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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.
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.
'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,' McAllister writes"
I'm sold.
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
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"
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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?:
$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....
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.
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.
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.
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
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