Experts weigh impact of Intel-Arm collaboration
eetimes.com
eetimes.com
That says nothing about the competition between ARM and Intel in the server or pc CPU markets. It's not about Intel's future CPU designs.
(Some people eg sitkack made the same point already in replies, just think it needs pulling to the top level)
Intel's Foundry business has long played second fiddle to the CPU business, but it seems like recently they've gotten serious about it due to the weakness of the CPU business at present. And many big SoC vendors would like an alternative to TSMC, which has become rather dominant.
Would be the type of thing that would enable Microsoft to make a serious attempt to shift Windows to another ISA. Use the ARM ISA for the OS and newer applications, have an x86 fall back for legacy applications that require it, without needing an emulation layer. This would allay business concerns over compatibility in an industry wide transition.
I can't do the same with any modern x86 systems and the one company trying (purisim) had to do some pretty serious reverse engineering of Intel's blobs to get there.
Of course this was basically bolting a good idea to an cement block dropped in the ocean, it didn't help that they had locked keys on secure boot so that users couldn't fiddle with this.
A good idea done poorly.
They were on separate cards, but it meant you could run DOS/Windows programs within the Acorn RISC OS.
”The "PowerPC 615" is a PowerPC processor announced by IBM in 1994, but which never reached mass production. Its main feature was to incorporate an x86 core on die, thus making the processor able to natively process both PowerPC and x86 instructions.[37] An operating system running on PowerPC 615 could either choose to execute 32-bit or 64-bit PowerPC instructions, 32-bit x86 instructions or a mix of three. Mixing instructions would involve a context switch in the CPU with a small overhead. The only operating systems that supported the 615 were Minix and a special development version of OS/2.”
”was 330 mm2 large and manufactured by IBM on a 0.35 μm process. It was pin compatible with Intel's Pentium processors and comparable in speed. The processor was introduced only as a prototype and the program was killed in part by the fact that Microsoft never supported the processor.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_600
I believe IBM had an x86 license from Intel (back from the original PC days) which allowed them to do this.
Dropping ARM usermode in the middle of an x86 host[1] would be particularly weird to build architecturally, though. You'd need x86 to correctly retain ARM register state and restore it, etc. The ARM side would also need architectural extensions to generate x86-side interrupts and syscalls for paravirtualization. You'd also need to be able to handle both AArch32 and AArch64 guests on an x86 host - and hopefully that host is in long mode, right!?
[0] There was speculation it might have been Amazon?
[1] "Host" in the most generic case of "software that controls the live-ness of other software": i.e. kernel, hypervisor, and/or emulator
There’s a number of CPU features that make running translated x86 code much faster than it otherwise would be, like “Alternate Floating Point Mode” that happens to exactly match the x86’s floating point behavior.
I don’t see anyone doing this because the economic story wouldn’t make sense
I'm shocked the sentiment has gone so quickly from "things that are not gonna happen" to "just in case" to "when". Every armchair politician on HN for the last 5 years has been regurgitating -- island is too far from China for a sea invasion, straight of malaka consequences etc
China is serious about their One China policy and it's only a question of when they think it's their moment to strike. Russia has already demonstrated for them, sacrificial lamb style, that warmongering does not actually carry significant penalties on the world stage if you're already estranged from the west to begin with.
And before anyone says I'm a Russian and/or Chinese apologist: No. I fucking hate this state of affairs. I would much prefer a world in which we can live in relative peace. Sadly, we aren't and can't back(ing) up our desires and demands for peace with tangible repercussions against those that violate it.
https://www.engadget.com/intel-is-optimizing-its-fabs-to-bec...
With DTCO, the idea is that ARM can do some initial design and see what their PPA looks like, then feed that information back to Intel who can then tweak the manufacturing process itself to make improvements specific to the ARM product. Similarly, ARM can optimize their design based on feedback from Intel about what is possible with their process. (Hence co-optimization).
The impression I get is that IFS is still in need of customers, and they probably got a big chunk of cash from the US government to help develop the business. If they can show that a particular ARM core performs better on their process, it would drive a lot of business.
DTCO = Design-Technology Co-Optimization [1], PPA = Power, Performance, Area [2] and IFS = Intel Foundry Services [3].
[1]: https://www.tsmc.com/english/news-events/blog-article-202206...
[2]: https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/eda-design/def...
[3]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/intel-foundr...
I don't know how popular that flow is but I have to imagine I'm not the only one.
It prevents me from having to read bullshit articles if it's already called out in the comments, and it highlights bits to pay extra attention to in the article.
There might be semantic splitting of hairs as to how one controls for different design features so that it is a proper "like-for-like" comparison. But for the longest time the narrative is that the ARM/RISC type optimisation is favorable for power consumption. "The use of ARM based systems has shown to be a good choice when power efficiency is needed without losing performance." [1]
Not an expert in this stuff and would stand corrected if, e.g. both this paper and the related narrative is all a devious plot against x86.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07437...
However, x86 has a ton of cruft in the instruction set which has to be implemented and keep working despite whatever microarchitectural changes happen. You have to worry about how your Spectre mitigations interact with call gates that haven't been used much since the 286, for instance. That's a lot of extra design work and even more extra verification work that has to happen with each new x86 core, which I think is most of the advantage that ARM has.
They've tried, at least twice. Itanium and Atom come to mind. It turns out, it's not as easy as it sounds, even back when Intel was near the top of its game.
As others have said Intel failed. There were Intel phones back in the days. Maybe they should have kept going even if it lost money. Maybe not. Who knows.
Not to mention Apple isn’t moving regardless since they were 1 of the founders of ARM.
20 years ago, probably. I don't understand why it is still the case today that legacy is important. Who is still running very old, 25yo software, and just how are they wagging the dog?
Intel structurally sucks. That’s the simple answer.