It's for every one of us
Adobe announced the latest version of its Flash software - 10.1 - today, and by far the most significant new feature is that it is now compatible with the ARM instruction set as well as Intel's x86 - which is the instruction set used by pretty much all PC processors.
The broader significance of this is that another obstacle to ARM and its ecosystem in their bid to become major players in the PC market has been removed, with Flash being the software that the majority of Internet video and other applications like web-based games use.
Additionally, with Intel looking to take them on in the smartphone, digital TV and other embedded computing markets, it signifies a further levelling of that playing field.
The announcement catalysed an avalanche of supporting press releases from the broader mobile phone and SoC industries, with the likes of Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Nokia, RIM and Google all pledging their allegiance to the Open Screen Project, an initiative headed-up by Adobe, with the stated aim of enabling consumers to have a rich Internet experience across multiple devices.
With full-fat Flash already available on x86 devices, this means opening it up to ARM, which was itself conspicuously silent amid all this band-wagon mounting. And with Intel itself having identified the inability of ARM architecture to run full Flash, you'd think ARM would be feeling somewhat jubilant this morning.
So we spoke to Ian Drew, ARM's executive VP of marketing, to get his perspective. "Are you calling about our little project that got announced today?" he asked, revealing how chuffed he was to see this morning's announcements.
