Thoughts on ARM chips and mobile marketing
Written by Bruce Townsend
Monday, 16 May 2011 00:00
In the growing move towards more mobile computing, there is one of big winner, unsung hero and future game changer, the Cambridge-based computer chip specialist, ARM.
ARM started life as a spin-off from Acorn Computers, producer of the legendary but long defunct BBC Micro. Today, chip designs licensed from ARM power virtually all the world’s smartphones and mobile devices.
Its influence is such that Microsoft decided to port its Windows operating system, long restricted to Intel’s architecture, to the ARM platform. In May of this year, CNET even reported that Apple may drop Intel processors from its MacBook line in favour of ARM chips.
There is a downside to ARM’s RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Chip) designs, however. Because they devolve more of the processing to the software, they cannot as yet compete with Intel chips for performance at the high end.
Consequently, the likelihood is that the microcomputer market will diverge into two distinct sectors. Intel and AMD chips will power higher-end machines performing processor-intensive tasks like gaming and media editing.
But the consumer market will be dominated by smaller and more portable devices. The majority will be powered by ARM chips, probably running Google’s Android operating system.
The main implications for marketing are two-fold.
1 - Marketing technologies that are incompatible with the ARM / Android combo will become increasingly useless for mainstream PC-based consumer marketing.
2 - Marketers must take account of the mobility of the new devices, and the different ways in which they are used.
The biggest impact may be on email marketing, as consumers use mobile devices for email more and more. This will affect things like the peak times for reading emails, the time spent and frequency of checking them, and the different kinds of response. Links in marketing emails must direct to pages that are friendly to mobile devices.
And it’s all happening right now.
By Bruce Townsend, ecommerce product manager and SEO specialist at Actinic. Originally published on UtalkMarketing.com.
