantages to first movers and make it particularly difficult for competitors to break in, regulators say.

“The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has reason to believe that Apple quickly will become a strong mobile advertising network competitor,” the FTC said last month. “Apple not only has extensive relationships with application developers and users, but also is able to offer targeted ads…by leveraging proprietary user data gleaned from users of Apple mobile devices.”

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission added that Apple’s ownership of the iPhone software development tools, and its control over the developers’ license agreement, “gives Apple the unique ability to define how competition among ad networks on the iPhone will occur and evolve.”

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