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."

Comments

Re:RISC ?!? It's here already

[tjwhaynes]

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