ARM spreads tentacles up and down the stack

Good Article

kudos to the author for cramming a lot of good info into this article. The "IoT" is indeed a coming battleground from a variety of perspectives. One problem is the money is pennies per unit so even a billion units isn't big bucks when you compare Microsoft making around $75 per PC. The ONLY area of IoT that makes bank is the wire owners. Seems like anything cloud needs connectivity and all the wire owners simply salivate at connecting all devices on the planet.

One other little thing mentioned is the Intel Wind River acquisition. What most people don't know is a good hypervisor was part of that purchase. The way of the world for big companies is to roll in valuable technology into the base offering so people have reasons to buy the newest shiny.

Prediction - when Moore's law slows down, Intel will include not just virtualization extensions for hypervisors to leverage, it will include a hypervisor in its X64 silicon. Those that currently sell Hypervisors had best start planning other ways to make money. My guess is the chips are already in the lab at Intel. Get the VMWare folks some diapers, they are gonna need to be wearing them when they hear the news.

Think about it. Most hypervisors are free anyway so why not create a family of chips with various flavors of virt and charge a bit more for the chip? A pint says they are working on it right now.