One of the more interesting state-of-the-industry articles that caught our attention this week was a column by Ars Technica Senior Editor Jon Stokes, in which he systematically describes the emergence of an ARM-based mobile device ecosystem that has recently begun to dominate the consumer market. With an effective combination of low-power, thin-client ARM microprocessors, the rise of the “app store” distribution model, and reliance on the ever-growing cloud infrastructure that everyone and their mother has been talking about, it is becoming evident to some that the need for x86-sized processing horsepower in the mobile computing space is becoming quite redundant and cumbersome.

Many SoC manufacturers are understanding of the fact that the x86 architecture is simply not competitive in the growing market demand for ultra-thin form factor devices. Add the problem of power consumption and scalable efficiency into the mix, and it becomes evident that Nvidia and ARM have succeeded at finding a market niche where Intel hasn’t been invited to the party. Of course, this applies mainly to smartbook, e-reader and tablet devices as the Atom x86 processor has held a dominant and successful position in powering the netbook revolution that began in early 2008.

In the generation of 2010 that has begun itself with popularizing markets for e-readers, tablets and other thin-client devices with reliance on cloud infrastructure, Stokes claims that ARM has successfully beat Intel’s x86 to the punch. In perspective, these devices are all connected to the net and share a common theme of being oriented for content consumption rather than content production. In a world where x86 makes sense for the latter use due to its raw performance, ARM has proven successful in developing lightweight, inexpensive CPU designs that provide just enough process cycles for handling UI calls and access to massive remote storage and powerful remote computing power via the cloud.

He explains this concept in terms of “local-remote division of labor,” in which most of the computationally expensive tasks are processed remotely on a server and streamed to the networked clients – otherwise known as the foundational concept of cloud computing. What we found interesting, however, was his analogy of this phenomenon to Western human civilization’s history of outsourcing labor to developing nations by means of telecom infrastructure. In a world where globalization is becoming a rapid replacement for multinational corporate infrastructure, it is important to understand the parallels between our modern computing theories and the philosophical investigations of social division of labor if the man-machine interaction paradigm is to progress over the next century.

On another note, the column points out that Intel isn’t necessarily competing with the ARM ecosystem of thin-device clients. Rather, it appears to be positioning its efforts to develop its own thin-client SoC platform based on the x86 instruction architecture.

But by the time Intel has finally succeeded in the development of a functional x86-based thin-client mobile design, the ARM-based ecosystem of SoC engineers, hardware manufacturers and software developers will have advanced by an incredible margin in the emerging niche of cloud client, ultra-thin networked devices.

The full article can be read here.