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Microsoft Signs License With ARM
G143 and several other readers let us know that Microsoft has signed a licensing deal with ARM. "Microsoft signed an agreement with the UK-based ARM, giving Microsoft access to some of the chip designer's intellectual property. The two companies have worked together since 1997, but Ian Drew, ARM's EVP of marketing, said this is the first time Microsoft has become a licensee of ARM's architecture, a move which will allow Microsoft to design their own microarchitecture. Other licensees include Qualcomm, Marvell, and Infineon. Neither company would reveal the cost of the license. Speculation about Microsoft's intentions includes wondering whether the company is taking aim at the iPad, or perhaps looking to produce a next-generation Xbox without the 360's heat problems."
Embrace, extend,... thrive! I guess.
-- Cheers!
Is the soon to be announced licensing with And A Leg Technologies.
The CPU is in fact quite a minor part of the iPad. It is an Apple device, so the consumer's main focus will be on the affixed logo, and nothing but the logo. Frankly, Microsoft just doesn't have the right logo to appeal to the hipster/trustfund baby/neckbeard market that Apple has taken control of. No matter what CPU Microsoft uses, their devices won't be adopted by the iPad crowd as long as the logo isn't an Apple logo.
... I shouldn't ask if it'll be running Linux?
The first two things that come to mind when putting Microsoft and ARM together are Windows Phone 7 Phones and portable gaming systems, not slate tablets and full-on consoles.
this kin finally be a way for MS to kill the iphone ? no...
I wonder what Intel's response is, especially since Microsoft is such a long-time partner. Apple went with A4, and here Microsoft is licensing ARM too. The emerging market is mobile computing, so what's the future for Intel? Surely, they can't live on x86 forever, and Atom currently isn't competitive with ARM when it comes to battery life.
Microsoft just wants a relation$hip with ARM so they can influence them before a huge wave of low cost, linux friendly PC's, netbooks, you name it hits the market.
I think it's interesting how the article speculates about innovation when to a large extent Microsoft M&A's are aimed at stifling competition. Seriously, when is the last time MS came up with a new idea?
The ARM core is so widely licensed that it would be hard to find a modern handheld device that does NOT contain one.
"Many semiconductor or IC design firms hold ARM licenses; Analog Devices, Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Energy Micro, Faraday Technology, Freescale, Fujitsu, Intel (through its settlement with Digital Equipment Corporation), IBM, Infineon Technologies, Nintendo, NXP Semiconductors, OKI, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and VLSI are some of the many companies who have licensed the ARM in one form or another" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_licensees
IMHO, this is a non-story.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
In before the "What's that giant thing in your pocket?" "That's what she said!" engine gets warm.
I wonder what MS has in mind. You don't have to be an ARM licensee to use ARM chips in your designs. For large enough orders, there are already a number of outfits that will implement customized ARM SoCs with your choice of functional blocks, and either fab them or farm the design out to somebody else, on a variety of processes. For smaller orders, there are even more outfits who have ARM SoCs, in a variety of common configurations, in stock and ready to go. Lead times pretty much limited by Fedex for small orders, some weeks for big ones. Buying an actual license seems to indicate Serious Business of some sort.
Without any particular background in chip design, what does MS want to do that they couldn't do at off-the-shelf prices just by calling one of the existing ARM licensees and asking for a quote? For the sake of my faith in their executive team, they couldn't be doing this just because Apple is, could they?
What will it be? Massive arrays of power optimized ARMs supporting a CLR environment as the future of Windows Server technologies? Xbox720 is going to be ARM based with some sort of secret sauce?
The folks at Apple understand what people want and understand how people work. They are also unscrupulous. It is dangerous to underestimate the power of this combination. It is easy to ridicule them, but it is to our detriment if we do recognize it and confront it.
They'll try to built a Ironman suit.
The fact that there are a large number of people who love their Apple i%DEVICE% is very telling. I meet damn few people who feel that way about MS products.
Obviously, because Apple is targeting niche market and also labels themselves to the hardware (and pay Intel etc so they can remove their logos).
In the normal PC world the cpu is from different manufacturer, the memory is, everything in the hardware is. People most likely just remembers something along the lines of their computer being a Dell-computer, because that's what the combination is sold at. Why would casual people be so interested about the single parts that make it? They just want to do their thing, that's it.
I went out to lunch with an MS software engineer a couple of weeks ago. He said that he wanted the ham sandwich. I said that I was considering the grilled cheese. He said it sounded good but had his heart set on the ham sandwich. After a brief pause he slammed his menu down and proudly blurted out, "Fuck it! I want a ham sandwich with cheese and grill the whole god-damned thing."
It took a short time for me to catch my breath, but I quickly saw the brilliance. Surely, it was the best idea to come out of Redmond since the quick turn around on the Vista service pack called "Windows 7."
Microsoft is still lost since their tactic of "give the people something that kinda looks the same but cheaper" didn't work for the Zune.
Was it the right or the left?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Speculation about Microsoft's intentions includes wondering whether the company is taking aim at the iPad, or perhaps looking to produce a next-generation Xbox without the 360's heat problems.
Seriously? Microsoft has been chasing the smartphone market for a while now, but keeps having performance issues. They want a custom designed chip for their next gen smartphone.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
It is pretty simple, if you wanna to sell 100-200 devices, then you just buy the ARM-CPU from another manufacturer. But if you wanna to sell 1-2 millions, then you will save a lot of money by simply buying the right to make the hardware and if you are good enough, even the right to change/modify it. From what i remember, the starting price for this scenario is $200k, which explains why there are so few companies willing to have this kind of agreement.
It's not surprising... A lot of things have been pointing to Microsoft building their own H/W in this space. HP canceling Slate and buying Palm. Dell going with Android. It makes a lot of sense for Microsoft to build their own ipod, ipad, and ARM based "netbook" like machines. If true, in the long run, I think this puts more pressure on Dell and HP.
And possibly even a PEN.
there is some company selling Atom CPU based servers and a lot of customers like them. Atom is just a Xeon with almost everything disabled due to manufacturing issues. Apple did a nice job with the A4 in terms of battery life and power consumption. MS will probably port Windows Server and other products to the architecture to keep VmWare and Linux at bay.
and with tech demos of Apache running on the iPhone any idiot will say that ARM will end up in servers soon with the big plus being you can customize it to your needs. just like Apple and Qualcomm did. with Intel you get a Xeon at $1500 each on average or a Xeon reject at $150. ARM CPU's cost a fraction of that even after R&D. and when you calculate the electricity savings it gets even better.
MS doesn't make PC's as far as I know. Maybe they have watched Apple be successful with their integrated hardware and software and want to duplicate their success.
Looks like they are copying the Apple's way of doing business. Can't live on Windows and the Office Suite alone!
Clone Apple. They have ARM. Microsoft must have ARM. Same old shite.
Both the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS used ARM7 and ARM9 chips. Now that Nintendo is using a different company from Japan to produce the architecture for the upcoming 3DS, perhaps Microsoft has decided to get into the handheld console race. I don't think this has anything to do with Apple or PC-related plans. This is the beginnings of X-Boy
Born to Play
Since the have licensed the arcitecture and the instruction set they are in the position of starting grouond up on ARM isntruction set compatible design and/or (heavily) modifying the exiciting core design. As the poster above pointed out they must have a need that is not serviced by the exisiting SOC comunity.
The prime candidate (IMO) is something in the Xbox3. After being burned by not controlling the CPU and GPU designs chipset parts for the Xbox1 they had tighter control on the Xbox2 (360) with thier own 3 core Power PC design.
With Sony continuing to leaverage the cell co-processors maybe MS wants something similar. It is not too far fetched that the next gen xbox could be a 3+core power pc with ARM derived co-processors (like CELL).
The advantage is that compiler support is mature and developers are very familiar with ARM architecture so getting the most out of the cores would not be the steep learning curve that cell has had.
ARM cores take up very little space compared to modern Intel/AMD x86 chip designs and typically have small levels of cache. Could easily fit a 4-6 core power PC and 20+(?) ARM cores on a modern process comparable in size to existing Xbox2 CPU die.
Disclaimer : I own some ARM shares.
They don't really need a particular project in mind, they have the cash at hand. Maybe they just want the option in their back pocket so they aren't backed into a corner.
I believe that this is probably an Xbox 360 successor play by Microsoft. The original Xbox used a stock Celeron 733mhz CPU from Intel and a licensed Geforce 2 MX variant from Nvidia. MS learned from the original Xbox that it is not cost effective to license technology and continuously pay royalties on that tech per unit of hardware sold, particularly for graphics. For this reason, Nvidia was cut out of the design process for the Xbox 360.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox
When Microsoft developed the 360, they opted to custom design both the CPU and GPU. For the CPU (Xenon), Microsoft used technology from the IBM/Sony Cell project, which IBM was more than happy to sell them (lol at Sony). They chose to place 3 of the Cell PPC cores on a die, giving each their own VMX vector processing unit to make up for architectural deficiencies related to not having attached Cell-like DSP units. This is the only CPU of it's kind, Xenon is a Microsoft designed chip to which they own the IP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_%28processor%29
The ATI GPU (Xenos) was also completely custom, being neither a R500 or an R600 part but something of a cross between the two architectural designs. It employed unified shaders well before the R600 architecture and featured a unique daughter die consisting of 10mb of DRAM used as a (very) fast intelligent framebuffer capable of performing 4x anti-aliasing on a per frame basis. This design allowed Microsoft to get "free" anti-aliasing, freeing up more graphics resources for other operations. Microsoft also owns the IP for the Xenos chip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_%28graphics_chip%29
As much as everyone here enjoys ripping on Microsoft, (I am also guilty as charged) I believe the 360 is a far more elegant design chip-wise than the PS3 and better suited to actual gaming applications. Microsoft would not have purchased an ARM license if it were not worth the cost. As I don't see them stepping up to revolutionize the world of cellular phones, I can only assume that they are designing something completely new. It is likely a design far in excess of the capabilities of the ARM chips that other vendors are providing. If it's really true, if I'm right, then Microsoft could be developing a high-powered multi-core ARM chip for the next Xbox in order to eliminate all out-of-house CPU design expenses. I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with, since current low-power designs by other vendors are beginning to reach clocks of 2ghz with ease, a simple redesign could produce chips in the 3.5 - 4.5ghz range without much effort at all. (Comparative to starting from scratch, of course)
The question is really, how well would a high-clock multi-core (likely 4 or more) ARM chip perform? If the cost to performance ratio is even close to what can be seen from an Intel or AMD solution, I think my suspicions will have been validated.
Back when netbooks first appeared on the market, many of them ran Linux for cost and performance reasons. At the time the only shipping version of Windows was Vista which was ill-suited for machines running early Atom processors. Microsoft actually extended the life of XP so it could be used on netbooks, but protected the notebook market by adding irrelevant licensing requirements on XP sales like limits on screen sizes and maximum memory.
Then we started hearing about a brand-new generation of ARM netbooks with much longer battery lives than Atom's can offer. Linux enthusiasts exulted that since there was no shipping version of Windows that ran on ARM processors other than the hoary CE, this gave Linux another window of opportunity in the netbook market. I don't know if MS now has a Windows 7 build that runs on ARM, or whether they needed this deal to release one, but if this means we'll be seeing netbooks with Windows 7 on ARM chips, it will block Linux from advancing in this space. For evidence, it took only a few months after the extension of the end-of-life for XP to enable Windows to dominate the netbook market in the US.
The netbook market is flourishing, by the way. Recent studies suggest that netbook revenues in 2010 will run into the $10-15 billion neighborhood and growing fast.
http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1697-As+Market+Shares+Shift,+Annual+Netbook+Shipments+Will+More+than+Double+by+2013?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AbiresearchPressReleasesFeed+(ABIResearch+Press+Releases+Feed)
http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/netbook-shipments-2009/
1. Microsoft has opened up a few Brick and Morter Stores designed for strictly Microsoft Technologies
2. Microsoft is realeasing a new Mobile Phone OS shortly which will allow XBOX Live integration in combination with their "hopefully" intuitive UI and NetFlix video streaming.
3. Microsoft already tried to cut in to the market with the Zune. Why not some other device that they themselves built.
4. Microsoft now has an in with the ARM chipset
5. The XBOX 360 will be hitting the 5 years old mark this November
I guarantee (and by guarantee; I am fairly certain; and by fairly certain, I am completely speculating) that Microsoft is hedging their bets in order to enter the Hardware market in a more agressive fashion. And with their own brick and mortor store, they can guarantee "local" educated and informed support for their newest products.