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Pocket Wars and Cores
An anonymous reader writes "If I were to ask you what is the most popular processor used in phones and pads, and you said, 'ARM,' you would be correct. Now comes the trick question, 'Who make ARM processors?' Not the ARM Holdings company. They design processors and license their designs to manufacturers. They also have a reputation for creating very low power designs. Interestingly, while almost everyone else was out ramping clocks and power consumption (until they hit a wall), ARM was chugging along addressing the low power end of the market. Now that low-power is all the rage, due to phones and pads, ARM has become quite a bit more popular."
ok, so?
(qualcomm, intel, samsung, marvell, etc.)
Why the Intel logo for this story? They're ones who do *not* make ARM processors, ever since they sold that business to Marvell (oops). I guess the TI logo isn't as cool.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I had always loved Slashdot, but is there any alternative community run site without the Slashvertisements?
Banu
...makes out
There are many, many makers of ARM based 'application processors' and the like: Texas Instruments, Samsung, Apple, ST Microelectronics, nVidia to name but a few. In addition, some people - like Qualcomm with their Snapdragon processor - have licensed the instruction set from ARM, but then have basically built their own core around that.
The nice thing about ARM is that - if you are looking to embed processing power - you can license a core (or two), design them into your own chip and then make it. Said chip can also include a USB controller, or a wireless baseband, or whatever. Intel will not sell you an x86 core for you to design into your own chip; ARM will.
Now: before this thread descends into meaningless ARM versus Intel rivalry, can I point out that the two architectures are optimized for entirely different situations. To say ARM is better than Intel, is like saying a bicycle is better than a ship - it's not a meaningful comparison. If you want to embed processing functionality, or you want low-power (particularly low standby power), then you need ARM. If you need raw processing power, optimised to run desktop or server operating systems, then you'll be wanting x86.
And the reason why x86 is so power hungry? It's because it's on big bits of silicon. And why's it on big bits of silicon? Because it support hyper-threading, out-of-order executon, has hardware virtualisation extensions, has extensive branch prediction, and tonnes of on chip cache.
There is no reason why ARM cannot offer all of these things too (and their Eagle design goes some way to do this). But if you want to do this, then your chip is going to get bigger, and more expensive, and more power hungry.
Over the next five years, we are going to continue to see mobility become more important: and that means more and more ARM cores, and a diminution of the importance of the traditional PC market. ARM has a very bright future - but, I suspect, it will probably have a great deal of trouble getting into the traditional PC space.
--- My dad's political betting
There's no mass market yet. Plug computers are around $100-150, with 256-512MB of RAM and are somewhat taking off. Some might also have video-out, most have USB where you can hang a hub, storage, & keyboard/mouse off it.
The thing is, even with a cheap core and an inexpensive power supply, you're still going to have to pay to include usable amounts of memory. I'd think $100 is a reasonable place for inexpensive compu-bricks with a good selection of ports, until there's a killer app that ramps up the volume and lowers the price.
ARM derived from the ideas of MOS and WDC (the 6502 and descendents) to make a low-power, efficient processor without fancy overheads.
Remember the rumors when the Apple II flirted with using ARM cpus toward the end of the line when Jobs was herding the company heavily toward Motorola and the 68K? Well the II line died with that, and so went any disruptive chances. Then strangely, it sorta came back again in the Newton, but Jobs killed that when he got the chance again while flirting with the PowerPC.
Then suddenly, Jobs embraced the ARM the next time around in the iPod and then later the iPhone (one-upping Sony in CE), and things have been going swimmingly for them.
Meanwhile, others picked up ARM for portable game devices, PDAs, and WinMob phones. It evolved slowly and not very well -- poor graphics drivers, poor OS/hardware implementations, hardware cycles focused on selling hardware, not the experience, etc.
Then the Jobs and iPhone said, "only the best combination of ARM cpu and graphics hardware for us. No more cheaping out to hardware designers for years like you guys have been doing", and boom explodes the market.
Companies are falling over themselves to make the best ARM hardware they can, although some are still missing the forest for the trees like Samsung. Others dumped the market because they thought it had no money like Intel's (formerly DEC's) Xscale(StrongARM) and ATI's Imageon graphics division (now Qualcomm's) and got caught with the pants down and what are now important toe-holds.
Nvidia whom only abortively were in the market and missed a cycle with the Tegra and half of it with Tegra 2, but seems to be holding their own. Imagination as PowerVR was pushed out of the PC market by Nvidia and ATI but flips it and now dominates as the best and reference hardware for mobile graphics over "newcomers" Nvidia/ATI. Funny enough, ATI's Adreno (from the former Bitboys) got recycled by Qualcomm into something that still viable after a stretch of horrible MSM720x hardware. Apple knowing they need to one-up these old-school houses, got PA-Semi and Intrinsity, fabbed by Samsung to own their own supply line for this critical hardware.
Ya this story just wonders what could've happened if Jobs wasn't so obstinate and denied using the ARM long ago.
Acorn machines were incredible for their time. Their GUI had concepts that have only been realised in mass market GUIs just recently, the flexibility of their OS and their advanced typographical features were many years ahead of their time. Things like the save dialog for a new file having an icon of the file that you could give a name to and then drag that icon to a folder to save it there (rather than having to navigate to the folder in the dialog). Built in BASIC in ROM (most of the OS in ROM, so boot times were on the order of seconds). I could go on...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Give it time. It will come because there's a market for it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If that surplus processing power could be harnessed it would be a different story, but Windows isn't up to that task.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm guessing here, but you live in a place where watts are cheap and reliable, right? Did you know most of the rest of the world isn't like that?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But you don't have to go with the wall wart form factor. I was working with an ARM on an industrial micro-ATX board, and that worked great. I was actually impressed with the speed, even though it was a 1Ghz machine. It was a tremendous step forward over another board they had chosen to use, where the only OS you could run was their own hacked up version of Linux, that required dozens of dodgy patches to rebuild the kernel.
If you really pay attention, ARM processors show up all over the place. I bought a little eMachines (the square thing standing vertical on a little pedestal), that works very nicely for running my theater system. At about 5"x5"x1", it's nice to have an absolutely silent machine sitting there that I can run the OS of my choice on. The only problem I had with it is that it didn't have enough USB ports for everything I wanted to hang off it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I think you might want to check this out: http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika Comes in at $129. Not exactly 50$, but I guess that's due relatively small production volumes.
BBC Micro ran a 6502, the Archimedes was the original ARM-based line.
Back in 2004 I've read a quite interresting article on ARM. http://news.cnet.com/The-unheralded-monopoly/2010-1006_3-5262581.html As you can see, the strong position of the ARM is not new, maybe just a bit more visible these days.
I read through the article and found it very informative. One thing I didn't realize was that Microsoft will not do Windows 7 mobile on ARM.
That was a surprising statement. I googled on it and found this:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20090603123741_Microsoft_Windows_7_Will_Not_Support_ARM_Microprocessors.html
This article says "Micrsoft does not believe ARM can deliver the performance needed." To that I wonder "why is everyone else able to make amazing performance happen with ARM???"
Every time I hear another Microsoft shill claim "but this is not Windows, it is entirely new from the ground up" I have to chuckle a little. If that were true, then they wouldn't have any problem getting performance out of low-power hardware if they designed their OS with that in mind "from the ground up." The truth of the matter is that Microsoft simply can't get away from its legacy code and rebuild from scratch. I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling. Apple did it when they went with OSX. A completely new OS and while the transition was painful for users and developers, it was the right choice. I have been saying for nearly a decade that Microsoft should do the same... others have too... but they simply choose not to at every opportunity.
This whole scenario gives me a better understanding of why Windows Mobile isn't catching on even with hard core MS fans. The "desktop experience" doesn't fit in your hand and they simply don't know how to do it any other way.... (Or maybe they are afraid to since MS Bob...)
ARM has also hit a wall with how much lower power consumption is needed.
This is a line of reasoning I've been fighting most of my career.
Lower power consumption is always needed. In a battery-powered, portable device, energy use is use of a limited resource and, therefore, is never low enough. Even if "most of us don't need the mobile device to continue functioning after heavy usage for more than maybe 48 hours" -- a statement of dubious validity -- the energy saved in performing feature set X can be used to perform additional features, features that may be used to competitive advantage in the marketplace. (Reducing the power consumption of a cell phone enabled manufacturers to add things like audio players, video, big displays, etc. to the device.) Alternatively, it can be used to reduce battery size and weight, which can also be used to competitive advantage.
Like product cost, power consumption is an expense that is never low enough. Designers (or their organizations) that think their product cost or power consumption is low enough are setting themselves up for obsolescence.
HP t5325 costs over 200 USD. OP asked about 50 USD machines.
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Your off-brand Chinese importers can hook you up with an ARM-based netbook-esque mini-notebook for $80-$100, depending on exact specs, volume, and the whims of the ebay gods.
Trouble is, in most cases, these will either be running some dubiously-legit(and sometimes questionably well-localized) version of WinCE, or a mildly elderly version of Android. Actual cryptographic lockdowns, in the Apple or Motorola vein, are way outside the budget; but total lack of usable documentation, a confusing proliferation of part numbers, or rampant hardware switching between similar looking models has somewhat retarded the growth of decent sized 3rd-party release groups.
Curiously, the hardware built into these $80-$100, with (lousy) screen, keyboard, and battery doesn't generally seem to show up in $40-$50 versions with DC-in, VGA-out, and USB for peripherals. There are some machines with those specs, like HP's t5325; but the fact that that is a "thin client" and thus "enterprise" instantly doubles the price you'd expect for the specs.
You can also get quite capable hardware in Marvell's *plug line; but those are generally network appliances only, with your only display option being a USB-based Displaylink or similar. That certainly works; but nearly doubles the price and makes for a rather ugly donglefest.
The newer Marvell SoCs do support at least one lane of PCIe, in addition to a raft of other onboard peripherals, so it wouldn't be rocket surgery for an OEM to put out a *plug-esque design with an actual PCIe graphics chip(only a low-end one would really make sense; but even the cheapest PCIe graphics chips available can drive pretty much any monitor that doesn't require dual-link DVI) hanging off that lane. However, that is a bit hardcore to just hack onto an existing *plug board, and, as noted, nobody seems to have done that in commercial quantity.
You can get the cheap-and-nasty "PocketPC of yesteryear shoved into a clone of the EEE701" from any number of mystery OEMs on ebay; but the software will blow and 3rd party firmware support is kind of a gamble.
You can get a *plug-based design, which will have a much peppier ARM core (1.2GHz) and beween 128-512mb of RAM, depending on the exact model, for about the same money(Seagate Dockstars were going crazy cheap for a while, like $10-$20; but that was a firesale of sorts); but those are network-only unless you buy a Displaylink adapter, which pushes you up toward $150-$200, at which point Atom boxes that will run normal x86 OSes with zero hassle and take 1GB+ of RAM start to beckon...
The t5325 is pretty much exactly what you are asking for, except that it is an "enterprise" product, and has a price tag to match. If one could hunt down whatever OEM produces the board inside, and buy 10,000 of the same thing in generic black boxes, those would probably be precisely what you want; but I've never seen any hints on how to do that...
Yeah, I realized my mistake only after I read that article again. That said, I also found this:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/215779/windows_8_on_arm_expands_microsofts_mobile_horizons.html
And while it is a nice attempt (so far) what I expect to see is the same things we have seen from Microsoft for decades -- they will support Alpha or some other processor for a while and realize "we can save money by dropping support for this minority thing" and then kill it. And according to the review above, while the machines made an admirable attempt, it is still the same old Windows being a resource hog and barely making it work. (For that matter, the 64 bit x86 processor support seems to be really lacking too -- they just can't convince software developers to update their code to 64 bit!! Think your new 64 bit quad core monster will deliver awesome performance on your game machine with nVidia optimus driving the graphics? Nope!!)
Once again, Microsoft is attempting to shoe-horn their old code into new places. I just don't expect it to work. What I expect to see, however, is Microsoft giving a ton of money to ARM makers to boost performance on their machines in order to support their software. This will benefit Microsoft but will also benefit Linux and other OSes on the same hardware in a much more dramatic way... (Unless, of course, they manage to bribe ARM makers to keep their performance enhancements locked down in a way similar to GPU makers like NVidia who only really supports Windows.)
I'm still waiting for something really surprising to happen... been waiting for a very long time. I wasn't surprised that Vista was an utter failure. I wasn't surprised that Windows 7 was more of an apology than a new OS. Microsoft exists on its defense of its market dominance alone. They haven't done anything exceptional with the Windows OS since Win9X or possibly Windows 2000.
Microsoft is eroding away due to its failure to keep up with the changes. Most people can't see it yet, but I certainly can. I think it became rather evident when the public stopped cheering at MS Product announcements.