Processor Architecture, Instruction Sets May Become Less Important in Future

The market of various mobile devices will grow much faster in the coming years thanks to greatly expanded set of mobile gadgets capabilities and rising demand towards them. According to an analyst, the war between various companies and architectures on the mobile chip market will cause importance of certain architectures as well as instruction sets to diminish as software makers will try to address all potential hardware.

Currently, two architectures, ARM and x86 dominate the low and high-end of the mobile market, respectively, and are battling it out for the mid-range convergence devices like e-readers, tablets, and netbooks. However, other architectures, such as MIPS and SH, are equally suited to power mobile SoCs and as more emphasis is placed on the OS and mobile applications, the use of a particular processor architecture or instruction set is likely to become less important, according to In-Stat market research firm. The differentiating factors become price, power, and performance as competing architectures wage war to gain their share of the nearly 4 billion unit mobile processor market in 2014.