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

What does it support?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I suppose Ubuntu Linux is just chopped liver.

C'mon people. Wake up! There are tons of operating systems out there. Some are even better than Windows! *gasp*

Re:What does it support?

[Publikwerks]

I like Ubuntu, but to ignore a large percentage(albielt shrinking as linux netbooks gain popularity) is kinda a big deal. It will be intresting to see if they can get hardware support, or if they will just end up like Transmeta

Re:What does it support?

[Bigjeff5]

...(albielt shrinking as linux netbooks gain popularity)...

I don't know where you've been seeing the growth, but linux has held pretty steadily at sub-1% desktop market share for years. Netbooks gave it a slight boost when first released, but MS quickly squashed that and now dominates the netbook market. It's true that Windows has been losing ground, but it's OSX that has been gaining, they are up to almost 10% share last time I looked, just a few years ago they were at less than 5%, so that's pretty darn good.

Linux? Not so much. As for the popularity, ARM is pretty popular as is on small devices, one could say they dominate, and MS already has some software that runs on ARM processors, so if this new breed of ARM is popular then we could see MS make the jump. But it will have to work in that order, the ARM will need to be popular and THEN MS will jump on it, it won't magically happen the other way around (unless MS has a major stake in ARM, which I don't think they do).

Re:What does it support?

[TheRaven64]

Most people won't be using something like a (cheap) ARM portable as their only computer. For those few apps that depend on Windows, they still have their other computer.

A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS

[mikeabbott420]

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. I would be surprised if they didn't have something similar to the x86 apple builds in the powerPC era. Of course windows is mainly valuable for its 3rd party software so people who buy these putative ARM/windows machines may be better off with linux anyway.

Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS

[sunderland56]

A Linux-based netbook won't worry MS if it only does what a MS netbook does. It needs to do more.

For example - they brag that the ARM "offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy". But, netbooks rarely use all of the processing power they have right now. If the ARM had equal processing power, but five times the battery life, they'd have a compelling product. The current standard of eight hours on a XP-based netbook is barely enough; a netbook that lasted forty hours would be a market breakthrough, and would be compelling enough to get people to switch to Linux.

Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS

[Microlith]

The current standard of eight hours on a XP-based netbook

Having owned an XP netbook (aspire one) I must say that an eight-hour standard is optimistic beyond belief, and likely only possible if you leave it sitting there. The Atom processor is power hungry and once you start actually using it the battery life plummets considerably.

ARM already has an advantage on power consumption, if they can match the Atom on performance I suspect they'll win on battery life by default.

Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS

[timeOday]

Whether the ARM chip performance is even adequate for normal netbook applications (e.g. watching youtube) is an open question until somebody tries it. Sure, ARM threw out this number of 5x, which is a meaningless number until we get a better overall idea of how fast and slow it is on different tasks.

Second, even cutting the CPU power consumption to zero wouldn't give you anywhere near 40 hours of battery life in a netbook. The CPU is just one piece of it.

Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS

[hackerjoe]

If the ARM had equal processing power, but five times the battery life, they'd have a compelling product.

Well, it sort of does. Battery life and CPU power are actually somewhat convertible.

When the CPU isn't doing work, its power consumption drops considerably -- if you have two CPUs with the same designed maximum consumption, but one has twice the computing power available, then for the same workload that processor will use (a little bit more than) half the energy.

Of course the real picture is not so rosy, because a CPU that uses that little power to start with is probably accounting for less than half of the total power consumption of the system, and of course the workload is likely to increase if you have more CPU available (people watch video fullscreen instead of windowed, games will generally render as fast as they can and use all available CPU, etc.).

no windows?

[uncreativeslashnick]

This won't end well. I have an ARM device (nokia n810) and it's great. But Wintel monopoly will kill this just like it did Sparc and IBM Power. I'm sure if it's as good as they claim it'll carve out a niche, but it won't directly compete in numbers or presence with intel CPUs.

Re:no windows?

[PaintyThePirate]

I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are significantly more ARM devices out there than x86, Sparc, and Power combined.

Phone like devices are getting larger and more powerful, and laptops/tablets are getting smaller and lower power. It is converging on a market space where ARM has no competition, and is exactly where the A9 would thrive. Microsoft is even entering the game with the Zune HD packing an Nvidia Tegra. This is not a low volume niche either. Think of the iPhone, Android devices, PSP, DS/DSi, Windows Mobile phones, etc.

That is just on the mobile end too. It makes no sense to stick Windows Embedded and a Celeron in a router, network storage, or a printer when Linux/A9 is cheaper and as powerful.

chip supports OS? Hmmm, backwards...

[kharris312002]

This may be the first time I've ever heard it said that a processor doesn't support an OS... Usually it's the other way around.

Re:"Windows CE or even Windows Mobile"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying "Linux or even Ubuntu". :)

Microsoft used to have a laptop/netbook-friendly Windows CE version back in the late '90s, but dumped it in favor of the "Tablet PC" build of Windows NT around 2000-2001. It would be interesting to see them bring that back.

They still do, the problem is it's shit and it won't run any off-the-shelf applications. It's used in a number of industrial PDAs, particularly ruggedized, intrinsically-safe ones.
The way I see it, using CE on a laptop is far worse than Ubuntu because it looks like windows (95), behaves (mostly) like Windows, but won't run any Windows apps. In some ways it's the perfect combination - you get all the 'It-won't-run-Outlook/Oblivion/Photoshop' problems of Linux, all the 'It-won't-work-with-my-USB-doodad' problems of OpenBSD and all of the bugginess of Windows.

And unless it's CE6 (WM and most devices are still CE5), it will have that abysmal 32MB-per-application limit, so good luck porting any substantial win32 apps to it.

Much as I'd like a linux ARM netbook, I am a little worried that they don't seem to have 64-bit addressing in that architecture yet. It won't be so many years before it becomes a needed feature for a netbook too.

Re:But, does it run DOS?

[Dog-Cow]

You are not all that bright. Some might even call you an idiot.

The ARM instruction set is not x86 compatible. End of story.

Re:No windows support?

[Albanach]

Oh yeah it clearly is Microsofts fault that ARM didn't bother to deliver a platform up until now.

That'll be news to the folk that have been using computers with ARM processors since the very early 1990s.

Re:real solution

[jabjoe]

The iPhone is a ARM processor.....

No Windows? Great! No Microsoft tax!

[MoxFulder]

However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows.

Fuck Windows. Seriously.

I've been unwillingly paying the Microsoft tax for TEN YEARS. All I ever do is wipe Windows and install Linux. If my new computer can't run Windows then... great!! Maybe I won't have to pay the tax.

I'd love a low-power, high-performance ARM notebook. I'd be happy with MIPS or Loongson (Chinese MIPS clone) as well. Debian already has a full-blown ARM port and I'll bet they could get it working on an ARM netbook in a day. Ubuntu would undoubtedly be soon-to-follow.

As a side benefit, having multiple widely-used architectures for desktop systems (x86 and ARM) would be a support nightmare for hardware companies that still keep their drivers proprietary and undocumented. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Broadcom and NVidia. This would just be another nail in the coffin for their obstructionist attitudes towards free/open-source operating systems.

Re:Porting code to a new architecture

[timeOday]

Porting Windows itself is almost irrelevant. The tens of thousands of apps in the Windows ecosystem still wouldn't work.

Re:I will buy one

[flyingfsck]

Get a Touchbook: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/03/02/touch-book-tablet-netbook-with-arm-cpu-10-hour-battery-detachable-screen/ It is already available and quite cheap.

The best thing about it

[the_womble]

it doesn't support Windows.

That's not a bug, its a feature.

Re:Just for kicks

[TheRaven64]

LEG should make DSPs or GPUs, so SoC manufacturers can include an ARM and a LEG on the same chip.

Re:chip supports OS? Hmmm, backwards...

[Locutus]

in the Windows world, you'll hear that the processor runs on Windows all over the place. They've been trained that Windows is the end all, be all, and center of the universe so the concept of "it runs on Windows" is their world. Talk about a CPU and _it_ runs on Windows is the norm. They really don't know how to think about it without Windows at the center or in a hierarchy of the hardware->OS->applications. They can't imagine a world without Windows. Combine that with software people and marketing people with no clue of hardware and you get "processor X doesn't run on Windows"

LoB