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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."
Broken, first gen/beta ARM drivers for all my hardware!
moox. for a new generation.
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*
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.
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What is involved in porting code to a new chip? I've done some programming in my life, but it has mostly been limited to personal interest and school projects. I imagine it can't be as simple as just recompiling. So what does it take to port code?What are the hurdles? Assume (accurately) that I'm a total noob.
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.
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.
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.
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People are willing to pay $15 more for XP (the cost of an XP Netbook license), but are they willing to pay $100 more for Windows (the difference between the cost of the announced ARM-based netbooks and a typical x86 model)?
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A Microsoft refusal to support a really cool netbook technology would be a good opening for Linux.
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.
You are not all that bright. Some might even call you an idiot.
The ARM instruction set is not x86 compatible. End of story.
There are a lot of barriers to Windows adoption on the ARM processor that go beyond MS not really wanting it. If they really want to gain market share above and beyond cell phones and PDA's, ARM needs a strong partner to create a real, integrated, polished solution. And by solution I don't mean a device. They need to do something akin to the iPhone, in creating a nice device or set of devices with a consistent polished operating system and with an integrated ecosystem of solutions. The project is large in scope and they need a partner that preferably has an existing position to leverage, experience, money, and which is not beholden to Microsoft. A cell phone service company might be a viable partner or Canonical and someone, or RIM or Google or an appliance maker that has not entered the netbook market yet.
If they really want to sell netbooks with ARM processors in them they have to think big. They need to better than hope MS is scared. They need to commit to building a system that bypasses MS's core monopolies through vertical integration. This is no small task. They need the hardware, which has to be cheap and hit a sweet spot. They need an OS and applications. They need dev tools for applications and services. They need Web and network services integrated with the device. More than all those pieces which are out there, they need someone to put it all together in a nice package and usability test the whole user experience from buying to opening the box right up through using it for all the common tasks: Web surfing, E-mail, chat, word processing, potentially phone calls and videophone, playing games, playing music and video, and adding new applications. The problem with a lot attempts at this sort of thing is the assumption that someone else will take care of parts or that blaming someone else somehow makes a failure better.
As a product of British manufacture, is it safe to assume it will spend most of its lifetime at the computer repair shop?
That'll be news to the folk that have been using computers with ARM processors since the very early 1990s.
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.
My bicyles
32-bit only becomes a limitation on NetBooks when you start to get applications that can't fit comfortable in less than 4GB of RAM. This is not likely to be a problem for a few years. NetBooks may start getting more than 4GB of RAM in the next couple of years, but that doesn't require major changes, as long as the OS can address it and map it into processes' 32-bit address spaces (we still aren't getting many machine shipping with more RAM than a Pentium Pro with PAE can address).
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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.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If anyone ever starts a new CPU-related company, can you please call it LEG for the sake of "it cost an ARM and a LEG" jokes?
Thank you.
Look through the Slashdot archives for the article containing benchmarks - I am too lazy to dig it out. It is a gross mistake to regard ARM as a RISC architecture. It is in the sense that the instruction set is orthogonal, but it is incredibly dense (much denser than x86). Almost every instruction can be predicated on one of the condition codes, which eliminates the need for a lot of branching (and, therefore, reduces the overhead from superscalar designs) and every instruction gets free use of a barrel shift on the result. Added to that, most ARM chips from the last decade support one or more of the Thumb instruction sets, which are 16-bit versions of the ARM instruction set, and most ABIs let you switch between these on a per-function basis, so you can compile functions that don't touch more than 64KB of RAM into thumb code and get even better cache usage.
You'd also be surprised at SIMD performance. The Cortex A8 and A9 support both Neon and VFP vector instruction sets. They are not so fast for double-precision vector floating point workloads, but on single-precision and integer SIMD loads they do reasonably well. For very FPU-intensive workloads you are generally better off using the DSP that comes with most ARM SoCs.
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it doesn't support Windows.
That's not a bug, its a feature.
There are 75,000 apps for ARM iPhone OS X.
There are 10,000+ apps for ARM Android OS.
There are loads of apps for ARM Maemo.
There are loads of apps for ARM Symbian.
There are loads of apps for ARM Windows CE and derivatives.
There are loads of apps for ARM Linux and derivatives.
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
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I've written networking kernel code for Linux, and never encountered any CPU specific requirements - it's all abstracted behind function calls.
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