ChipZilla rampage

After yesterday's blog on Intel, I think that I'll start calling them ChipZilla from now on. Today, there is news of ChipZilla's continued rampage on the embedded market. Other chip makers like ARM and MIPS should be running scared. ChipZilla has a vision of the future with them inside everything and it's using it's might to bludgeon everyone.

There is a new ChipZilla initiative, called Moblin. According to an article, it is an "ambitious project aimed at developing open source software for mobile devices. The Moblin project comprises a Linux kernel, UI framework, browser, multimedia framework, and embedded Linux image creation tools, along with developer resources such as documentation, mailing lists, and an IRC channel."

At the moment, according to the specs, the project is focused on the A100/A110 processors with a 945GU chipset with ICH7. The last two chips should be familiar to most computer users as these were the last generation ChipZilla integrated chipsets. The A100/A110 are their new low power Pentium-M derived processors that are targeted at embedded platforms. ChipZilla had introduced these processors as part of their Ultra Mobile Platform earlier this year.

Other architectures should be running scared. Although Linux is capable of running on almost any architecture in the world, it is not difficult to see what ChipZilla wants. Other companies (AMD, VIA) in the x86 market are not making noise yet. Presumably, they expect ChipZilla to do all the hardwork and they can then come in as alternate suppliers for low-powered processors.

There's nothing wrong with Intel doing things like this. Normally, I would sing praises as they are supporting an open platform. But I'm a little disappointed in how they strong armed the OLPC. They're like the Microsoft of the processor market. Someone needs to stop them before they become a complete menace.