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ARM Hopes To Lure Microsoft Away From Intel
Steve Kerrison writes "With the explosion of netbooks now available, the line between PC and mobile phone is becoming much less distinct. ARM, one of the biggest companies behind CPU architectures for mobile phones (and other embedded systems), sees now as an opportunity to break out of mobiles and give Intel a run for its money. HEXUS.channel quizzes Bob Morris, ARM's director of mobile computing, on how it plans to achieve such a herculean task. Right now, ARM's pushing Android as the OS that's synonymous with the mobile Internet. But it's not simply going to ignore Microsoft: 'What if Microsoft offered a full version of Windows (as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows CE) that used the ARM, rather than X86 (Intel and AMD) instruction set? Then it would be a straight hardware fight with Intel, in which ARM hopes its low power, low price processors will have an advantage.'"
^Apple didn't suddenly port Mac OSX to x86. Both versions had been in development since OSX's inception so Apple could keep its options open if the PPC roadmap didn't unfold to their liking. It didn't, so they exercized the option.
Look at how quickly Apple ported Mac OS to Intel.
Apple maintained an internal cross platform port.
And does ARM actually make a desktop-class CPU (as compared to Intel/AMD's mid or high end cpu's)?
ARM CPUs are advancing faster than x86 CPUs.
The Cortex A8 has roughly P3 performance (per clock), and clock speeds varying from 600-1000mhz. This is without Out of Order execution, 64bit support, or any other fancy stuff. The power envelope is about 50 milliwatts load. Most SoCs bundling GPU, DSP, LCD controller, wifi, etc. consume around or under a watt.
The Cortex A9 should be significantly faster. If I recall correctly, it has OoOe and sports a 2-4 core multicore architecture, with increased clockspeeds, in the same power envelope. Look up TI's OMAP4 SoCs. When these are released in 2010, we'll have Pentium D/GeForce 6600 level performance using up a hundred or so milliwatts, and generating a completely negligible amount of heat.
Now maybe you can see the implications of this?
ARM doesn't actually ship or make CPUs, they license IP cores. There are a whole shit ton of ARM cores out there, though.
It uses the same kernel. It uses the same CoreGraphics, Foundation, and CoreAnimation frameworks as well as countless others. About the only difference is that OS X on the iPhone does not have AppKit or Autozone.
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Flash is pretty inefficient, but it does run (admittedly not great) on the N810 which has a 400MHz ARM processor, which is a generation behind the Cortex A8s, so a Cortex A8 should have no real trouble with Flash.
I hope some non-Adobe Flash implementation is ready for real use soon as the only possible reason for Flash to be as slow as it is is that Adobe must not care at all about its speed.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Heh... In the case of your laptop and netbook, the odds are good you don't have the power management turned on or turned up much. Stock configs for Linux leave that turned off. Windows turns it on and you deal with it or turn it off after the fact. Without the power management, it eats batteries like candy.
Now... To put this in a perspective you and others can clearly understand:
The netbooks we're about to see from ARM licensees are roughly in the same ballpark of performance and capacity (depending on RAM included with the devices...) of the eeePC when it first came out to the 900 series devices.
The Intel based devices for these models needed a 49 watt-hour battery to do 3 or so hours runtime, whether you're talking Linux or WindowsXP.
The OMAP3 boards I've had the fortune of having in my possession at one point in time were able to go roughly 10 hours...on a 13.5 watt-hour battery. While I've not abused it as much as others, some were not letting it just set idle- it did these amazing runtimes with emulators running full-tilt. It'd probably get approximately 8-ish in the same configuration if you had the 3D accel running.
Oh... By the way... That was without any power management- not that it'd been kicking in with what they did to it.
This is using the Cortex-A8. The A9, is out-of-order plus SMP capable, and has a few other gems going for it. It's like having 1-4 of the pre-Core P4M devices at the same rated clock speed as the ARM based SoC- and consuming only slightly more juice per core than the A8. That's NEXT year's crop of fun from ARM.
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