That was the conclusion of a panel (see full 45-min video) on the state of microelectronics at this week's Embedded Systems Conference in Farnborough, U.K., where the discussion ranged from the current state of design and what skill-sets engineers should be nurturing, through to Intel vs. ARM and the increasing commoditization of microcontrollers. However, it was the implications for systems designers of Intel's aggressive drive into the SoC arena that stole the spotlight.

Most recently exemplified by 45-nm digital TV chip announced at IDF, Intel's SoC efforts has its detractors, including panelist Graham Althorpe, managing director of STMicroelectronics, UK, who said it was wrong to even group the two companies together.

"They [Intel] are primarily a digital company that makes chips, and from a personal point of view, that needs a very large [profit] marginI don't see them making a chip that costs $0.50: it's not in their structure to do that," he said, adding that, "They've tried to get into the set-top box but failed."

However, it's as much a technology capability issue for Intel as it is cost. "We're looking today at putting analog, memory and digital computing on a single chip: that's what SoC is," said Althorpe. "It's putting DMOS drivers in to drive 600 V and I don't see them putting a LM324 on their silicon any time soon."

While it's clear that Intel needs to find other avenues to revenue besides a now-flat PC market,"That will be a challenge for them," said Althorpe.

For fellow panelist Tony King-Smith, vice president of marketing for Imagination, the Intel vs. ARM debate isn't really important and it may be that neither will win. "The answer is: We all win," he said, pointing out that the debate is taking place against an applications-processing backdrop with high-performance graphics, video and communications blocks where the specific instruction set architecture becomes just another block that happens to help control and coordinate. Independence from this instruction set via increased abstraction, "Will fuel the next level of competition and also the development community and middleware community as they have a bigger prize to play for."

Instruction-set independence

Speaking with EE Times after the panel, King-Smith elaborated upon his comments and the implications of the Intel vs. ARM battle. "It's creating the start of the end of the end of instruction sets dominating and being such an important part of system design," he said. "It's going to make the market more exciting as you're adding more competition."

However, "there's a much bigger thing at play here," said King-Smith, whereby instruction-set independence is being accelerated by the emergence of higher-level operating systems. "We're learning more and more ways to abstract away from the instruction set." Increasingly, then, "it becomes more about what the application does and how it does it and the feature set of that."

In effect, it's less about the underlying processor and its instruction set and more about the system-level design and optimization, particularly with respect to heterogeneous environments.

For more on designing within and optimizing heterogeneous processing environments with various forms of intellectual property, from audio to video to communications, see the four-minute interview with King-Smith by clicking here.