Can ARM Kill Intel?
electronicsweekly.com
electronicsweekly.com
Intel has so much FAB capacity that they can't easily be killed even by superior competing products.
(I assume the answer is that it would raise a bunch of anti-trust flags everywhere, but I'm not positive about that.)
Intel had an ARM license and got rid of it, which suggests that Intel doesn't think that ARM is worth the trouble.
http://www.intel.com/design/iio/index.htm?iid=ipp_embed+proc...
Intel makes several 'families' of ARM (Xscale) based parts: IXP, IXC, IOP, PXA and CE. Intel sold the PXA family to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006.
The simple fact is that Intel still holds an ARM license even after the sale of the PXA family to Marvell.
You're right - I misread what happened with StrongArm.
Because the Intel leadership signed off on selling their ARM interest (XScale) to Marvell. (The very group that is now turning out a product aimed directly at Intel's lucrative server products)
So it would take a gigantic admission of error for Intel to start up another ARM group. Someone would probably have to resign and I can't imagine anyone's eager.
Also, the profit on being an also-ran ARM supplier is nothing compared to what they could do as a market-dominating mobile-x86 supplier. It's longer odds, but higher payoff.
And the way ARM licenses get passed around (as I understand it) Intel isn't really falling behind by pursuing x86. If they reverse themselves five years down the line, they can quickly catch back up, close enough to the state of the best ARM processors that their superior fab tech can make competitive chips.
In any case, they've always said mobile x86 was a long-term bet. I don't think they honestly expect to be competitive for at least a few more years. So any evaluation and possible surrender is still down the line a bit. Particularly as they're still hitting their targets and estimates for improvements in the ATOM line.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/08/30/intel-acquires-infine...
Also, the processor is not responsible for a huge part of the power consumed on a netbook. Disk, screen and memory seem to be a big part. If you make a netbook that can run Gnome and Firefox decently, it will have a hard-drive (or SSD) and a couple gigabytes of memory. The LCD is the same.
When I only do word processing or browsing simple web pages, I never have to read data (everything is cached). Laptop-mode also delays writing data back.
So anyone like Asus or Acer that have a PC business and launch a non-windows netbook soon learn the error of their ways.
Of course, Microsoft will probably find a way to increase their OEM pricing, specially if the Windows-proof line ends up making a dent on the Windows-bundled lines. And they don't even need to increase, say, Asus's licensing prices. All they have to do is to lower Acer's.
The Windows-based netbook market?
It's a Toshiba AC 100 with an ARM-based Nvidia Tegra processor and Android operating system in a standard netbook form factor. I don't believe it's available in the US though, if that's where you are.
First impressions: it's very light, to the point of wobbling around when I type with it on my lap. Many of the peripheral keys are very small for my Western fingers, although I feel I'm getting used to them already. It's fanless, and has only flash storage, so it's eerily silent and apparently gets up to 8 hours of battery life. The trackpad doesn't have enough vertical space to be comfortable, and there are neither function keys nor a delete key, although there are a whole row of special keys which presumably can be xmodmappped.
The online reviews mention that Android provides a less than elegant interface with the lack of a touchscreen, and I agree; I was planning to install a Linux or BSD OS on it all along. As I understand it, that's pretty tricky; should make for a nice weekend project :-)
As for why there aren't more of them around already, my best guess is that OEMs don't want to piss off Wintel by selling what is effectively a PC which doesn't use their platform, for fear of losing the discounts and rebates they get when they do. I hope I'm just cynical and there's a better reason; for casual use the system resources definitely seem adequate. Acutally, as soon as I get a proper OS and WM installed on this thing, I can easily see it taking up half of my computer time, and it will be brilliant for having a quick hack on the go...
[edit]
After the first half hour or so of usage, it's clear that the Android as currently installed is definitely not a good fit for a non-touchscreen, full-keyboard device: After 5 seconds of idleness, the screen dims, then blacks out completely, just like a phone would; navigating through screenfulls of icons using keyboard or mouse becomes tedious very quickly, and to top it off I've run into a few bugs as well.. This thing is begging for a linux/bsd makeover, hopefully I will uncover a real beauty...
That said, the rumor is that Chrome OS is only going to ship on ARM, and will do so Real Soon Now. I'm not convinced that Chrome OS is going to be a hit, but I can see more people being willing to give up Windows for it than for a typical netbook Linux distro.
I recently made a comment about this on an Intel blog article (SC10: Jeff’s Notebook - Innovation and Disruption: How a Successful Company can be gone in 10 Years): http://intel.ly/dZAxKk
Someone is building them. In iPhone's case its Samsung. The phone's Apple-designed A4 processor, which was built by Samsung, costs $10.75 each. Most of that is going to Samsung, part of that goes to ARM. The ASP of ARM 10-20x lower than that of Intel.
Of the three (Acorn, Apple and VLSI), only Apple is really still around. Apple must already have significant equity position in ARM being a founder.
VLSI was bought by Philips Semi, which was later spun out as NXT. NXT is a user/licensee of the ARM architecture but not even the biggest one by a long shot.
Intel's revenue from ARM (and yes, they still make some Xscale parts) is probably bigger than all of NXT's revenue.
Acorn went belly-up as a going concern in 2000 with the remains bought by Morgan Stanley.
The ARM "JV" IPOed (as ARM Holdings).
In any case, I doubt that Apple pays much, if anything for its ARM license.
And I doubt we really know what Apple pays for A4 parts.
You can replace 1 beefy server with 8 small nodes, but you can not replace the convenience of administering that one server.
Also, retargeting performance-sensitive JITs/compilers/maths libraries such as GCC, LLVM, Java, V8, *BLAS is no small feat either - x86 gets support first, because it is the market leader, and also gets tuned the most, since it's the oldest backend. A feedback loop that's hard to break, so don't expect Intel to go out of business any time soon.
Why not suggest ARM will defeat PowerPC or MIPS? That sort of seems plausible, Intel is so insanely good at what they do and they backed out of ARM a few years ago. I can't imagine they did that without understanding how they'd compete.
They allow you, or anyone, to build compatible CPUs. You just have to pay for the privilege.
"Merging" the desktop and mobile-touch universes is a fool's errand. They shouldn't be unified for the very same, very good reasons that the iPhone was served by a fork in the first place.
Frankly: you're looking for a fundamentally different experience at the desk top than you are on a mobile. And ARM is a bad choice for the types of tasks that people are still buying traditional PCs and Macs to do.
I don't think it's really a matter of desktops becoming like mobile devices. I think it's "desktops as we know them will be going away (except in specific use cases)".
My wife's Macbook has seen better days. When it finally dies, we're going to replace it with an iPad, a bluetooth or docked keyboard and a camera connection kit. It does everything she needs. I imagine this will be the same when my kids get old enough.
And why is ARM a bad choice? Have you heard about performance complaints from iPad users? Have you seen Rage HD on iOS yet?
I tend to agree with that. But that's a wholly-different argument than suggesting Apple would make their desktop OS ARM-only.
OS X is Apple's solution for those use cases where desktops do and will persist for the next decade, at least. As such, making it ARM-only would require the use of currently-inferior chips, chipsets and tools. It would murder Apple's steadily-growing share of the very market OS X exists to serve.
iOS is already serving their mobile devices, and doing it very well. It stands to gain very little from a hypothetical OS-merge and stands to lose quite a lot by becoming more PC-like. (simplicity, stability, performance, etc)
It may be true that the current ARM offerings are inferior in terms of benchmarks, but as far as general computing use they're probably overpowered. I don't really need an i7, a Core 2 Duo is fine. Nearly everything seems generally overpowered these days.
To you maybe. Some of us also do stuff like Video and Audio editing, processing and mixing on our machines, not to mention photoshop and stuff. Remember, the industries that made Mac cool in the first place? yeah, we're still here, just getting addressed less and less. i everything is nice, but there's still millions of people who use this shit professionally.
Apples attitude - i.e. killing the xserve when there's hundreds of the things in usage in render farms and video asset serving etc. - is, while typical, somewhat frustrating.
Apple's "attitude" is called meeting market demands and eliminating the cruft from their product lines. They're here to make money not do you (or me) favors.
I'm not sure how far towards the high end ARM will go, but it sure makes sense to have things like Apple TV on ARM. It uses less than 6 watts.
There is nothing that prevents building an ARM processor that performs as well as a current x86. In fact, due to its simpler implementation logic, an ARM implemented with the same technology as a x86 would probably run faster or leave more silicon for caches, inter-core communication, more cores and specialized logic.
And if you're going to suggest WP7 for tablets, don't. Microsoft will only do that in worst case scenario if Windows 8 will prove to not be good enough for tablets. They don't want to get $10 per license when they could get $50, and that's especially true if touch/mobile computing will replace desktop computing.
Apple certainly has the ability to make OS X run on POWER, but doing that might people fall over from dizziness.
Intel only got involved because DEC sued Intel for patent infringement (over the Pentium processor), and lost. Intel grabbed a lot of DEC's technology in the settlement, including StrongARM (which became XScale).
i'm pretty excited about gpu's, but they're only good for parallel instruction processing, some tasks still require the usage of a highly spec'd cpu.
whatever happened to transmeta?
Could you maybe read the Wikipedia article next time?
Although I doubt they'll make them for much longer.
Killing Intel themselves, though, just won't happen. If anyone can dominate the CPU market wielding ARM in their hand (haha!), it's Intel. The rest of the world has a good few years to go before catching up to their level in terms of manufacturing.