The ARM race is on, but the leading horse may be… Intel?
One of the complaints about WebRTC is its support of VP8 instead of H.264, and one of the reasoning here is the lack of chipset vendors support for VP8 and hardware acceleration availability.
There were some rumors of possible support of Samsung chipsets of VP8. Then there's the Rockchip one. Nvidia has something in the works. So we've got ourselves "covered" by most ARM chips. That if you ignore the 2 giants in this space: Qualcomm and Apple.
Apple has no incentive to support VP8 or VP9 or WebRTC for that matter.
And Qualcomm? Not sure about them.
The interesting news to me comes from another front though – from Intel. They just launched (quietly) a website around WebRTC: http://webrtc.intel.com/
And instead of chipsets and acceleration and optimization it seems like yet-another-cloud-API-service.
Hmm… not what I would have expected from Intel. I had more of a feeling they'd go for optimization of their mobile chips and later on their ultrabook ones. The fact that they have taken it further into APIs looks either like an interest hobby inside Intel's main domain (=weird) or a willingness and understanding that software rules when it comes to hardware companies these days.
So if Intel, Samsung, Nvidia and even the low end suppliers like Rockchip has plans for WebRTC… where does that leave Qualcomm?
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The happy news here? Another company just got into my list of vendors (190 strong now, and we're still half way through 2013).
