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Intel Unveils New StrongARMs
mirko writes "Supported by the Epoc, Windows CE, RiscOS and VxWorks, the StrongARM RISC processor, which features power, low-consumption and high-frequency, could bring lots to the wireless market.
This article and this other article describe Intel's new XScale micro-architecture that will be used in the forthcoming 1GHz StrongARMs."
.. you could get some rest!
Somebody port NetBSD to these babies! Quick! =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
...PalmStation posted this article about Palm's future with the XScale technology... According to the article, "The XScale architecture offers performance roughly 20 times the Dragonball and uses less power..."
Maybe this will be foundation for PalmOS 4...
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Here is another article talking about Palm's interests in these new chips. I must say that I, a PalmOS PDA owner, am very interested in the possibility of jumping from a 16MHz dragonball to a 1GHz StrongARM!
More detail on the StrongARM range can be found on ARM's website.
Richy C.
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The second article says "built using Intel's StrongARM technology". Surely they mean Advanced RISC Machines Ltd's StrongARM technology, which Intel did nothing but pay some money for.
Does my bum look big in this?
I guess the editor is probably not aware that arm processors already run a lot of deeply embedded applications. For instance, the soundchip of the dreamcast, or most cellphones. They have a 60% market share for the comms market I think. I am currently working with such a platform (lowlevel system work, and trying to fix issues in gcc as well when I can), and I must say it makes a lot of sense from a design point of view. Highest code density (especially in Thumb mode) of all 32-bit CPUs, quite efficient, and very low power consumption. No wonder it's used all over the place.
what does this mean for the much-hyped Transmeta chips?
undoubtably, these StrongARM chips are Transmeta's biggest competition. Why would serious competitors in the info appliance market choose Transmeta's unproven chips instead of the market leader Intel's fast and proven chips?
You can't compare the Pentium to the new SA - the die is many, many times smaller on the SA which means the yields will be much better.
It should also be a lot cheaper, but it won't be as fast as a PIII at 1Ghz.
Still, it *will* give the Transmeta stuff a run for its money - 1GHz at 1.5W is pretty good, and SA's run linux very nicely (as empeg owners, netwinder owners, and iPaq owners know)
Hugo
Sure it sounds nice... Doens't all new tech ?
It definitely sounds nice ... I can already see the river of drool coming from people who own Risc PCs (I almost refuse to call them Acorns since Acorn sold out their workstation division but I digress).
But seriously, have anyone considered that these are RISC processors ? Do they (Intel) plan to abandon their CISC processors for the private user ? Or is this simply Intel's way of saying "we want a bigger piece of the Business pie". I certainly think the latter is true. I seriously doubt that we could get along without the CISC, it would just cause to much incompatability, or the translation matrix would make the apparent speed increase gained from the CISC->RISC insignificant. This has no bearing on "us" the private users as I see it.
I think a small history lesson is in order. The ARM architecture is not a 'new' architecture - it dates back to the mid-eighties when Acorn, having decided to skip the 16bit generation, started working on a RISC 32bit processor. In 1987, the first Acorn Archimedes was born, running Arthur OS - a fairly primitive but useable GUI and OS. This was running an ARM 2 processor at 8MHz.
Later revisions took the processor design to ARM3 with improve level 1 cache. Note these machines had no level 2 cache - as clock speed increased, this would have throttled a x86 style processor, but the ARM has fairly light memory usage as it has 13 general purpose registers, a fairly orthogonal (and small) instruction set and a load/store architecture minimising the need to go to memory for information.
Then came the ARM6 and 7 cores which took speeds up to 40MHz. At this point the ARM chips were running market leading MIPS/watt ratings - no ARM machine I have ever had has needed a heat sink - but the clock speed was starting to lag the x86 line badly. After a joint project with Digital, the StrongARM was born, screaming along at 200MHz way before the Pentiums got there, and running at less than 1W. By this time ARM Ltd had been born out of Acorn to pursue its chip dreams - but not fabrication of chips. ARM Ltd is a purely design-orientated chip creator - other partners actually build these processors. A quick trip to the ARM website will quickly show you just how widespread the ARM processor line has become - ubiquity is an almost acheived goal :-)
But just as the ARM 7's had topped out around 40MHz for a while, the 200 MHz (sometimes oc'd to 287MHz) StrongARM has remained the fastest ARM chip for a good while. During this time, DIgital got into a patent/IP dispute with Intel and ended up having to sell the StrongARM team to Intel as part of the settlement. So this is the first news of a faster ARM processor for several years - I got my 200MHz RiscPC workstation a few years ago and it blew my socks off with it's slick performance. RiscOS which is the oft preferred OS for this processor when it is used in a workstation (rather than a PDA, router, or other electronic utility) is pretty quick, and a 5x boost will be fairly insane :-) And naturally there is a port of Linux for the ARM processor (but here on Slashdot we expect nothing less).
I just regret that my RiscPC is back in the UK and I'm here in Canada with an x86. :-(
Still it would almost certainly require a motherboard upgrade ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
But first I should mention that there is a port of Linux: ArmLinux
The BSD one seems to be delayed.
Now, to the technical stuff.
According to Intels site, they have added power management features to the chip that allow the clock speed to be adjusted from software. Yes, this is similar to Cruesoe, but it seems like they have taken the concept even further, allowing one to go from 0 (standby) to 1000MHz. Not bad.
They have also added a few DSP functions for multimedia applications. Further details:
Intel has always made a wide variety of microprocessors, not all of them being x86 compatible. They have the MCS-51 series 8-bit microcontrollers. They have the i860 RISC line.
They have a large R&D budget for x86 compatible development, since that is a large part of their revenue, but that doesn't mean that is all they know how to do. Neither does it mean that they won't spend money developing an incompatible product line if there is money to be made from it.
As others have written, this new product is the latest development in a product line that Intel bought a few years ago from Advanced RISC Microdevices, (with some fabrication plants they bought from Digital.) These products are geared towards a high MIPS/milliwatt ratio, so they have often been used in portable devices (ie PDAs like the Psion, the Apple Newton Messagepad, etc.)
So no, Intel doesn't expect you to throw away your x86 based desktop for a ARM RISC box. It would be a poor use for the technology. (For a desktop, you have plenty of power, and you can disipate a lot of heat. The perfect environment for a Pentium based CPU because it needs a lot of power and generate lots of heat.) But on the other hand, imagine how smart of a smart phone someone could make with a chip like the strongarm.
RiscOS Ltd have been talking about supporting 32 bit for a year or two, but as far as I know nobody is actually working on it as they don't have the resources. Perhaps if they Open Sourced their OS they would have more than a couple of developers, but that doesn't seem too likely as the RiscOS world is very deeply entrenched in the world of closed source.
Isn't the RiscOS 4 release 32 bit? It doesn't run on anything prior to ARM 6 so it as removed the processors that were 26bit reliant. As you pointed out, full 32bit access of memory has been on the drawing board for a while but its status is unclear.
As for releasing the source to RiscOS, Risc OS Ltd can't open the souce because they only own the license not the product. Element 14 (formerly Acorn) own the rights necessary to make that move. That said, since much of the OS is in ARM assembler, it would make cross-platform moves extremely fiddly. RiscOS is fast because a lot of it is hand-optimized.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
It seems that every few days or so yet another Intel story will crop up, but instead of being a real story about chips shipping or computers being made with them or actual R&D they're doing, it'll be an Announcement or Press Release about Something Really Cool (TM) that Intel will be making, shipping, and selling Real Soon Now (TM).
Please have a look and see if you can fix this. Thanks.
Mr. Ska
I like how /. posters think they see through corporate media, then post press releases as "articles."
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
You're mostly correct Toby, except for:
>During this time, DIgital got into a patent/IP
>dispute with Intel and ended up having to sell
>the StrongARM team to Intel as part of the
>settlement.
DEC did not HAVE to sell the fab that made Alpha's, StrongARM's, and PCI bridges. Although we may never know the details, the agreement between DEC and Intel was that in exchange for DEC not sueing the pants off Intel for patent infringment, Intel had to take the fab off of DEC's hands. Intel got the deal of the century. They got a first class fab, the PCI bridge chip business, AND StrongARM. Too bad for them tho that the original StrongARM team up and quit enmass.
Many within DEC thought that the CEO at the time was just prepping DEC for sale to Compaq. The rumours were that DEC had both Intel AND Microsoft dead to rights on technology that DEC developed (Alpha and VMS) and that Intel and Microsoft aquired without license.
As I said, we'll probably never know the details. And that's a shame.
Makes plenty of sense to me.
The ARM instruction set is great. It is a joy to program in ARM assembler. I especially like the possibility to add conditions to every instruction.
Yes - conditional execution is a major plus and probably helps the ARM assembler get such good code density.
Nitpick: it has 16 basic registers, all of which are interchangeable. Only R15 has specific semantics (program counter).
Major Nitpick: Two other registers are vulnerable - R14 is used as a link register for branches and I counted it out. It's also dangerous to fiddle with this when switching IRQ, FIQ or SVC modes as it changes - the same is true for R13. That is why I gave the 13 general purpose registers r0-r12 - I never used r13-r15 except in special cases :-) Really the ARM has more general purpose registers than 16 - there are 27 (ARM 2 and 3) or 31 (ARM6+) registers but you only see 16 at any one time - changes in processor mode can swap registers over.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
That 0.60 is variable by task. Some tasks its closer to 1.0, some its closer to 0.10 (we just don't do those
So, lets look at the Intel XScale Benchmarks or rather hallucinatory benchmarks since they don't have the silicon yet...
It looks like a 1GHz Xscale is about three times as fast as a 233MHz StrongARM. Thats three times as fast as a Pentium III 130MHz, or perhaps in the ballpark of a PentiumIII 400MHz.
So stop having GHz envy and instead marvel at the really neat parts of the architecture.
(Incidentally, don't b*tch at me about my 0.60 estimate. email me and I'll give you an account on a benchmark machine and you can't run your own. If you can figure out how to email me then you aren't worthy.)
P.S. It's RISC OS. There is another OS called RiscOS which has nothing to do with Acorn/Pace/whatever
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I'd really like to buy a StongARM system if only I could buy the CPU/MOBO in a standard AT/ATX form factor. Anyone know of a modern ARM based system (short of the now dead Netwinder) which can be had on the cheap and uses commodity parts?
One poster wrote that the StrongARM is only about .60 the speed of a PentiumIII at the same clock. That number varied and would even go down to .10.
But at 1.6W and only costing around $20, how many of these could you put together to summarily spank the Pentium performance-wise and still run cooler and leave more in my pocket? Are there any workstations that already have multiple StrongARMs?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Many within DEC thought that the CEO at the time was just prepping DEC for sale to Compaq. The rumours were that DEC had both Intel AND Microsoft dead to rights on technology that DEC developed (Alpha and VMS) and that Intel and Microsoft aquired without license.
Supposedly the Intel Pentium was using branch predict algorithms that were in the Alpha when DEC was trying to see who they can get to support this technology, and apparently Intel stole some details that they disclosed.
For the Microsoft case, I think the lead designer for VMS went to Microsoft and made a very VMS-like OS there, then called Windows NT. At the surface, the similarities were few (some apps were named the same and performed the same function), but the underlying architecture was said to be very similar. There was talk that that lead designer took a lot of trade secrets and other intellectual property with him and put it in NT.
Since then, Dec / Compaq has licenced out the technologies with in VMS to Microsoft to integrate into what was then slated to be called NT 6. At this rate, that product will probably Windows 2010.