ARM Attacks Intel's Netbook Stranglehold

Barence writes "British chip designer ARM is launching an outright attack on Intel with the launch of a 2GHz processor aimed at everything from netbooks to servers. ARM claims the 40nm Cortex A9 MPCore processor represents a shift in strategy for the company, which has until now concentrated on low-power processors for mobile devices. In the consumer market, ARM is pitching the Cortex A9 directly against Intel's Atom, claiming the processor offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy. 'It's head and shoulders above anything Intel can deliver today,' ARM VP of marketing Eric Schom claims. However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows. 'We've had conversations with Microsoft and you can imagine what they entail,' says Schom."

Comments

Re:No windows support?

[TheRaven64]

Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 is a bit faster than the Atom on most workloads (in about 10% of the power envelope). The A8, however, typically ships at about half the clock speed of an Atom (they go up to 1GHz, but 600MHz is the most common speed). The A9 is slightly faster than the A8 clock-for-clock, but goes to twice the clock speed and scales to four cores, so it's not a stretch to imagine that it's more than five times the speed of a single-core Atom. I've not seen any figures for the A9's power consumption yet though...

It's worth noting that ARM doesn't make chips, they are an IP-only company. ARM licenses designs to other companies who combine their cores with other stuff and ship them. One of the more high-profile Cortex A9 licensees is nVidia, who are using it in their Tegra line. Other existing ARM licensees, like Qualcomm, TI, Samsung and Freescale have already signed up for the A9 as well.

It's also worth noting that the A9 isn't really news. The designs have been available from ARM for a while now. I don't know of any shipping chips including A9 cores yet (being mass-produced, anyway; there are a few being sampled), but TI announced the OMAP4 series a little while ago which is based around the A9 and looks like a very nice chip for handheld machines.

Re:Porting code to a new architecture

[TheRaven64]

It is either a complete rewrite, a simple recompile, or something in the middle depending on how different the architectures are. In terms of programmer-visible features (ignoring things only visible to compiler and OS writers), ARM and x86 are very similar; same word size, almost identical alignment constraints, same byte order. If you wrote your program in a high-level language, it is just a recompile. If you used any assembly language, then you will need to rewrite it. If you used a language somewhere in the middle, like C, then it will probably be a straight recompile. This is unlike porting, for example, from x86 to SPARC64, where you suddenly have very strict alignment, opposite byte order, and different

Of course, this is assuming the operating system interfaces are the same. If you're on something like OpenBSD, for example, then the OS does a good job of isolating the userspace code from having to know anything about the underlying architecture. Linux, on contrast, exposes a lot of architecture-specific details to programmers (and that's ignoring the fact that embedded Linux often ships with a non-GNU libc, which lacks a lot of features). Wince is about the worse at this, where every single device implements some subset of the Win32 APIs and so you end up having to do some tweaking for every device.

Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Linux already made MS drop their price, allwing cheap windows netbooks because of linux. It's not out of the question that a really compelling ARM netbook would scare them into ARM support.

And Microsoft would still lose. The only thing Windows really has going for it is the existing library of PC software. That's the network effect that keeps Windows out front, otherwise the market would have dumped Windows ages ago. Windows on ARM runs existing Windows x86 software about as well as Linux does: not at all.

In fact, ARM netbooks running Windows might actually be at a disadvantage relative to Linux. People would see the Windows logo on the box and take it home, assuming that they could run PC-Windows software. When that software fails to load, the netbook gets returned to the store.

Netbooks running Linux on an ARM processor with insanely long battery life and a true dedicated mobile operating system may be what it takes to get people to realize that netbooks were not intended to be merely smaller laptops.