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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
The article says that a port of Windows could be important to the future of ARM, and that Microsoft has no plans to do such a port. (Does anybody remember when Windows NT was supposed to be ported to DEC alpha, HP PA-RISC, and IBM PowerPC?). But why, exactly, does a consumer want Windows? For Excel? Word?
Seems like Linux will fill the bill with a browser, maybe a PostScript app and a media player. Text editing isn't such an elaborate thing these days. And only a few people even know what to do with Excel.
Sounds like ARM is to Intel the way that Linux is to Microsoft; a threat coming from the low-end.
Speaking of apps, seems like iPhone and the like are coming up with apps that don't run on Windows. Do we really need, or even want, Windows any more?
So, what we need is a netbook with ARM, running Linux, to serve as a model for future application development.
Best regards.
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.
The article says that a port of Windows could be important to the future of ARM, and that Microsoft has no plans to do such a port. (Does anybody remember when Windows NT was supposed to be ported to DEC alpha, HP PA-RISC, and IBM PowerPC?).
Thing is, there may not be such public plans today, but don't think it would take all that long should MS change its mind. NT was designed from ground up to be portable; heck, its early builds ran on Alpha before they did on x86. And it wasn't "supposed" to be ported to MIPS and Alpha and PowerPC - it was ported to all those platforms, and successfully ran there, though that configuration was never popular, and so support was dropped in W2K.
In fact, a version of NT running on PowerPC still exists today - it's the nameless OS inside Xbox 360...
Software for a hypothetical Windows ARM port is a more interesting topic. Of course, you can be sure that most Microsoft software - most importantly, IE and Office - would be ported right away. For other stuff, it may not be as hard as it seems - it's not the 90s anymore, and you don't see many people hand-coding asm for performance, or using dirty architecture-specific tricks. Windows went through multi-architecture support pains when x64 and Itanium were introduced - and it was a lot of headache back then, because of all the bad code that assumed sizeof(void*)==sizeof(int) etc - so now the tools are there to handle a transition (C++ compiler will give warnings for nonportable constructs, for example), code for most products that are still being developed had been cleaned up, etc. It's still not quite just a recompile away, but it's close enough.
Which means that pretty much every application that is actively developed for Windows today, you'd probably see ported to ARM in short time should there be demand: Flash, Quicken, new game releases...
ARM is the sort of thing that'll blindside Microsoft the way netbooks recently did. Cheap XP licenses for netbooks came about specifically because there were a bunch of popular linux netbooks, after which point MS decided they really needed to grab that new market and/or bump linux out of a market. That was the netbook panic point for MS, and if there end up being lots of cheap long-battery-life ARM netbooks running linux, that'll be the next panic point for MS. That'll be when we see an ARM windows.
Intel's panic point comes after ARM windows, because if people get used to those ARM windows netbooks, we'll start seeing full fledged ARM windows laptops. If Intel gets totally asleep at the wheel we may even see full fledged ARM windows desktops.
I would expect, though, that sometime before that Intel would try for a cross licensing deal with ARM - because once there's an ARM windows, it would be easier for intel to start building up on the existing ARM stuff than it would be for them to get x86 all the way down into ARM's stronghold. The atom isn't managing it, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.
While what you say is a valid point indeed, if Intel sees MS supporting ARM; it will immediately (and with much better success) come up with a much less power hungry Linux and make a separate processor for that. All the lock-ins such as ACPI etc which MS and Intel worked hand in glove will come crashing suddenly, when Intel's blood is running cold.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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