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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."
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.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
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
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"
There are a few things; but mostly obscure or dubiously suitable. The Touchbook (not toughbook) still has a touch of beta about it; but you can actually order one. The Sharp PC-Z1 has a bad case of obscure and japanese; but otherwise exists. You can also get a number of super cheap ARM based netbooks from various random Chinese outfits. Trouble is, most of those are basically the WinCE PDAs of a couple of years back, stuck into a netbook shell. Truly dire specs are the order of the day.
I'm frankly a bit surprised. You can get beagleboards and shivaplugs, with pretty credible ARM based specs, for not all that much even in small quantities, and ARM based smartphones are all over the place, so the field seems surprisingly thin on the netbook side.
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
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
Had you read the article, you'd see where all the chips come from, because it's summarized right below that line on the first page.
Hint: if you have an electronic device that is NOT a desktop or laptop computer, the odds are somewhere around 99 out of 100 that it's using one or more ARM chips. This includes, but is not limited to, cell phones, GPSes, home routers, calculators, and portable gaming devices like the DS.
Apple's iGadgets are ARM-based and run a variant of OS/X. Of course, ARM also has WinCE, so that kind of balances the karma.
$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.
Apple's iGadgets are ARM-based and run a variant of OS/X [sic]. Of course, ARM also has WinCE, so that kind of balances the karma.
It's not a variant. It is the same code that runs on an iMac or MacBook, just trimmed back (e.g., no FireWire or SATA drivers).
The Windows CE has barely any relation to Windows Vista or 7. It's two different code bases, whereas with OS X it's the same code base.
This doesn't really make much of a difference to the end user in most cases, but keeping one code base bug free and thoroughly tested is generally less of a hassle than keep more than one code base the same.
ARM has ARM mode, Thumb Mode, Jazelle Mode, and ThumbEE mode. FOUR instruction sets. Multiple different floating point unit specs that are incompatible with each other. Crazy page table formats. The architecture spec is over 2000 pages long, for pete's sake!
ARM has a more uniform encoding, but actually has a large number of instructions, and does crazy things like put a rotating shifter in the load address path. Not good from a modern pipeline perspective. You can get around it by breaking up the operation, but then you're getting into complex instruction decode like x86.
I'm not saying ARM is bad. I'm just saying they have no magic. You're right, Intel doesn't either (though they do have manufacturing and an army of engineers to do hand-layout). Nor does MIPS or PPC. But MIPS does make energy efficient cores, roughly as good as ARM. They haven't been as popular as ARM, but they're around.
And I'm certainly not saying x86 is great -- it's certainly not. I don't think it's quite as bad as people make it out to be...
Look, I wish the architecture made a difference. For one, we'd all probably be using Alpha. That was a great, elegant, beautiful processor architecture. For another, I'd have much better job prospects. But it doesn't matter that much. Scalar architectures are scalar architectures. Instruction set makes some difference, but not very much.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Waiting for disk access.