Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade

I ultimately think you're right, and we won't see a V9 in an RPi for a while, but it's a more complex situation than most SoC integrators that has a slight chance of working out in RPi's favor. Does ARM care enough to make a tiny core in their gate count niche? Does ARM want to give the free new cores to increase market share and get V9 features in the hands of tinkerers? etc.

The chance they'll have stuff using RISC-V in 2027 is definitely above zero. It's easy to forget that the Raspberry Pi Foundation have been RISC-V Foundation members for years.

The sad reality is that the faster ARM cores don’t trickle their way into mainstream ARM SoCs very quickly. The fastest ARM chips go into cellular phones, set top boxes, and other mass produced electronic goods from vendors who can afford to implement them.

I hope this changes in the coming years as more chipmakers embrace mainline Linux and open source drivers instead of relying on the old models.

It's a good target if you want to provide something very close to a "turn-key appliance" without actually selling your own hardware: You can provide an image that a user writes to a microSD card, plugs in, and it just works.

For example: HomeAssistant [1] for home automation, OctoPi [2] 3D printer software, OpenElec [3] media center, RetroPi [4] game console emulator, Volumio [4] music player, and lots more [5].

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation

[2] https://octoprint.org/download/

[3] https://openelec.tv/

[4] https://retropie.org.uk/

[5] https://volumio.org/

[6] https://github.com/thibmaek/awesome-raspberry-pi

It's not mysterious. Making and supporting Raspberry Pis is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's thing. Wandering around in a confused state is Intel's thing.

The only one I'm aware of that's in the same ballpark is the Atomic Pi, which was apparently a limited production run using heavily discounted surplus components. It's not as popular as you'd expect given the $40 price point, which I assume is because there isn't anything like the same level of community support that the Raspberry Pi has.

Cheap, robust, solid support and tools. Definitely hit the sweet spot for what we needed.

Not quite direct competition, but pretty close. Maybe more directly similar to the Pi 4CM with a daughter card for NVMe, network, sata, etc.

The Pis really can do a lot too. Mine hosts a vpn, pihole, calibre-web, and a couple of other basic things. Really the only downside to the ARM based SBCs is they mostly use MicroSD cards, which probably are the greatest bottleneck in the system and mostly likely thing to fail.

As a dedicated, small, cheap computer for the “brains” of various hobbies and certain professional projects (at least where reliability isn’t the top concern)? Absolutely.

It’s by far the popular $35 Linux box out there. People create distros for all sorts of use-cases. Off the top of my head:

Pi-hole, RetroPi, Volumio, OctoPrint, Home Assistant, piAware, Plex/Kodi, many more.

Oh dear. That will involve the process of flashing OS onto the Pi and will increase the risk of bricking it. That is the reason for using SD cards instead of a NAND chip.

Secondly, you can't upgrade the storage on it either and would have to choose a RPi with fixed storage space on it. Might as well get a M1 Mac Mini.

I cannot imagine having to choose a future RPi 5 having either a 8GB, 16GB, 32GB NAND' and being unable to upgrade the space on it. So no thanks and no deal to (2).

I disagree. Having onboard NAND seems like a disadvantage, for like when it goes bad from all the usage.

Should have one M.2 slot.

> 2) get rid of SD and have onboard NAND, like a phone

Why are these important?

It is because AMD and Apple have wider architectures with more vector ports, they can execute 3 or 4 of these instructions per cycle while Intel can only execute 2(or even 1 in some cases with avx512).

AMD has already said they will be adding AVX512 to the next zen, so they apparently think SIMD matters.

Apple will almost certainly implement SVE, they would be stupid to not do so, and they aren't stupid.

And the iPhone 12 won’t be out of support in 3 years.

It used to be the case if you used NumPy on a Mac it would use Accelerate but it no longer does because the BLAS/LAPACK API is so outdated.

As an exception, an ARMv8.x-A chip can have some ARMv8.x+1-A extensions, but _never_ 8.x+2-A extensions (forbidden by Arm).

You just have one ISA minor revision of wiggle room.

And yes, Arm architectures are co-designed with plenty of output from partners.

Which generation are you referring to with 'last-gen'? If you mean PS4 / Xbox One then what else was on the high-performance CPU market other than x86 in 2012-2014? The POWER family had moved deep into HPC specialization. POWER7 was a bit old by 2013 and POWER8 wasn't quite there, but neither would make for a good gaming CPU with the heavy multithreading focus (4-way SMT on POWER7 & 8-way SMT on POWER8), and both would require substantial design changes to be scaled down to what a console would want. The ARM CPU of the time was the Cortex-A15, which was a fine mobile CPU but wasn't pushing any boundaries to make laptop or desktop CPUs nervous (and you'd have to substantially invest it its IO capabilities - there weren't really any ARM CPUs + PCI-E x16 + SATA SoCs laying around at the time)

If you mean the PS5/XSX generation then I think it's simply a why not Zen 2 & keep backwards compatibility? It's not like there's anything else you can buy that's a clearly better CPU offering anyway.

Qualcomm is likely going to want to focus their talent on the mobile market where they've historically been running only slightly customized ARM designs. I think Qualcomm would like to close the performance gap between it and Apple and fend off MediaTek who is taking an increasing amount of marketshare. As the US weans off CDMA, it's likely that Samsung might end up using their own chips more. So Qualcomm might want to focus Nuvia on mobile.

Qualcomm had tried its hand at Intel competitors, both on the consumer and server side. They seem to have given up on that for now.

Ampere is trying to get into the server space, and Anandtech notes that they're competitive with the AMD EPYC Rome series (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review...). Oracle said they'd launch some in 2021, but who knows how limited that will be or whether their plans will change.

Amazon will want to use their own chips rather than pay a third-party. More and more datacenter operations seem concentrated in the big three providers who might not want to let a new third-party get margin there (specifically, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft). I can't imagine Google not going with an in-house design if they wanted to launch an ARM platform.

Consumer devices are difficult. macOS won't work on non-Apple hardware. The Windows ARM experience will be sub-par because there's no dictator to force ARM on everyone (like Apple). Apple can say, "we're moving to ARM" and developers either get on board or are left behind. If Microsoft says, "we're moving to ARM" it's more like, "we're going to add ARM support, but we'll always be a first-class experience on Intel and you can still expect to run Win16 apps from 1990 on your new ARM computer and if developers and consumers don't show interest, we're flexible and we'll pivot away from ARM...so maybe don't buy an ARM machine right now because we haven't been able to convince developers...and since you won't buy the ARM machines, we'll probably just think it's a flop in two years and put fewer resources towards ARM...so there's no real reason for an ARM CPU company to want to make good CPUs...which reinforces why consumers shouldn't buy them..."

We are seeing movement in the space, but it's hard. I don't think we'll see a lot of consumer stuff for Windows and Linux comparable to Intel. I think it's just hard to break into that space. With Linux, the market is small already. With Windows, trying to convince consumers on a less-compatible experience or an experience that Microsoft is less committed to is hard. I think it's easier to compete against AMD and Intel in the server market where so much software is already CPU-independent and doesn't have the same reliance on consumer software and compatibility. I think if you're making consumer processors, you want to target Android and Chromebook where you won't be dealing with convincing consumers to select a lesser-compatible, lesser-supported alternative to Wintel.

Or, could we see Nvidia (since it has acquired ARM) jumping into the console space?

A suite of three consoles ranging from mobile/portable, to 1080p/TV, to 4K/Desktop quality could be very appealing, especially if the top-end model could also use a mouse and keyboard and dual-boot into ARM Windows.

Nvidia would just need to design a Linux game OS and storefront. If they offered a 10% developer commission and paid for some big exclusives, they could have a very compelling product.

Which means you should be able to pick one up in some flagships phones early next year.

Last year, the A78 was announced in July and we had first Snapdragon 888 phone launch on Jan 1st.