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The CPU supplier for iPods does over 400m a quarter. http://www.arm.com/ir/financialnews/10757.html

Not doing any embedded development, I presume?

The Multi-ICE JTAG debugger from ARM is parallel port only. I recently had a colleague who had to buy a port replicator for his laptop just to get a parallel port to use with the Multi-ICE.

Dude, a PPC 440 is 6mm^2 and consumes 700mW of power at 667Mhz. You could easily fit a dozen on a die the size of a P4 and still take FAR less than this Niagra core. At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus.

Similar the new ARM cores Cortex it takes roughly the same power at 1Ghz which gives it apparently 2000MIPS. The area is about the same as PPC 440. So in theory you could hook 4-8 of these up as well and get a killer chip too..

Point is Suns quotes of being "2 possibly 3 generations ahead" is totally bullshit. They're at most one generation ahead. It takes one multi-core ARM or PPC to totally destroy this.

Tom

I'm sorry, but if you can't manage to track down a JVM for your platform, you need your geek card revoked. I mean, hell, there are JVM instructions built into the damn ARM processors! What more do you want, an Angel to come down from the sky and say, "Hey you, over that way!"

For instance, there is no Java JVM for a Palm.

There isn't? What will I do?

Dude. Java is everywhere. It's in tiny little cards and in the latest ARM processors. You can't run. You can't hide. Java will find your OS, and you will be assimilated. Submit to the collective!

I wonder how this will compare to the ARM Cortex A8 in 2007?

A .5 GHz XScale would make for a good RISCOS experience. However, a high-powered (battery-sucking) Pentium emulator is likely to run at a workablespeed too. And no ARM, StrongARM, XScale is going to outperform a mainstream x86 in native desktop speed, simply because it was neither designed or taylored for it and did not have the momentum to evolve on the same scale.

More importantly, however, is that an emulator is only software. This is relatively cheap to develop and VERY cheap to produce, whereas any hardware development is quite expensive. You could easily spend you first 50.000 on selecting the SBC that best suits your needs. (not just getting the boards, but invetsing time to study them. Then you need to either port a licensend version of the OS to the new hardware (or emulate RISCOS compliant hardware). By that time , the SBC may not be available any more, spec may have changed, etc. Even on relatively simple systems under high time presure with adequate staff (like in case of tomtom go navigator) this seldomly takes less than a year.

You will have burned close to half a million, sans marketing and you'll probably make less than 100 per item shipped. Ie. this won't work for a market as small as RISCOS. Compare this to any skilled software engineer writing an ARM emulator in a few weeks or months. (Actually, some decent emulators are already available for free.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Softgun_ARM_Emulator
http://www.skyeye.org/index.shtml
http://www.arm.com/support/ARMulator.html

Sort of. Most of the ARM9 cores in mobile phones have a very clever hack that lets them execute 80-90% of byte codes in a single cycle by mapping them to a Arm instruction with an extra stage on the front of the normal Arm pipeline. The rest trap to ARM code that emulates them.

http://www.arm.com/pdfs/JazelleWhitePaper.pdf

The real ARM instruction set is nothing like Java BTW, it's a slick Risc chip where all instructions are conditional, and you get shifts for free, whereas the Java VM is stack based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_RISC_Machine

ARM7TDMI (Thumb):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMI.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMIS.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM720T.html

ARM1156T2(F)-S (Thumb-II):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/families/ARM11Fam ily.html

What is Thumb?:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb.html

Signed by the World's Saint.

ARM7TDMI (Thumb):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMI.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMIS.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM720T.html

ARM1156T2(F)-S (Thumb-II):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/families/ARM11Fam ily.html

What is Thumb?:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb.html

Signed by the World's Saint.

ARM7TDMI (Thumb):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMI.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMIS.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM720T.html

ARM1156T2(F)-S (Thumb-II):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/families/ARM11Fam ily.html

What is Thumb?:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb.html

Signed by the World's Saint.

ARM7TDMI (Thumb):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMI.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMIS.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM720T.html

ARM1156T2(F)-S (Thumb-II):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/families/ARM11Fam ily.html

What is Thumb?:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb.html

Signed by the World's Saint.

ARM7TDMI (Thumb):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMI.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM7TDMIS.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM720T.html

ARM1156T2(F)-S (Thumb-II):
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/families/ARM11Fam ily.html

What is Thumb?:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb.html

Signed by the World's Saint.

ARM is a reduce-instruction set processor designed from the ground up to be small, powerful [in terms of instructions executed per second] and lower power [in terms of Watts].

It is a 32-bit processor with plenty of registers and a flexible instruction set that makes quite a few operations more efficient then on the x86 desktops.

The later generations have introduced SIMD instructions to handle things like video and sound. They also have quite capable debugging assist hardware and memory management units (MMU) to handle virtualization.

In short, what you are doing with your desktop processor could be done with an ARM processor at a fraction of the cost.

The biggest problem with this [in the eyes of the uneducated] is that it doesn't run x86 instructions. So you assume you can't run anything on it. When in fact Linux and *BSD have been ported to it and you can run essentially any portable souce based application on it.

The other reason is the MIPS rating [millions of instructions per second] doesn't scale as much as the P4 or Athlon64. The fastest ARM processor clocks in around 500Mhz which is about 550MIPS while the fastest AMD64 clocks in a 2.8Ghz which is about 3920MIPS [assuming IPC of 1.4].

So for the number crunchers out there, ARM is not an option.

However, look at things like a Gameboy or PSP. They use multiple low power processors to get the performance required for say 3D video games.

An AMD64 at 2.8Ghz can take upto 100Wh of power [but newer cores are like 60Wh]. A 500Mhz ARM processor consumes 0.5Wh.

Put it this way, the average desktop idles at ~130Wh and peaks ~250Wh or so... but let's assume idle. That's 3120W per day, 93Kw per month. At four cents per kilowatt that's 3.72$ per month.

Now if you're like me and have 3-4 computers in the house that's 15$ per month. Just to have computers idling.

That for 0.04$/KWh. That's relatively cheap. A quick google shows 6.91 cents/KWh for california which amounts to 25.7 dollars per month [before tax and other surcharges].

Now imagine if your computer PEAKED at 20Wh using multiple ARM cores (one for main processing, one or two for graphics, one for sound, etc). That's a whopping 480W per day, 14.4KW per month or $3.98 for four ARM based computers at 6.91 cents/KWh.

And what could you do with these ARM [or other RISC based] designs?

1. Well all your office type applications [e.g. OpenOffice]
2. Web browsing and email
3. IM chatting
4. ... other trivial desktop things
5. Video games [hint: what do you think runs the PSP]
6. Video and Music playback
etc, etc, etc.

The hysteria that you need more processing power than God to play a video game or watch a DVD is just the sort of things they want to hang you on to net sales.

Once you realize you can get away with MUCH LESS and still have quality in the end ... you'd be better off.

BTW why not just head to http://www.arm.com/ and check out there stuff. Not a lot of consumer info there but if you're curious about the company it's worth a look.

Tom

amd64 is the fastest consumer desktop processor but it's hardly the most efficient.

A 25Mhz ARM processor decent cache would be more than enough for typical word processing/email/etc needs. Want multimedia? Ok get an ARM core that can scale the freq and add the v6 SIMD extensions.

For the overwelming vast majority of computer users a simple 1W ARM processor is all that is required.

An ARM920T can hit 250Mhz and requires on average 0.25mW per Mhz. That's roughly 63mW at 250Mhz!!! [see arm922t].

According to ARM this core would achieve roughly 275MIPS at max frequency which is way more than enough to decode a dvd in realtime. Granted you'd want a core with a bit more cache [this comes with 16/16] but even with a maxed out 64/64 cache the power usage at 250Mhz is probably less than 100mW.

For the average word processing task the cpu wouldn't have to clock over 16Mhz or so, which amounts to a power usage of about 4mW which is probably less than the power required for the DRAM in the system.

Heck even the ARM11 MP core would still be well below the power usage of even a VIA C3 and net you four processors in one die. According to ARM [and I think they mean per cpu] it's 0.45mW per cpu per Mhz, so at it's max freq of 550 that's 990mW.

In the MP core each core has it's own L1 data/code cache of upto 64KiB and they can talk to each other over a dedicated bus [like HT in the AMD64]. It's even compatiable with the 2.6 kernels...

Long story short... there are MUCH BETTER processors that desktops could be made of. Just people are tied into believing they need legacy software [hint: if their programs were proper the data formats would be open] or need an Intel...

Tell you what. I'd rather have a four-core ARM11 running my laptop then an AMD XP-M 2400+ ...

Tom

>> ARM (the company) collaborated on desgin of the StrongARM, but it was DEC, and

Such is ARM's business model. They're a fab-less chip company, with, to generalize, two kinds of customers:

- Those who just mint the chips from the designs
- Those who are allowed to tinker with the designs + produce chips

This is a very interesting (and profitable) business model, as it allows ARM just to concentrate on the design and leaves the capital-intensive manufacturing to somebody else.

IIRC, the iPod has at least one ARM chip, but I'm not sure who makes it.

But it doesn't mean that it's got adequate performance for a modern desktop system.

They could use more than one.

http://www.arm.com/news/5346.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM11MPCoreMultip rocessor.html

But it doesn't mean that it's got adequate performance for a modern desktop system.

They could use more than one.

http://www.arm.com/news/5346.html
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM11MPCoreMultip rocessor.html

What about ARM CPUs? they power virtually every portable device in the world.

As far as I know, Apple has had no involvement in ARM.

As you appear to be completely ignorant of ARM's origins, why bother making such a statement?

See http://www.arm.com/aboutarm/milestones.html and scroll down to where ARM describes their origin as an independent company. ARM was initially a joint venture of Apple, Acorn, and VLSI. Selling off their shares of ARM was part of what kept Apple alive in the late 90's.

oh, you mean Arm...

I think it refers to pulling out an ARM: designing processor cores and licencing them to be manufactured by third parties (or licencing parts of the technology used).

It could work if they do it right: Transmeta has a bunch of CPUs with very interesting technology and low consumption, which are in high demand these days - for embeeded systems mainly.

It's a typo. It should read "Game list as long as your ARM."

The DS has two ARM processors; an ARM7 and an ARM9.

Since there are more than 9 launch games, the list is longer than either ARM.

And there I thought StrongARM was designed by http://www.arm.com/ and only fabricated by intel.

These are not buzzwords : ARM have been doing this for years and are a very profitable R&D company.

You'll have a hard time convincing anyone in-the-know to run Linux on anything that isn't x86.

That is complete crap. I'll give you a couple of people who use Linux on non ia32. SGI, IBM, plenty of ARM products, Alphas used to be (not sure if they are still sold).

So I assume you'll say you know better than all these people because you have some ancient SGI MIPS machine that nobody cares about and Linux doesn't work on it, right?

How about you show a few examples of people in-the-know who run NetBSD. Yourself doesn't count.

Its strategy towards porting is "convince the rest of the kernel it's an i386 and work like that", which fails on a lot of systems which are fundamentally different from i386, even if they have some things in common (ISA isn't the same everywhere, for instance).

Sorry, Linux is ported to more CPU architectures than NetBSD, including architectures without MMUs and PPC64 (which doesn't have pagetables), neither of which NetBSD can handle.

So give me a single example of something that is i386 specific (or even i386 centric for that matter) in generic kernel code, and I'll eat my hat. If not, you are just a clueless troll.

The same clean code and clean design that allow this kind of abstraction lead to a generally clean and stable system. NetBSD's worst stability problems occur only in device quirks which haven't yet been fully understood (you'll notice Linux has the same quirks but the hacks around them are usually done earlier, since Linux contributors don't care if something is a hack or not).

I don't think you are in a position to say that Linux kernel developers don't care if something is a hack or not. You're nowhere near in their league. But give me some examples of these so called "hacks" (clue: a workaround isn't a hack by definition).

Where the hardware is non-quirky, the system simply does not encounter problems. Simple as that. You could say the same for Linux to some extent, but for Linux, achieving stability is all about quirks for everything, even where it's not needed [see the first mention of i386 'emulation' above].

I'm sorry, but you are simply wrong about this.

That's why the Linux kernel is an order of magnitude larger than NetBSD's but does not have the functionality to justify it.

The Linux kernel has an order of magnitude more device drivers, supports more CPU architectures, has orders of magnitude more filesystems (including proper journalling filesystems), can be configured to run in 2MB of RAM, or scale up to 512 CPUs and terrabytes of RAM, thousands of disks, hundreds of PCI busses...

"There are _no_ RISC CPUs still being produced."

Guess you've never heard of ARM http://www.arm.com/? They've licensed only about a billion of so ARM CPU's floating around in everything from XScale PDA's to Apple's iPod, and countless other devices in between.

Last time I checked, hundreds of ARM licensees are busily churning out millions more on a daily basis.

Does anyone know what type of architecture these prosthetic limbs run on? Is it ARM?
Yeah.. I couldn't help myself.

Intel and AMD both still run their own production facilities. In fact, Intel makes sure that the layout of the fabs is identical, so that production parameters are transferable from one fab to another. As a result, their fabs are designed for producing microprocessors, and making major changes in this general alignment would be rather difficult. IBM, on the other hand, runs a more diversified system of fabs.

You are probably confusing this with companies such as ARM. They are merely a chip design and intellectual property company now, however in spite of the "merely" this is still an enormous economic asset in today's tech arena.

well your printed magazine is wrong. go to arm's website and look it up. arm60 is a 32bit chip, no if's ands or buts about it. it can work in 26bit mode (not 24bit, which by the way you can run a 16bit operating system on a 32bit computer, but that doesn't make the system any less a 32bit computer. you can even run 32bit apps in win3.1 even though it isn't a 32bit os. {ala win3.1 or macos 7}). please read the docs and quit extrapolating... anyway, believe who/what you want.

well your printed magazine is wrong. go to arm's website and look it up. arm60 is a 32bit chip, no if's ands or buts about it. it can work in 26bit mode (not 24bit, which by the way you can run a 16bit operating system on a 32bit computer, but that doesn't make the system any less a 32bit computer. you can even run 32bit apps in win3.1 even though it isn't a 32bit os. {ala win3.1 or macos 7}). please read the docs and quit extrapolating... anyway, believe who/what you want.

well your printed magazine is wrong. go to arm's website and look it up. arm60 is a 32bit chip, no if's ands or buts about it. it can work in 26bit mode (not 24bit, which by the way you can run a 16bit operating system on a 32bit computer, but that doesn't make the system any less a 32bit computer. you can even run 32bit apps in win3.1 even though it isn't a 32bit os. {ala win3.1 or macos 7}). please read the docs and quit extrapolating... anyway, believe who/what you want.

I was looking around and if the arm 9 core inside the DS is anything like the arm 9e Well, porting linux to it should be a snap, and once ported, you could stream a DivX movie to it and play it back with XMMS...

Who mentioned Intel?

WTF? They have 10 offices and tons of vaccencies, how is this less than 10 employees?

http://www.arm.com/employment/eu.html

Starting a company that doesn't need to scale up to mint Brink truckloads of money is also one of my dreams. It wouldn't have to be 10 or fewer people, in my case, but I would like to keep the numbers low, so that I can keep the quality of personnel high.

The one corporate archetype that I've found that could realize Paul's (and my) dream is the model that ARM follows. ARM is the intellectual property company that focuses on R&D behind the ARM family of RISC microprocessors. The trick is that they generate all their revenue from licensing fees and royalties from partners (like Intel), who take the R&D that ARM does and incorporates it into their own offerings (like StrongARM). ARM, while >10 employees, is miniscule when compared to it's competitors in the microprocessor space. And insanely profitable. ARM's is a fascinating story, and should be a case study for anyone who wants to see how a tenacious and dedicated team of really smart people can create a successful business in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

Licensing of IP is one of the few formulaic ways that I've seen where one can accomplish big money while maintaining a small core team.

In fact, care to find anything other than the StrongARM

You misspelled "XScale". :-)

anywhere at all???

Yes, I'd care to, although many of them aren't systems for which most people you might think of as "IT workers" would write software - a lot of them are embedded systems.

I don't know how many of them are XScales and how many are other ARM instruction-set processors.

One of these optional [ARM] components is... a module which ran Java bytecode natively

The marketing term is "Jazelle"

Looks like it's in two of their cores, an ARM7 and an ARM10.

One of these optional [ARM] components is... a module which ran Java bytecode natively

The marketing term is "Jazelle"

Looks like it's in two of their cores, an ARM7 and an ARM10.

A microchip in the Arm...

Is there an ARM in the microchip?

Incorrect. ARM licences its instruction set architecture (ISA) as well as its own implementations of that ISA. Intel (and DEC before them) do pay a license fee and royalties for the StrongARM and all the XScales. Have a look at the ARM Milestones. 2001, Intel and TI license the ARM architecture.

Intel is Arm's strongest compeditor in low-power embedded chips with its Xscale chips.

..they aren't in the business of 'competeing in/on a manufacturing' bases, but to provide their costumers with the designs they need (Seems like a 'service oriented' approach, to me).

/* they make their money by licesing 'the final design' on some royalty-base *I guess*, and I guess their costumers sees those royalties as 'part of the manufacturing costs' and don't really care much more about them. +Plus it would cost 'them' more to R&D and Devel/Debug etc etc on their own, then to go with ARM .... Finally it brews down to 'costs' and it seems ARM provides a compelling cost-effecting product/service(s) .... */

Their website has this picture displaying products based on their architecture.

Of note: Microsoft, Portalplayer (iPod Interface), Philips, Redhat, IBM, LG, NetBSD, Texas Instruments. WOW, there's too many to list them all, but this is pretty crazy.
Looks like a monopoly to me, but does anybody know the names of ARM's competitors?

I've been researching chipsets for digital TV. Here are my links to current hardware products:

STMicroelectronics System on Chip (2) Get Linux here
ATI Xilleon 220 (Products)
Sigma Designs Digital Media Processors (Products)
IBM PowerPC405 STBxx (Zarlink [2], Araneo)
Texas Instruments DM642 DSP (i3 Mood Box , X-Designs Flikit + Softier MediaLinux)
NEC EMMArchitecture2 (Galaxis + LinuxTV , PRISMIQ + Linux)
Equator Technologies BSP-15 boards
Via CN400 (Mini-ITX Board), PM800 and PM880 (w/ HDTV for Pentium 4) , ShowShifter HMN, Soyo Multimedia Ready Motherboard (with TV Tuner, $129.99)
Toshiba TX System RISC (MontaVista Linux)
Windows chipsets:
Intel 815 VisionPlus terrestrial box (Korean OEM)
AMD Geode (CoCom)
ARM (Samsung, etc.)
Digeo X-Stream (Paul Allen company)

I've been researching chipsets for digital TV. Here are my links to current hardware products:

STMicroelectronics System on Chip (2) Get Linux here
ATI Xilleon 220 (Products)
Sigma Designs Digital Media Processors (Products)
IBM PowerPC405 STBxx (Zarlink [2], Araneo)
Texas Instruments DM642 DSP (i3 Mood Box , X-Designs Flikit + Softier MediaLinux)
NEC EMMArchitecture2 (Galaxis + LinuxTV , PRISMIQ + Linux)
Equator Technologies BSP-15 boards
Via CN400 (Mini-ITX Board), PM800 and PM880 (w/ HDTV for Pentium 4) , ShowShifter HMN, Soyo Multimedia Ready Motherboard (with TV Tuner, $129.99)
Toshiba TX System RISC (MontaVista Linux)
Windows chipsets:
Intel 815 VisionPlus terrestrial box (Korean OEM)
AMD Geode (CoCom)
ARM (Samsung, etc.)
Digeo X-Stream (Paul Allen company)

Okay. Or maybe you'd rather play with the reference board?

where are the dual-proc small form factor CPU-X(where X is anything -x86) mobo's these days?

Is Micro-ATX small enough? If you'd be happy with ATX, then why not play with a dual processor 64-bit MIPS system?

it sucks. nobody seems to be pushing the CPU envelope, cheaply any more... its all x86 hegemony

Oh, cheaply. Perhaps you should take a look at some products based on ARM chips.

There are a lot of interesting CPU architectures out there. The only reason not to be using one is the need to run Windows (and even then you can use IA64, although it's not cheap.)

They use ARM code. Which is actually quite fun to write by hand, if that's ever required these days.

ARM started as a spin-off from UK computer company Acorn (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machines, although as it was exploited away from its parent company it was renamed Advanced RISC Machines). The ARM2 processor was used in their Archimedes machines, which at the time were probably the most powerful thing on the market. As Acorn started spiralling out of the home computing market, ARM was spun off as an entirely separate company, licensing its processor designs to other companies and improving them in the process (StrongARM with Digital and XScale with Intel being the most obvious big-name successes).

(All from memory - apologies for any inaccuracies. You can probably find out more at the ARM website...)

Forget the April fool. Acorn Computers (the ahead-of-its-time UK computer manufacturer that created the ARM architecture) put a toaster into one the their demo machines years ago. Then the following year they put a sink and a pizza oven in!

The computer, the oven and the sink all worked of course.

Specifically, J2ME (micro edition) software is supposed to run on a wide variety of devices, some of which may actually exist.

Nokia has plenty of information on getting started in their developer's Forum.