Arm Announces Client CPU Roadmap For Laptops
arm.com
arm.com
> Maximum continuous power: 85W
You can buy a cheap powerful phone because there's a market for it. The margins are in the scale of the consumer market. However, there isn't as much a market for a generic "beige-box" cheap CPU. It's one of the difficult realizations of being a techie: the kind of undifferentiated, cheap, flexible box we want just doesn't carry itself as a product.
> https://all3dp.com/1/single-board-computer-raspberry-pi-alte...
The reason you don't see them all that often is that none of them have close to the popularity of the Pi, and therefore don't have nearly as good community resources. The Odroid boards seem to have fairly active Reddit communities from what I've seen, but haven't tried using one personally.
I think what OP wanted is usable NUC alternative on ARM (popularity is the result of that and is really proportional), so little ARM hardware is tolerably compatible with Linux (be it GPU driver, network driver, bootloader or whatever else cr*p ARM hardware makers keep to themselves), unlike NUCs which is actually really nicely compatible with Linux.
There's a little truth to that, but it also overlooks the huge effort the Pi Foundation has made to foster a community, which I think is the one thing the Pi team do that other board manufacturers simply haven't come close to matching.
I'd personally argue it's the work of the Pi Foundation that has lead to the boards success more so than the boards themselves, which to be honest are increasingly pretty under powered compared to almost all rivals and have very long intervals between upgrades. It has probably also helped that the Pi Foundation is a charity promoting CS education in schools, rather than a commercial enteriprise.
I think I didn't overlook it, Linux already has a huge community, they had to roll their own (community) because they weren't compatible enough, this is better than none, but not as good as it could be.
The dominant player in this instance is insisting on using chipsets that are effectively obsolete when compared to the competition.
As a result, the community that they command continues to work on supporting this obsolete hardware, rather than newer hardware.
Network effects exist here just like in many other industries.
If ARM manufactures want to get serious about devices for enthusiasts, hobbits and Linux users, they need more UEFI+ARM solutions that can boot plain old Linux or Windows 10 ARM.
To be fair I've yet to see a good ARM manufacturer and they'd all deserve a "fuck you".
Rockchip has the source of all the things on their GitHub, and a ton of commits in mainline Linux.
Not leaked, entirely official: http://opensource.rock-chips.com ("Hardware Support" section)
And instead of dumps, they have proper git commits! https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/commits/release-4.4
And lots of upstream linux commits with @rock-chips.com addresses.
Not sure what would be in a "secret 2nd part"… the only thing I can think of that's missing from "Part1" is the display system. But there is a driver in mainline Linux for that https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
Easily unlockable with WPInternals :)
> only the dead Windows phones
Marvell/SolidRun MACCHIATObin, SoftIron Overdrive, even the old Gigabyte boards with APM X-Gene have both U-Boot and EDK2 (TianoCore) firmwares available. I'm not even talking about big servers (ThunderX) :)
Heck, U-Boot itself can run EFI binaries, with network access for netbooting even — and it's good enough for FreeBSD/aarch64 to not even consider non-EFI booting methods.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/review-clearfog-pro/
Their support is terrible and they only have a 14 day refund window.
if it's an eval board, then do they provide schematics which are typical of other eval board producers?
Having the schematic might aid in getting things working assuming the MAC <-> PHY circuitry supports what you want to do.
If you do a search for Apollo Lake NUC or SBC (6-12W) you'll get dozens of results. The followup Gemini Lake boards are also starting to appear and it looks like there's even a 4.5W Core-M Kaby Lake SBC coming out (LattePanda Alpha - ridiculously overpriced for general use IMO considering you can get 15W 8250U NUCs for less).
Gigabyte, Zotac, Asus and tons of Chinese OEMs all sell 15W U processor NUCs (as well as Apollo Lake options).
At the time, they sold one of the only consumer ARM boards that had a separate controller/bus for their gigabit ethernet and USB 3 controllers[1].
Hardkernel has also been patching new kernels for their boards, which is a breath of fresh air. Usually, consumer ARM boards, other than Raspberry Pi Foundation's offerings, are tied to single kernel release and, unless you wanted to commit a lot of time to building your own patchsets, they'd never see a kernel update.
[1] http://www.hardkernel.com/main/_Files/prdt/2016/201602/20150...
Are you sure? As far as I could tell, they had a single USB 3 controller that had a 2 port hub. One port was connected to gigabit ethernet, while the other was connected to another two port hub which is the two ports on the device. ie all devices connected to USB 3 and the gigabit are sharing the controller and bandwidth. The background is the Exynos chip used was intended for the cell phone market, where there is no need for multiple USB 3 controllers, in addition the existing USB 2 controllers.
(There is a but coming.) It just works with standard AMD64 Linux distros and uses UEFI. You can grab any of the Ubuntu / Redhat / Fedora / Arch etc installers and they just work. You can use the mainstream kernel and it works. The GPU is a standard Intel one and just works.
BUT if you want to use some of the 40 pin connector then you will need some kernel patches. Under the hood the Atom runs at 1.8v but the rpi pins are at 3.3v. Consequently there is a piece of level shifter hardware that does the voltage translation, but needs to know which direction the pins are being using for (like the raspberry pi, you can change this at runtime). The kernel patches make that work. There are more if you care - eg you can make the enumeration order of i2c & spi etc match the same as the raspberry pi.
Storage is embedded emmc (ie no need for sdcards), and I don't know what they did, but it is really fast. CPU performance seems to be about double that of the Odroid XU4 for each core in my workloads. Having a standard (for AMD64) boot process is great - the various ARM devices in this space are all over the map.
That's what x86 was always winning at. Power consumption is higher, however.
I guess what I'd really want is a x86 device to get a more PC like experience. I can buy a tablet with battery, touch screen, and Intel Atom X5-Z8300 CPU for less than $90 [0], but there aren't any good cheap x86 alternatives for simple home servers.
Also this whole announcement is really petty... Qualcomm and Apple already have SoCs with scores higher than 9k on geekbench so why does ARM have so much trouble making good cpu cores? They are comparing existing 14nm CPUs with theoretical 7nm CPUs that they haven't even released yet. Of course it's going to perform better. It would be embarrassing if it didn't...
...none of which are CPU-bound, instead relying on either hardware accelerators or the presence of specific SIMD instructions.
Geekbench is pretty good at measuring how well a chip would perform / scale as a web-app server. (Ignoring IO bandwidth, that is. A benchmark that incorporated both would be brilliant.)
Pov-ray is a raytracer. It only runs know he CPU (it has no codepaths to use the GPU).
imagemagick is an command line image manipulation suite that by default uses the CPU to perform operations in images. There is opencl support but it requires either a build option or configuration option for it to be enabled.
My own experience, comparing LAME and flac encoder speeds on an Android device (binaries invoked via a terminal emulator) to a desktop CPU and comparing the actual performance to the geekbench 4 scores showed that gb overrated the Android device by almost 125%.
The modding scene might not have the same level of polish as a rpi - there are ROMs for Android/Armbian/CoreElec but you may be at the mercy of building it yourself, e.g. When the wifi module isnt precompiled for your particular no name OEM device.
Gemini Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
Apollo Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
On the consumer side there might be less, but the Gigabyte Brix, ECS Liva, and the Zotac mini-PC lines seem to be running strong and have a full line of TDPs - Zotac's latest P-series units look pretty great for their size: https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all
Rockchip RK3399 boards:
NanoPC-T4, $109 2x A72@2GHz, 4xA53@1.5Ghz 4GB LPDDR3-1866 RAM, 4 lane PCIe M.2 80mm https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&... http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPC-T4
RockPro64, $80 2x A72@1.8GHz, 4xA53@1.4Ghz 4GB RAM, 4 lane PCIe full-size slot http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/ROCKPro64_Main_Page https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c...
Rock960, ~$99 https://docs.96rocks.com/rock960/start/unbox/frontside/
HiSilicon Kirin boards:
HiKey960, $239 Kirin 960, 4x A73@2.4GHz 4x A53@1.8GHz, 3GB LPDDR4, TSMC 16nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey960 https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/hikey/hikey9...
HiKey970, $299 Kirin 970, 4x A73@2.36GHz, 4x A53@1.8GHz, 6GB LPDDR4X-1866, PCIe M.2 2260?, TSMC 10nm http://hihope.org/product/HiKey970 https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YiJ4PQoNTM
There's also the Socinext 24-core developer box. It's $1200 for a complete system: https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/
Even finding usable images to flash was tough on the RK3399 and near-impossible on the HiKey960. Even then, the HiKey960 image I found was pretty unstable (randomly killed processes due to a mysterious OOM) and was contributed by a _forum user_, not the official vendor (they seem to mainly support Android).
What should be kept in mind is that these are essentially phones-on-a-board that may or may not have been shoehorned properly to run a desktop Linux. That comes with all of the relevant baggage. For example, the HiKey960 board will aggressively thermal throttle given that all that comes with the board is a piddly copper "heatsink" that you _glue_ on the SoC.
Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi is the only board that I've come across that offers a sane GNU/Linux experience in terms of software support. The performance is acceptable if you consider that even these 4xA73 boards would still get smoked by a reasonable desktop CPU.
At the high end, I agree that unless you have something really specific (if you need Jetson for CUDA or high-end imaging), you'd usually be better off w/ x86 - it's nice to have full mainline support and stuff that just works. In the SBC space, for the same price as a HiKey960 you could get an UDOO x86 Advance or an UP Squared, both of which will beat the pants off the HiKey in most aspects.
https://gist.github.com/carlosedp/f9e5c72ed4c1b66917ad3348bf...
Fantastic for a $80 board that consumes less than 10W.
But in 1987 the ARM was so astoundingly powerful that it should have become the king of the workstation market. A failure of marketing, perhaps.
The failure of non-PC-clones in the 80s/90s is mostly attributable to those two deficiencies, I think.
Then again, both Atari and Amiga tried that with their 030 machines and had no success. They were not taken seriously as workstation vendors (in the then lucrative workstation market) in many cases because of the brand on the box. I distinctly remember a UnixWorld article about the Atari TT030 with the headline "Up from toyland" (above an otherwise positive review)
And remember, back then the whole notion of a _personal_ PC was very new, and thus companies with first mover advantage got huge leverage by instilling the idea into common people that AT/XT "common phenotype clone" is the computer.
Lots of people then got an idea that a computer must be a kind of at/xt derivative and nothing else:
My parents brought a second hand CZ310 from Japan in late 1994. A super expensive machine even for them (they were possibly within the top 2000 at that time in Russia.) I remember, mom saying about those times affectionately that she asked for "the best computer the money can buy." And that when it gave up the ghost in 1997 or 1996, the repairman simply did not believe that it was a computer and not a some kind of a gaming console.
Benchmarks are not everything, but the experience of using the Archimedes tells me that on many untested tasks, like writing to the screen, it is far faster than anything else I've seen. If I had to take a stand on benchmark figures alone, I would look at the Dhrystone, which is the most general-purpose test (even though it doesn't test floating point). The Archi- medes runs 3 1 percent more Dhrystones."
https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1987-10-rescan/1987...
(see other formats at the top too).
Facinating read.
We really need to get these laptops (NovaGo etc.) into the hands of experienced developers to figure out what the deal is.
In my mind, there are two big questions: (1) is it fast enough for users, and (2) will users be able to run business-critical x86 / Windows software on it?
(1) was pretty bad with the first ARM-based Chromebooks, which could handle at best 3-4 tabs, but has started getting better (see the Samsung Chromebook Plus).
(2) boils down to whether the relevant parties can get x86-on-ARM emulation working. I feel like Microsoft had a pretty good tech demo of this at a past Build conference, but I wouldn't be surprised if non-technical reasons prevent it from shipping.
The various Snapdragon 835 powered Windows laptops use it AFAIK.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/154821/hp-envy-x...
Also, regarding x64, I believe it was due to patent issues, not because they somehow thought x86 is enough for anybody.
So the real question is: will the laptops let end users replace the TrustZone kernel?
It's possible to build out SoCs that require a closed-source blob that runs on one of the ARM cores, doing basically all the same jobs a PSP or ME does.
This means some companies have hidden proprietary code in their bootloaders. For example the Samsung Exynos have a range of ARM chips, but to boot them you must use their bootloader, which may contain spyware, backdoors or surveillance systems. You can not see the source code for this bootloader and have no way of auditing what it actually does.
Rockchip is another company that makes ARM chips, and can be considered mostly free [1]. As with all hardware it's very hard to know what's going on inside, but all the code to boot into Linux (minus the optional GPU) on a Rockchip product is open source and can be audited/compiled by anyone.
ARM also have TrustZone [2] that allows you to run applications in a "secure" (or separate) space. It doesn't run on a separate chip, but runs on the ARM chip, separating memory and instructions from the operating system. (Don't quote me but...) I believe you don't actually have to use TrustZone. The instructions/documentation for it doesn't appear to be available to the public, however if you don't upload a blob for TrustZone, with Rockchip it simply won't use it and will run everything on the same level. (Note this is true for Rockchip, but again depending on who is manufacturing the ARM chip, they may force you to use TrustZone).
Unlike with Intel ME and AMD PSP, if you don't want to use their ME, you have no choice. If you remove the blob your system won't boot (or will restart after 30 minutes for some older models).
This means if ARM TrustZone is compromised you can remove it and continue on as normal. But if ME and PSP are compromised you are at the will of Intel and any agency it may have colluded with.
While we're on the subject of free and open source code, note that with (most) ARM chips, the GPU is closed source just like the Intel ME. Again, the difference is if you don't want to use the GPU, you can just not upload the blob, and use the CPU without the GPU. There are some movements being made to open the GPU [3], but it's still a long way off.
1. https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html
2. http://www.openvirtualization.org/open-source-arm-trustzone....
It's very very different than the dozen or so instructions to setup TXT or SGX that sits off to the side of the main OS rather than running like a super hypervisor. If you're going to compare it to something, it's way more like SMM on x86.
Source: I've ported a kernel to EL3 (secure mode).
A complication is that ARM only designs the ISA, implementors can very much add their own management system to the SoC.
In 2013 AMD successfully fabricated a CPU with said ARM Cortex core embedded, thus that was the first year they actually offered their PSP. AMD had similar problems with their APU's for a number of years IIRC, whereby making a single chip with both CPU and GPU on it had poor yields with a high percentage of dead chips.
They could have used MIPS, PowerPC or any other CPU cores for PSP, they just decided to go with Arm.
SoC power management, system bringup, and maintenance tasks are complicated enough these days to warrant a full small core tacked onto the side. These cores are necessary, and aren't going away. Complaining about them being there is just pissing into the wind. Complain about what they're used for and the closed source nature of their code.
> However, while Intel ME can't be turned off completely, it is still possible to modify its firmware up to a point where Intel ME is active only during the boot process, effectively disabling it during the normal operation, which is what me_cleaner tries to accomplish.
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner
EDIT: Also, the ME is inside the PCH, so I'm not really sure why you're making a distinction there.
Because Intel makes it required, or is it technically required?
Just like the similar cores you see in pretty much every ARM SoC.
There's a vast difference between such a core being used solely for bringup/power management/housekeeping and it having a network connection to the outside and being used for "remote management" (and running with godawfully insecure parsing code, at that).
> Complain about what they're used for and the closed source nature of their code.
All of these cores will have the ability to have network connections because they'll bringup the whole SoC including the network MAC.
Intel and AMD sell an entire System-on-a-Chip disguised as a CPU processor. Their CPU is much more than a CPU core: they contain an entire system in there.
If you want to make a comparison, it is more correct to compare the Snapdragon and the Exynos chips to the off-the-shelves CPUs that Intel and AMD sell.
Arm only sells technologies that enable other companies to create a final product, it doesn't impose those kind of "management systems" and binary blobs.
The only reason why it might not be considered a ME or PSP replacement is that the user can control the signing keys.
ARM platforms are extremely diverse largely due to the fact that its cores are integrated into SoCs for a wide range of uses, and I'd say the majority of ARM SoCs in use don't even have any public documentation. This is particularly true of those used in smartphones and tablets.
Or put it more bluntly, "legacy-free means compatibility-free."
I certainly assume they weren't paying large amounts for a license when relatively poor in the 90s despite holding one.
I don’t think Apple uses straight ARM chips for anything of consequence anymore (I imagine little low-power embedded ones still exist).
And nobody wants a stripped-down, locked-down version of MacOS-Lite.
So, no.
Plenty of people use iPads instead of laptops, no?
I wouldn't be amazed if they supported big-endian PPC still for the sake of maintaining portability, though I feel that's less likely than little-endian ARM.
Imagine if Dell didn't have a competitive workstation/pro laptop in the lineup for five years.
I'm not sure what you mean by "political reasons" but it does still make billions from Macs, and the Macs contribute in indirect ways to the phones and the overall brand. Maybe that's what you mean.
Either support a product fully or end it, one of Jobs’ most important lessons.
Porting AppKit to ARM is easy. It's another thing entirely to commit to supporting parallel versions of AppKit for the next 8+ years.
It would be a colossal waste of Apple's software engineering resources, which many people believe are already stretched too thin. And for what, a little better battery life? It's just not realistic.
Having entire vertical control, with the flexibility and profitability that entails. Apple is paying hundreds to thousands per processor to Intel, and worse (for Apple) they are beholden to Intel for their product map. This is the antithesis of what Apple is about.
That's what everyone was saying before the iPad launch and look how that turned out. Personally, I would hate an iPadBook, but I can see it selling really well. Especially among students.
I've had both a Chromebook and most recently and Android tablet with a magnetically attached keyboard, and it's great as a "I don't quite feel like bringing my proper laptop" device crossing over to a tablet, and it fits in my coat pockets.
It's a bit on the heavy side, but have pretty much supplanted my Android tablet. The Chromebook had a similar position, but then I still ended up bringing my (smaller) tablet with me.
For me at least it will never supplant a "proper" laptop because I want a full size keyboard and a much bigger screen, but it's a great complement for travels and meetings etc. or just to bring along in case of emergency.
There's nothing inherent in an ARM transition that would lead to such a thing, and there's nothing in the current x86 architecture that's preventing it.
And nobody wants a stripped-down, locked-down version of MacOS-Lite
Yet in iOS that is exactly what Apple sells the most.
I guess you missed the fact that Apple has endless billions to spend and can buy or hire to achieve anything they want.
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/04/19/...
> "Windows Defender System Guard runtime attestation, which is built into the core Windows operating system, will soon be delivered in all editions of Windows. Windows Defender System Guard runtime attestation, like Credential Guard, takes advantage of the same hardware-rooted security technologies in virtualization-based security (VBS) to mitigate attacks in software."
BTW, Google uses hardware-based security on all of their servers:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/google_reveals_its_...
https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/09/07/anti-evil-maid.h...
The secure enclave isn't subject to these constraints, allowing for more conservative design decisions.
You've found a privilege-escalation attack that can let sandboxed apps escape their sandbox? Still secure if the chip can't run apps in the first place. You've found a bug in the USB disk mode emulation code? Still secure if the chip doesn't have any USB code on it. You've found a bug in branch prediction? Still secure if your chip didn't use it. You've found a way to abuse the third party developers' debugging interface? Still secure if your chip provides no such interface...
I don't know if Intel's days are numbered or not, but I don't think this alone would be enough.
Does "Intel Inside" sound familiar? That's because it worked amazingly well, and people chose Intel over AMD back in the day just because they "felt" better about it. Some even chose it because they didn't want to get AMD shamed ("Aw poor person; they could only a afford an AMD.").
Not saying Intel CPU lineup wasn't better than AMD's product, (especially at the height of the marketing program when laptops used to have "Intel Inside" stickers), but a lot of people didn't even bother comparing. They just chose Intel-based computers.
And that's the story of how so many people I know ended up buying a PC with a crappy Celeron* (I know, I know, the new ones are better).
Sure, CPUs are harder than iPods to market to consumers. Most haven't a clue what ARM Cortex-A7 is. But, that could be the issue. They need to step up their brand identity. They also should probably tell people that ARM doesn't actually make hardware for consumers. They just design the architecture and license that design to silicon manufactures.
Most people knew they were buying an Intel. Most people don't know they bought an ARM. They could do better.
*: I assume some bought them because the salesman at Best Buy said "dude, Intel's are what you want. AMDs are slow."
Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area.
Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.
[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7501&id=31...
[2] Compare that with performance and price of something like E5-2670 from 2012: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+...
# sysbench --test=cpu run --max-requests=20000 Test execution summary: total time: 25.9014s total number of events: 20000 total time taken by event execution: 25.8983 per-request statistics: min: 1.27ms avg: 1.29ms max: 3.19ms approx. 95 percentile: 1.29ms
# sysbench --test=cpu run --max-requests=20000 --num-threads=16 Test execution summary: total time: 1.6859s total number of events: 20000 total time taken by event execution: 26.9264 per-request statistics: min: 1.26ms avg: 1.35ms max: 3.59ms approx. 95 percentile: 1.51ms
Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 1 Initializing random number generator from current time
Prime numbers limit: 10000
Initializing worker threads...
Threads started!
CPU speed: events per second: 1461.82
General statistics: total time: 10.0004s total number of events: 14621
Latency (ms): min: 0.67 avg: 0.68 max: 1.76 95th percentile: 0.69 sum: 9997.72
Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 14621.0000/0.00 execution time (avg/stddev): 9.9977/0.00
[dman@epyc ~]$ sysbench --test=cpu run --max-requests=20000 --num-threads=128 WARNING: the --test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options. WARNING: --num-threads is deprecated, use --threads instead WARNING: --max-requests is deprecated, use --events instead sysbench 1.0.14 (using bundled LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta2)
Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 128 Initializing random number generator from current time
Prime numbers limit: 10000
Initializing worker threads...
Threads started!
CPU speed: events per second: 47980.46
General statistics: total time: 0.4152s total number of events: 20000
Latency (ms): min: 0.68 avg: 2.06 max: 111.24 95th percentile: 3.36 sum: 41275.73
Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 156.2500/118.37 execution time (avg/stddev): 0.3225/0.06
Let me know if you want me to run any other benchmarks.
[dman@epyc ~]$ sysbench --test=cpu run --max-requests=2000000 --num-threads=64 WARNING: the --test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options. WARNING: --num-threads is deprecated, use --threads instead WARNING: --max-requests is deprecated, use --events instead sysbench 1.0.14 (using bundled LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta2)
Running the test with following options: Number of threads: 64 Initializing random number generator from current time
Prime numbers limit: 10000
Initializing worker threads...
Threads started!
CPU speed: events per second: 70704.31
General statistics: total time: 10.0014s total number of events: 707263
Latency (ms): min: 0.68 avg: 0.90 max: 25.23 95th percentile: 1.50 sum: 638330.33
Threads fairness: events (avg/stddev): 11050.9844/1635.68 execution time (avg/stddev): 9.9739/0.02
This is a good move for ARM perhaps, since their licensees have (repeatedly, at least _for now_) failed to move into the server market where x86 reigns supreme, so if they can take a shrinking market off Intel's hands and make some inroads there, hey, whatever works. People actually don't care about processors, because for consumers, price is king. So if they can deliver cheaper Chromebooks or whatever, people are happy. And ARM already dominates the lower end market. But large players don't work that way.
EPYC has better pricing per-core (I say this as a very happy 1950X owner) but you're kidding yourself if large scale vendors who buy thousands of SKUs per year/quarter do anything but buy in bulk, on multi-year contracts, with extensive sales negotiations. They are far ahead as far as vendor validation/stability goes (my 1950X motherboard still has BIOS/IOMMU glitches that I'm waiting on updates for, this stuff just takes time). For the biggest customers, Intel customizes their SKUs directly to their requirements. That's a significant amount of integration with their partners that AMD is not going to match overnight. And even if they take away some of Intel's total-monopoly status in the DC, say 25%, which is a metric shitload, they've still got a hell of a lot of technology (in their foundries) to back themselves up, as well as a massive warchest. I wouldn't be surprised if Xeon margins were above 50%. You really think they can't drop some of that off and immediately tilt that ratio back around, while having tens of billions on hand for R&D anyway?
You live in a castle of sand if you think they're actually going anywhere anytime in like, the next 5-7 years. And I have many bridges to sell you, if you think "marketing" is their only advantage in this fight -- as opposed to their foundries, deep integration, near-total monopoly status in the only market that matters, their massive warchest, and huge R&D setup.
I honestly wonder if Intel actually wants people think that ARM Chromebooks are a threat to them or whatever. It means they can keep deluding themselves while Xeon sales and margins continue to skyrocket for cloud providers while everyone else chases pennies (except AMD, who are actually trying, and are absolutely not guaranteed to dominate by that alone)...
(I do hope they start feeling the pressure, of course. I'd love cheaper Xeons, personally. :)
While arm is catching up, there is no gaurentee that it will actually be competitive one day, not to mention beat it. Intel is still a beast and spends more in R&D than what amd took in last year. It would be foolhardy to write intel off.
* it's the second paragraph
So, for ARM to become as performant as x86 means they wind up burning the same area and power.
That having been said, breaking a monoculture would be welcome, especially given how cavalier Intel is about security.
(You will note I didn't say "In light of" with respect to Intel and security. IBM, DEC, etc. have been preaching about the fact that x86 has lousy security for 30+ years. It's just that nobody cared until x86 became a mainframe ... err ... cloud.)
Then how come ARM won on mobile?
Low power Intel is not as good as low power ARM. "High power" ARM competitive with desktop doesn't quite exist yet, although the iPhones are very close (and better than a desktop of a few years ago)
In addition, the batteries of the time demanded a specific power envelope. Not many chips had this envelope ... pretty much only ARM , MIPS, and a handful of also rans that you've never heard of.
Once ARM got going, network effects took over. There is no reason you couldn't implement a cell phone on a MIPS core, for example, at this point except for network effects.
You could get usable low power microcontrollers and almost-SoCs with ARM cores in late 90's. While there were SoCs with other 32b RISC cores they typically were intended for mains powered high performance applications ranging from DVD players to network equipment. See how large part of Freescale's PowerPC SoC lineup are without much exaggerattion "Cisco 2500 on a chip" (obviosly with ppc core instead of m68k and with wonderfully complex DMA-engine/protocol decoder/whatever-thing)
Yup. The thing is that ARM can indeed match Intel on scaling up as you noted. Intel is struggling with x86 in scaling down, though. Easy to see which one is in a better position overall.
Intel's x86 architecture reset and housecleaning is due to land in 4 or 5 years and it should be really interesting then.
Good battery life though.
The real test for this is software.
Anyone remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
Exactly...
It is the same reason why x86 doesn't work out when it is moving into mobile space, same reason ARM doesn't work out moving up to Notebook Desktop space.
Two more years down the road I wouldn't be surprise to see a Dual Zen Core, 64 Vega APU selling for $59 or less.
While i want to see the x86 desktop get a serious contender once again, it has risen on the back of a very open and modular platform.
But ARM based products are virtual black boxes by comparison.
Thus i worry if ARM rising to the challenge on the desktop will lead to an acceleration of the trend of "devicification" the desktop.
Given that. AMD has licensed cpu to China Hygon AMD now has competitive gaming CPUs ARM is releasing laptop cpus
Umm not much? Intel mostly runs Microsoft software, and what could be worse than Windows on low-end x86? Windows on ARM...
To them¸ I tell that dozens of makers of ARM laptops in China could not be wrong manufacturing a product at huge profit for over a decade (yes, the netbook wave has ceased much in the Western world, but the need for cheap, near disposable machine that can send email and read simple websites is still around)
Cheap laptops made on prehistoric Via Wondermedia chips are made by tons and are flooding places like Africa and India https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...
> Windows 10 systems powered by Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs are already available from ASUS, Lenovo, HP, and Samsung have also announced they will join the mix as well.
E.g.: https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/30/asus-novago-review/?gucc...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/HP-Detachable-Snapdragon-Processor-12...
The one I have is ergonomically great! Asus, something or other, but it has an Intel Atom, Win 7 Starter (fine for what I use it for) and a single GB Ram.
Under powered to say the least. It runs Linux much better though.
Anyway, I use it with some embedded dev tools. It actually does the job, and the form factor is great.
Want one just like it, touch screen, more RAM and a fast enough, efficient Arm CPU.