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ARM Launches Cortex-A5 Processor, To Take On Atom
bigwophh writes "ARM launched its new Cortex-A5 processor (codenamed Sparrow) this week, and while it's not targeted at the top end of the mobile market, it is a significant launch nonetheless. The Cortex-A5, which will likely battle future iterations of Intel's Atom for market share, is an important step forward for ARM for several reasons. First, it's significantly more efficient to build than the company's older ARM1176JZ(F)-S, while simultaneously outperforming the ARM926EJ-S. The Cortex-A5, however, is more than just a faster ARM processor. Architecturally, it's identical to the more advanced Cortex-A9, and it supports the same features as that part as well. This flexibility is designed to give product developers and manufacturers access to a fully backwards-compatible processor with better thermal and performance characteristics than the previous generation."
The Cortex-A5 is aimed at phones. The Cortext-A9 is the one aimed at netbooks. The article referenced in the summary makes this clear.
The Cortex-A5 is a slight improvement over the MPCore/Arm11/Arm9. That's nice for those who need it, but it's miles away from the speed of a Cortex-A9, which is really what's going to be needed to battle Atom.
And since the A9 has announced by ARM quite some time ago, this posting should have been written then not now.
In reality, it's not clear which niche the A5 is going to occupy. It's probably going to be useful in lower end smartphones only, since current higher end models are already using the faster A8.
Looks like the Cortex-A5 has 50% more performance while using 1/3rd the power of the current generation ARM11 found in the iPhone. As a game developer this makes me hopeful that we'll see cellphones as a gaming platform without sacrificing useful battery life.
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Its the Wifi/WWAN chips, and LCD screen which suck up the power, not the CPU. ARM is cool and all (pun intended) but if you make an ARM based Dell Mini 9, you're not going to end up with uber battery life, when you're on Wifi and running the screen bright.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
ARM talked about the Cortex A9 (the one I'd actually like to have in a netbook) over two years ago. There is still nothing you can get that actually has one in it. Yay something to replace the ARM11. Hope it actually gets used.
Microsoft can really change things around if they decided to port Win7 to ARM, instead of offering only Windows CE.
But considering monopolies, I wouldn't expect that any time soon.
People generally use Windows on PCs because they have x86 Windows software they need to run.
How many people have a stack of ARM software to run on ARM Windows? If you're going to need new software anyway, why would anyone in their right mind pick Windows to run it on?
It would be best for Microsoft if ARM on the laptop/desktop was a complete flop. Sure, if what others say is true about the portability of Windows internals, Microsoft could release a version of Windows 7 for ARM. But really, what would be the point?
The biggest strength of Windows is running Win32 apps, and they are all compiled for Win/x86. Microsoft would have to provide development tools that encourage developers to make ARM binaries along side x86 binaries to even have a chance at making it happen.
Look at the average computer user's software catalogue, you will find many apps (and games) that were bought long ago and would cost money to upgrade to a potential ARM port if the company that made them are sill even in business. Those programs are never going to be ported to Win/ARM. Then there are all the drivers for last years peripheral hardware (assuming that the laptop's hardware is supported) that won't work.
I don't believe they can do what Apple did either. Apple was able to move to x86 from PPC because the control the hardware and moved their whole product line to it (killing PPC market). Any developers that wanted to stay in business had to port to x86. MS would be introducing a side product that would have a very small fraction of the bigger x86 customer base.
In the end all that Win/ARM has left is the few open source apps that choose to build an installer for it and the familiarity of the Windows desktop environment.
It would be in their interest to do everything in their power to make sure this doesn't ever get off the ground. We will have to wait and see what their next move will be.
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MIPS rather than ARM, but these things are cheap and look pretty useful.
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http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/10/arm-fills-out-cpu-lineup-with-cortex-a5.ars
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/21/arm-announces-cortex-a5-for-the-next-15-billion-cellphones-and-mids.aspx
As a developer for products based on ARM9 and ARM11 SoCs the A5 is targeted squarely at me. I'm not sure why it's of any interest to slashdot. But it does appear to be a cheaper ARM11 (to the point of making the ARM9 obsolete) but with some of the features of the A8.
While smartphones are all sexy and exciting, the staple for cell phone manufacturers are the simple ordinary phones. If they can cram more features into the same cheap phone it usually means they can sell more of them. Think of it as competing in the free phone market. Where the styling and brand and features are the only way to differentiate yourself rather than price. The customer is just going to pick 1-4 of the plan bundled phones.
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I hope ARM beats x86 merely because x86 is an ancient technology that has a pile of limitations preventing the industry from moving forward as fast as it otherwise might. Previous attempts to move away from x86 failed due to the absence of software to run on the new machines. It's all fine and dandy if Microsoft write NT for the Dec Alpha and Itanium, but if there are no apps, it's pointless.
Actually there is a way for this to work. Microsoft ports Windows to Arm. Most of the time the processor is in kernel mode so that makes a difference. Now running user mode code through an emulator which is basically a big switch statement will not deliver a decent performance level. Microsoft could port their Office applications to ARM.
ARM have actually quite some experience of running non native instruction sets - Jazelle is mode where the ARM runs 80% of Java byte code natively. Basically there is an extra pipeline stage that decodes Java byte code into native ARM instructions.
Now surprisingly this doesn't give particularly good performance
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mlam/archive/2007/02/when_is_softwar_1.html
It's actually better to JIT the code. ARM have actually have a second generation produce that uses a mixture of Ahead or Time compilation to native code for the Java platform, DBX aka Jazelle for rarely used code and JIT for the hotspots that are executed frequently. In practice I'm told that you could get by with purely AOT for the platform and JIT for the rest, except that application startup will seem sluggish.
x86 Java VMs have to do this because there is no equivalent of Jazelle DBX there. Now ARM could do something similar for netbooks. Still that is not without problems. Notebook processors, whether x86 or ARM are optimized for power consumption, not performance. Notebooks are also very short of memory - you basically can't afford to keep both the native ARM code and the original x86 code in memory. Actually there isn't much disk space either.
So it's far from clear whether an ARM that can perform as fast as an Atom on native code - i.e. a faster processor that the fastest Cortex A9 - would be able to run x86 code as fast as an Atom. Given that the performance of an Atom running x86 code is pretty awful, that makes me wonder if you could sell them even if the battery life is much better. Even that is doubtful actually - Atom is pretty power efficient but current Atom chipsets are not. It's likely that Intel will fix that problem if Arm based notebooks start to become popular though. They'll cut the price of Atoms too. At that point ARM doesn't really have any advantage over x86.
Of course I say x86 but most x86 chips will be running x86-64 code by then. ARM doesn't have a 64 bit extension either.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Acorn Computers tried in the 80's and 90's. The ARM processors were faster than their x86 rivals, and OS was years ahead of the likes of Windows and Mac OS. As you say, some monopolistic software company would never allow ARM to take off. Lucky ARM is now the most common architecture on the market.
It's sad x86 is still here, the platform should have been done away with years ago.
You have to expect pedantry, this is Slashdot.
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http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
http://promos.asus.com/US/1000HE/ASUS/index.html
Two netbooks with long battery lives.
There are smaller devices available, which might be nice for lugging around - but keep in mind that the screen and Wifi are still big power draws, so the bigger the batteries the better.
I've said this before. Aside from games, very little legacy software is CPU-bound. A modern emulator can get somewhere between 50-80% of the host native speed on emulated software, and not all of the code that is running will be emulated. Take a look at a typical Windows application. Most spend at least 50% of their CPU time in system library code. A half-decent emulator will just pass these calls to the native versions of the libraries, so for half of the CPU time you are running native code. A lot of recent Windows applications use some .NET code. This will be JIT compiled to ARM, so it's also native. The remaining code will be emulated, but the number of programs for which this will be too slow is very small.
Oh, and most people do not have a stack of x86 Windows software. They have one or two Windows programs that they depend on (or, at least, would not abandon without a lot of persuasion). You can bet that an ARM version of Windows would be accompanied by an ARM version of Office, and if MS really wanted to push it then they'd give a free download of the ARM binaries to people who owned the x86 version.
In terms of C programming environment, x86 and ARM are very similar. C does a terrible job at abstracting the differences between SPARC64 and x86 (for example), but it does a lot better at abstracting the differences between ARM and x86. Most software, unless it uses inline assembly or SSE / MMX intrinsics, is a straight recompile. The SSE and MMX intrinsics can be implemented in terms of NEON or slower scalar operations, so the code will compile, even if it doesn't get the same performance.
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And it's full of misinformation:
1) The A5 is not meant to take on Atom. The A9 is.
2) The A5 is not architecturally identical to the A9. The A9 is an in-order, multi-issue core. The A5 is an out-of-order, single-issue core. The only thing similar is it has the Cortex A-series ISA.
What the A5 is is a CPU that completely obliterates the ARM11-derived cores, used in everything from NVIDIA Tegra to the Nintendo DS. It's an update of the ISA, and a more capable core, with better thermals. That's it. Whereas every low-end smartphone now has the same damn QualComm ARM11-based core, in a year, they'll all have the A5.
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They're not saying "it's identical", they're saying "architecturally, it's identical", which is to say that any differences are non-architectural (i.e. performance, power consumption, etc).
Perhaps a car analogy would help...
If I say that color-wise my Ford Pinto is identical to my Ferrari, all I'm saying is identical is the color!