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ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."
Still, competitors claim it's mostly 'armless.
To tie in with an earlier article on the front page: the Tesla Roadster's battery pack management system is ARM-based. It's built around a Philips-LPC2294 with 32 megs of ram and a 1GB U3 Cruzer Micro USB flash drive, running Linux kernel 2.6.11.8-1.3.0.
Look at me, still talking while there's science to do.
Just release MAME for a popular ARM motherboard.
I am yet to see any. If they only at least produced one for each article declaring ARM ubiquitous winner at low-end netbooks....
839*929
The fastest processor is not always the best for all applications. Certainly most desktops these days have more than enough power for those that browse the web. So why not save the cost of the big overpowered processor (and the big overpowered OS) where possible.
And in embedded designs the fastest processor is almost always an overdesign. All those kiosks for cash machines, ticket sales and cash registers do not need the latest fast processors. The do fine with a slower processors.
There is certainly a big market for an OS that does not tax the processor and is able to provide the minimal OS functionality dedicate application devices need.
As it happens, that would have been a perfectly cogent headline a few years back, had we been bothering to pay attention.
'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market.
In my opinion, it's the opposite. One thing Windows doesn't have is ARM support (besides Windows CE). Manufacturers are already seeing the advantage of ARM, and the lack of Windows support isn't a deal breaker in every segment. I have a SheevaPlug which is an ARM device, and while most major Linux distributions have support for the architecture, Microsoft just has the one, and it isn't even a consideration for most users of the device.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,'
Who wants windows running on low-end computers anyway? You'd be waiting minutes for your web-pages to load.
Ubuntu has the arm stuff working now, so I want a laptop to install it on. It would keep me from lugging around a big notebook.
It's interesting they don't talk about the palm pre with armel-linux.
I've rooted my pre and I can run stuff like ssh or telnet from it, but it would be cool to have something with a larger screen and a keyboard.
The problem with ARM is that it will perpetually be in the "gadget" category until it can run some "real" OSes. Yes, there is Linux but on popular Linux distros aimed for the general public (such as Ubuntu) ARM is only slightly supported and is still very much a "second class" port compared to the x86 and x86-64 versions. But really what will kill it is more "innovative" UIs for lower-end laptops don't look like "real" computers in the eyes of the consumer. If it looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_netbook_remix_9.04.png it is a gadget, compared to if it looks likehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_XP_SP3.png , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Snow_Leopard_Desktop.png or even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-2.28.png
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
" 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes"
I'm sold.
90*60*60*24*365= about 2.8 billion
Is that for real or is it a typo?
February: Shifting Apps To ARM Chips Could Save Laptop Batteries
September: ARM Attacks Intel's Netbook Stranglehold
3 days ago: ARM Launches Cortex-A5 Processor, To Take On Atom
Doesn't mean it won't happen, of course, but still unclear if it will, either...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Windows CE and Windows Mobile both support ARM.
There might not be "full-featured Windows" on ARM, but saying there's no Windows at all on ARM is just ignorance.
Comment of the year
Oh please!
It's not a stealth thing at all. The low power SoC market has always been ARMs. It's AMD (Geode... and then Intel's Atom) who decided to bring x86 to the low power market. If anything the article should focus on the troubles ARM is likely to face in the near future: unless RISC can continue to compete for price (aggressively), I doubt that adding more pipelines will make the general purpose platform developers happy - RISC bottlenecks will always be bottlenecks; x86 can simply gun for greater clock speed.
IMO Transmeta had it right: very long instruction words (which ultimately do 'everything'). Unfortunately it came 10 years too soon and no-one was ready because we didn't know "what" we wanted from a clock (or half clock etc if you're talking ARM...).
VLIW will be back soon enough, but I worry that it wont be the right place for ARM.
(nb: I am an ARM fanboy, having 'matured' in an ARM sponsored undergrad lab. it upsets me as much as anyone that ARM haven't tried to reinvent the wheel using the cash from their recent market dominance)
Matt
Is this the End of Intel AND Microsoft?
Intel doesn't care what OS runs on their chip. I think their Linux distro is Moblin? As long as they have orders, they don't care what the consumer uses.
Microsoft doesn't care because this is still a niche and they can string along the OEM's with XP forever. When it starts blowing up into a category all its own, I think they'll do something to encourage OEM's to use Intel chips and keep XP out there. Microsoft relies on the fact Linux still doesn't have anything overtly special on XP that the average Dell buyer wants.
Please don't flame me bro. I say these things as a long-time Debian user who gets the differences.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I just purchased a Wikireader, which uses a low power Epson S1C33E07 60 mhz RISC processor, not unlike an ARM. It will run for 90 hours on 2 aaa batteries. And that includes a 240 * 208 capacitive touch screen.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Far too stealthily for my taste! Let's get lots of netbooks/notebooks with ARM so we have some choice!
Ok I was wrong there that was an Atom not an ARM notebook.
This is ARM
http://armnews.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/dell-announce-notebook-with-arm-processor/
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/arm/xmame-sdl/download
I've run Debian ARM distro on an NSLU2. Works great.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
That really depends I think on how netbooks mature.
Is a netbook a small weak notebook or a big iPod Touch?
Take a look as the WindowsMobile vs iPhone battle.
WIndowsMobile had years of time in the market before the iPhone and it had a lot more applications than the iPhone. The iPhone blew it out of the water in just a few short years.
If the ARM baised netbook folks get their act together then yes Arm could move up into the netbook area. From there it could move up into the Notebook and even Desktop space.
You may think that could never happen but the X86 went from a toy to push up into the workstation and server market. You even have some X86 style systems pushing well into the Mini/Mainframe area.
Windows and X86 has done so well because it is cheap and fast enough.
Now ARM is heading into cheap and fast enough.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It didn't monopolise the market though, and may not have done so well had it not had other advantages (i.e. it was cheap). Camcorders had phono composite connectors so it wasn't that hard to convert other formats to VHS.
Similarly, all people really want is to be able to transfer documents seamlessly. They don't care so much if different applications run on different machines. You can already get Windows CE on ARM, and MS would have no objection to producing a Word compatible word processor for CE if demand was sufficient.
As far as the application is concerned, the only difference between Windows CE and Windows NT is the APIs exposed. The calling sequence is the same, the library structure is the same, the IDE is the same, the Pocket PC emulator on Windows works by recompiling the same source to x86 instead of ARM code and linking to a different set of libraries.
Given the variety of APIs exposed to applications running under Linux on ARM (two different Java runtimes, as well as the native UNIX APIs and X11), the differences to the application between Windows CE on my iPaq and Windows on my desktop are less than the difference between Android and Familiar.
Everyone knows it costs an ARM and a LEG.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
I've run it on an NSLU2. Worked perfectly. They've got desktop packages for it an everything.
Ubuntu is has been standing on the shoulders of giants (Debian) for a long time. It's time for you to go straight to the source.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm writing this on a netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 and it just works (TM). It would work just as well on an Arm processor.
In the real world, I'm sure that Microsoft will be able to roll out Windows Mobile on Arm one microsecond after Dell tell them that their new 7 inch communications centre and ebook reader will have to run an OS supplied by Canonical.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
ARM lacks OS/X in addition to Windows.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Nobody gives a hoot about how " high performance applications " do on netbooks.
No, they look like smartphones on steroids. And as these lower-end units will basically be just that - with 3 and 3.5G, phone connectivity, GPS, Bluetooth and wireless, and connecting seamlessly to the back at the ranch desktop - they will be seen as a step up from phones, not down from laptops.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That's not a netbook and it has both an ARM and an Intel CPU.
Mada mada dane.
docs especially, but even apps don't have to be difficult to move back and forth. JPEGs, .doc/docx/odf are architecture independent. Java/.Net and fat binaries exist for apps, as well as cross compilation. Any good OS would provide all of this.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
That's 7,776,000 chips/day. I find that more than hard to believe.
ATI has used VLIW in its GPU for a few years now. It is beating nVidia quite readily.
Yes, 2 billion units a year. Most of the mobile phones in the world have at least one ARM core in them, which adds up to an awful lot.
I meant "roll out the latest Windows Mobile on Arm..."
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
My SheevaPlug arrives via Fedex in about 30 minutes :).
It's going to be like Christmas in a few hours. The Fedex box will be ripped apart strewn across the living room as will be the product packaging. I'll plug it straight into the wall and Ethernet, realize it doesn't do much. Break out the 8GB SD card and not sleep tonight.
Even if there was a Windows port, if you cannot run the vast set of Windows applications a port is useless. You would be better off running a Linux distro since it effortlessly comes with most categories of apps people need, because said apps are open source and usually can be recompiled fairly easily. If most Windows applications were targeted at .NET by now I could see a point, but they are not.
WIndowsMobile had years of time in the market before the iPhone and it had a lot more applications than the iPhone. The iPhone blew it out of the water in just a few short years.
Let me preface this with a disclaimer. I never really liked WinMo, and I can't wait till I can buy a cheap, fast ARM netbook to run linux on!
However, WinMo did not come about in the era of ubiquitous high-speed internet and wifi, large hosted storage and applications ('cloud' crap). I used to own an HP Jornada 320lx (precursor to netbook- a palmtop)
WinMo however sucked because of poor app compatibility. The portable versions of word and excel were pretty useless. Nobody uses these types of apps regularly on an iPhone. The iPhone is largely (but not solely) a toy used for music, video playback (youtube) and web browsing. When WinMo was relevant, processing power and internet availability were not up to it, and so the only people buying it were using it primarily for Calendaring, Portable Office, and the like, and it wasn't all that great at it, as I mentioned before. As such, the usability, simplicity and broad appeal of the iPhone is simply not there.
The scene is very different, it is hard to say just what will happen.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
how much did it cost you? been looking at getting one myself.
I would love a full-size laptop (13" screen or better) with an ARM chip. Long battery life, full size keyboard and display. It'd be great.
The only things I can find with ARM chips these days are tiny netbooks. The largest I've found is only 10".
Anyone know any "big" ARM laptops?
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
$99 + $17 shipping, no tax. There's only 1 supplier in the US at the moment.
And for slashdotters, the devkit is MUCH better than PogoPlug or other 'final' products.
USB -> JTAG adapter. If you fubar it, you should be able to unfubar it.
SD Slot: 8GB card will act as the boot drive. Saving wear on the internal 512MB memory and allowing me to add a ton of other stuff.
I plan on it being my IRC, AIM, Torrent, Usenet, XBMC Serving, HVAC Controlling, 1-Wire Weather Sensing, 5W (max) box.
For kicks I'll probably do some mencoder benchmarks.
FYI: http://computingplugs.com/ is hosted on a Plug. It survived the last Slashdotting. The guy was using it to stream a TV show and it was still only using 40% CPU. He only unplugged it when he didn't know he was getting slashdotted and thought it was acting weird.
My SheevaPlug arrives via Fedex in about 30 minutes :).
how much did it cost you? been looking at getting one myself.
Well, if he doesn't answer in the next 17 minutes, we know we're not gonna hear anything for a few days....
"ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year"
Really? Is this some kind of government math? That's 2.84 billion chips shipped in 2009.
decent price, nice bonus with the jtag adapter too, I still have a ghetto one I made for parallel port when I was playing with cpld's.
Be careful about assuming causation here. It might have easily been that VHS-C sounded familiar to people who had VHS, and they went with what they knew. Video8 might have been just as successful if the names had simply been reversed.
Neither Microsoft nor Intel had it. The perfect monopoly was always the duo. Both of them. Hence it was called Wintel by many in the industry. And AFAIR Intel was really up there with Microsoft when it came to playing hardball with the competition.
The Intel has a monopoly on high-end CPUs right now while AMD is pretty much alone in delivering band-for-the-buck budget CPUs. Now ARM is trying to take on the really cheap budget segment? That is bad news for AMD, far worse news for them than it is for the Intel empire.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
But WinMo is still with us. The Treo and other WinMo smartphones did have internet data before the iPhone.
What I think was the big advance was the App store. It made it easy to find, buy and sell software for your device. I do agree that it is hard to say what will happen but I hope that we get something more innovative than just little Windows machines running on Intel Atoms.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes. 100% support from some random dude on the internet. Try running mythtv on it including commflag... post your results somewhere. Others have.
http://www.google.com/search?q=mythtv+sheevaplug&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Surprising nobody's mentioned Acorn Computers, the British company that actually gave us ARM. At the time Acorn simply used ARM to compete with Intel chips, in 1995 when the StrongARM Risc PC came out it was 233MHz, where as the latest Intel Pentium was 200Mhz or so. The advantages of the RISC architecture were also clearly present, with a higher MIPS rate. But of course the Windows beast could not be slain, and ARM went into portable devices, and became the most successful legacy of the Acorn era.
Acorn is still around today in the form of Castle, Advantage Six and others, but it lives only really through enthusiast support. With ARM changing their focus to low power consumption (the reason they were able to step into the portable market in the first place), speed became less of an issue. The fastest ARM processors today are only 806mhz (in the form of the XScale), and so building an Acorn today that was realistically comparable to a modern PC is simply impossible.
I'm just here hoping somebody ports Risc OS Open to x86, Apple managed it after all.
There is an AI Touchbook review on the net somewhere in which the reviewer measured the draw from the wall. With the battery fully charged, it draws ~4 watts, and ~8 or 10 watts while charging. The omap3 consumes less electricity than the atom alone, both under full load. And the omap is on a 65nm process. All the fab technology Intel has isn't going to help them compete on power consumption or cost of manufacturing.
Yes, ARM marketing (notoriously overoptimistic) says they will have a 2GHz A9 in 28nm, relatively high performance process.
But A9, in terms of efficiency, is not substantially better than where Atom will be. That shouldn't be surprising. They're both scalar architectures. They both have a little less than 15 useful registers. They both have similarly deep pipelines. They both rely on branch prediction for performance. Neither company has magic, it's not surprising that they're similar on the curve of performance / efficiency.
Put another way, your instruction encoding doesn't really buy you all that much.
Now ARM has some lower-end cores (ARM9, ARM11, Sparrow/CoretexA5) that are much more energy efficient than Atom. But they're also much lower performance.
But this is how ARM's marketing plays it out: we have super-efficient cores (ARM9)! We have higher-performance cores (Theoretically, A9)! You think that ARM cores are somehow both high performance and much more efficient than Atom will be in the same technology... but this will probably turn out to be false.
Put another way... are MIPS or PowerPC cores dramatically more efficient than x86 at similar performance levels? No. They have most of the same architecture benefits that ARM does... more, in many ways, because they have about double the number of useful registers. But they're on basically the same efficiency/performance curve as everyone else.
You could probably do an x86 implementation that was similar to ARM11/A5... no floating point, no SSE, just the basic 386 instruction set. Give it a short pipeline and turn down the frequency, and it will probably compete relatively well on energy efficiency with those low-end ARMs.
The thing I DON'T understand... why does ARM marketing get an article on slashdot every week or so?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
You know, that's what's going to happen when this whole ARM vs. Core rivalry thing gets taken just a step too far. But don't say you weren't warned.
If you sell people a 'computer' they'll expect it to run windows or at least run all their 'PC' software, but if you sell it as a PDA or a smartphone, or a netgadget thingy then they won't expect it to run 'PC' software and so won't mind that it doesn't.
eg. the iPhone is widely populate.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Dollars to doughnuts, you can bet that Microsoft is working on porting Windows 7 and Office, as well as their various other software packages, to ARM processors. With ARM breeching the 1GHz mark and fully capable 3d acceleration, they're at least on par with an Intel chipseted Atom, and in many ways vastly superior. With most people preferring "as cheap as possible" computers - because they'll do the job just fine - things are sure to move towards ARM.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
JTAG adaptor is included?
That's great, most outfits charge $99+ for that alone.
Sent from my PDP-11
He said "oh right I can't", which is accurate. YOU can buy one, but HE can't. Not until he cleans that basement, that is. It looks like a bomb went off in there! Once it's nice and tidy, then mom will let him.
But for the moment it's a true statement. Until he gets the pizza boxes out to the curb anyways.
Should have bought a Fritzbox instead...
One thing is sure; whatever platform ends up dominating the netbook space really needs some work done in terms of optimizing the user interface for smaller screens, becuase, as it stands, some software is completely unusable (without plugging in an external monitor) due to windows being designed to be too tall. I think this is one space where Microsoft could potentially have done a lot more than they have; linux is also a mixed bag, but at least Intel and Canonical are working on the problem.
I've been a fan of the ARM for years, ever since I encountered them in high school in Acorn Archimedes computers. The instruction set was so elegant compared to the i486 and Motorola 68k series chips that it was up against at the time. Flat memory model, none of this segment:offset stuff on the intel platform and a really well-thought-out streamlined set of core instructions.
I've recently got my hands on an ARM platform, and compared to what I was playing with in school, this thing is light-years ahead. 600HMz ARM, 256MB RAM, 256MB NAND Flash, GPU with ~10M polys/sec, SD Card Interface, High-speed USB 2.0 etc etc. It's all on a board that's 3" square, draws something like 1.75W at full tilt (it is powered from one of it's USB ports) and costs $150USD. No moving parts, not even a fan. 100% solid state.
I'm currently running Ubuntu on it, but there are other systems like Angstrom and QNX that will happily boot on it as well. Boot the OS off SD card, swap them out to switch operating environments and it's all good.
http://automatica.com.au/blog/2009/10/the-beagleboard/
http://beagleboard.org/
I've got no affiliation with Texas Instruments or anything like that, I'm just a happy customer who is amazed at the power of this platform, it's low cost, low power usage and flexibility opens the doors to doing so many things with it...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
The other difference to the application, of course, is that the app isn't compiled for ARM instructions, they're compiled for x86 instructions.
So? The RPMs you download from Fedora aren't compiled for ARM either, and packages that are have had to be pretty extensively modified to be usable on a handheld screen. When I ran Familiar on my iPaq there was very little software other than command line stuff that was really usable... that's why I flashed it back to Windows CE.
Don't forget Chrome OS from Google. I have high hopes for Chrome OS if for no other reason than it drops X windows. Yes that will mean that some software will not work but I wonder how many will be left out if they port GTK and QT to the new video system? If needed I am sure that it would be possible to add an X-Windows layer to the system similar to what Apple does on the Mac.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's internal, there is a mini-usb connector on the side which has a USB to serial and JTAG converter chip behind it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
What is this unique licensing model, how is it different from standard chip licensing models, and why is Arm's success due to it?
Don't manufacturers just pay some fee for every chip? Where does this license come into play?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
XP itself is perfectly usable on 1024x600 (the most common netbook resoloution afaict), heck with the classic theme it's interface is much the same as windows 9x and I ran that at 640x480 for a while until I could afford a new monitor.
The problem is app vendors became used to the minimum common screen resoloution being 1024x768 and developed apps based on that assumption, a couple of offenders that immediately spring to mind are iTunes and the lego mindstorms nxt software. There isn't really a whole lot MS can do about this.
This was one of the reasons I waited and splashed out the extra cash to get a HP mini 5101 with a 10 inch 1366x768 screen.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
ReactOS is a Windows clone currently being ported to ARM
http://www.reactos.org/en/newsletter_37.html
So what does ARM need?
'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market.
What a bunch of tripe! Microsoft bullied all the laptop manufacturers into upping their harware specs and offering XP. They shot themselves in the foot doing this as it needlessly inflates the price of the 'netbook'.
This is likely an opportunity for ARM to flood the market with supper cheap linux netbooks.
He's not assuming. When I worked retail, the first question out of a customer's mouth was, 'Will this work in my vcr?" or "Is there an adapter for my VHS-C/Sony 8/hi8/digital8?" I had several that had Sony 8/hi8/digital8 cameras swear up and down that there had to be a vcr cassette adapter for their camera's tapes--For them I showed them the VHC-C adapter and told them "It wont work, but you can buy it anyways if you dont belive me."
Not a one of the customers knew the difference between the formats. They knew SONY as a brand name and often wanted SONY. I had some ask for SONY cameras with VHS-C after explaining the differences. We often steered joe customers to VHS-C in herds because we knew they wanted simplicity. Throw some batteries in the adapter (or not if it is geared), shove the VHS-C in and shove in the vcr.. done. Any other format required cabling the camera to the tv, or vcr or dvd burner or pc and fat finger mashing the tiny buttons on the camera to play the video back.
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.