Mobile phones with many personalities

Your basic smart or high-end cell phone comes packed with a handful of specialized processors. There's one to handle cell communications, another for the camera, the MP3 player's chip, one more for gaming and so forth. Handset engineers have to balance mobile features with the various processors' power requirements, costs and real estate demands. It's a daunting task.

Peter Richards and Mark Milligan argue that mobile handset design complexity can be solved with multicore CPUs combined with a virtualization layer. They are the CEO and vice president of marketing respectively for VirtualLogix Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. According to Milligan, the company's VirtualLogix VLX product lets multiple operating systems and applications run in an embedded environment without the need for discrete chips. He says the multicore-virtualization combo will let wireless operators run their proprietary software in a secure container while opening up other containers, or virtual machines, to third-party providers, which he says is critical if they want to compete against the likes of the iPhone.

Richards envisions cell phones sporting multicore chips with virtualized environments as ideal for enterprises that want to give users devices "with multiple personalities." He sees policy-managed handsets that can switch from enterprise tools by day into entertainment units at night.

Although there are no cell phones with multicore CPUs running virtualized environments on the market today, Richards says NXP Semiconductor of Eindhoven, Netherlands has a multicore CPU nearly ready for the virtualized mobile market. "All these different silos will become one environment," he predicts.

Perhaps. Until then we'll need to muddle through with devices limited to one all-too-often crabby personality.