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ARM, Intel Battle Heats Up
An anonymous reader writes "Low-power processor maker ARM Holdings is stepping up rhetoric against chip rival Intel, saying it expects to take more of Intel's market share than Intel can take from them. With Intel being the No. 1 supplier of notebook PC processors, and ARM technology almost ubiquitously powering smartphones, the two companies are facing off as they both push into the other's market space. 'It's going to be quite hard for Intel to be much more than just one of several players,' ARMs CEO said of Intel."
I've been hearing about how ARM is going to destroy Intel for the last 5 years at least and I haven't seen the products yet despite the promises thrown about with the Cortex A9. It looks like the cortex A15 willl be able to beat Medfield... but you aren't getting those A15s in large quantities until next year when Intel will have the next iteration of Atom ready anyway. Oh and 64 bit? That's gone from an insanely important feature when Intel didn't have it to being useless bloat when Intel does have it and ARM doesn't, but it's OK because in 2015 you might be able to get an ARM chip with 64 bit support....
Since 2008 when the much derided Atom debuted, Intel has gone from not having anything that could remotely run a smartphone or tablet to having Medfield, which is competitive although not industry leading in the smartphone and table space. I have yet to see ARM come out with anything that even threatens a run of the mill Core 2 yet... so why is ARM talking so much trash?
It might be that ARM is a little more nervous that there is finally some real competition in the mobile space, which is a boon to consumers. I'd like to see AMD get an x86 solution down into this power envelope too so that there would be multiple competitors on the x86 side as well.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Low-power processor maker ARM Holdings
ARM Holdings do not "make" processors, low powered or otherwise. They design, they develop, and they certainly license. But they don't make.
Interestingly from a Slashdot point of view they're probably the most high profile example of an "IP" company with a positive image.
Of course ARM will take more from Intel than Intel will from ARM. But it's stupid math.
Take the desktop market. If ARM has 0% of the desktop market, and Intel has 65%, there's nothing for Intel to take from ARM. If ARM sells just 1 desktop, they've taken more from Intel than Intel took from them. But it's a meaningless stat.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Intel gets my respect for being one of the few companies to invest heavily into research. Seriously, they do a lot of "fundamental research" work, and so far, it's worked well for them. They develop products all the time that never get released because they're too "experimental" - Larrabee is the example that comes to mind first - and justify the expense because the information learned is worth the $100M they spent on an unreleasable product.
Intel, you can hedge your bets. Take one of your teams - rumor has it the Itanium team won't be working on that much longer - and tell them to make a desktop-quality ARM processor. You've already got the ARM license, do something with it. Figure out how to bump up the clockspeed (if *Apple* can do it, so can you), throw cache at it, bring the core count up to eight or so. Target your own Core i3 chips both in speed and in cost.
You do that, Intel, and you basically can't lose (barring sudden inexplicable incompetence). If the ARM desktop project completely fails, well, you just proved that x86 chips are unbeatable on the desktop market (which will never completely disappear). If the project succeeds, you'll win no matter which architecture comes out on top, and you'll have the advantage of having an experienced ARM team to help you take the best features of ARM and put them in your mobile x86 chips.
With Intel being the No. 1 supplier of notebook PC processors, and ARM technology almost ubiquitously powering smartphones
Memories of 1987, my 4/8MHz ARM powered Archimedes was running circles around the Intel 80x86 CPUs - heck we even emulated (PDF) Intel to run WordPerfect and a Modula2 compiler.
Even though AMD is not mentioned in TFA there is still a picture of an AMD guy with a wafer (even though ARM doesn't even contract out chip manufacture much less have its own fabs). Silly journalists, TLAs are for engineers.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
If they let Microsoft call the shots on the ARM PCs, I'm not so sure.
They should be making the SoCs on their most advanced process. Not one a generation behind
Intel is making the same mistakes that sun and it's old competition made. Their cpu's are too good and too expensive
can we stop with this ubiquitous word please?
22nm lithography. Intel is, as usual, a node ahead of basically everyone else. Other fabs just got their 28nm half node online not long ago, late last year. So we are seeing products based on that start appearing on the market. The current nVidia and AMD GPUs would be some notable ones, but there are (or at least will be) ARM chips too.
Intel though, they didn't do the 28nm half node (they haven't done half nodes so far), they went straight to the 22nm node and it is online and running full swing. Ivy Bridge chips using it have shipped in large quantities.
What that means is Intel can pack more transistors in to a given die size, and have them use less power per transistor. For mobile, that is a big advantage. That means even in the event their shit does less per transistor, they can make it up with more transistors. Also means things like 64-bit are less problematic to implement (64-bit requires more transistors).
Now I've no idea if Intel what arenas Intel will choose to compete in, but if I were ARM I wouldn't be looking forward to direct competition. I'd hope it remains largely how it is: Intel focusing on the high end (from netbooks all the way up) ARM focusing on the low end (from tablets all the way down). No competition, no problem. I wouldn't be enthused about the prospect of having to compete with someone in the low power market who has a better process.
Intel is likely to keep the advantage too. Everyone else is hard at work setting up their 22nm fabs, but they are probably at least a year away, maybe more. Intel? They've been hard at work building Fab 42 inc Chandler which is to be their first 14nm facility. They say they'll have it online in 2013 (it'll be some time after it goes online until chips are shipping to consumers though), and they are pretty good about hitting their marks on that.
It is one of the things that has given them an edge is their massive R&D in to fabs that keeps them a node ahead of everyone. ARM can't do that, they are just a design company, not a fab, and none of the other companies that do fab work seem to be willing to plow in the R&D money that Intel is.
Smaller computers may sell more than bigger ones, but they don't replace them. Take the mainframe. The desktop didn't kill it, in fact there are more of them now than when they were all you could buy. That doesn't mean there are very many, but the desktop didn't kill it off. It just eclipsed it in numbers. Same shit with laptops and desktops. Laptops are more popular (particularly if you count netbooks) but desktops are still everywhere. Their sales aren't growing a ton, but aren't shrinking either.
Same deal with smartphones and tablets. While a few people may be obsessed with them replacing all computers, most aren't interested. Much harder to do content creation, even when that content is just a Word document, on a little tablet than on a desktop or laptop with keyboard, mouse, and big screen.
I'm sure that smartphones will totally outstrip computer sales, I'm also sure they won't kill off computer sales.
x86 is a big advantage for Intel. Not a lot of people have a license to use it, and the ones that do either don't do a very good job (AMD) or haven't done anything yet (nVidia). It also gives them binary compatibility with so much out there. It is big to be able to run a bunch of programs with no recompiling (and even with recompiling an architecture switch can be a pain).
Were Intel to do an ARM chip like that, it would be an internal hedge, you wouldn't see it unless there was a reason. There would be no reason to sell thing thing and give the ARM market credibility against the x86 market. They'd only introduce it were it clear ARM was the way they needed to go.
There's heavy inertia on x86 as well and it may never change. Really modern compilers and microarchitectures have rendered a lot of the old school RISC vs CISC and arguments like that moot. Turns out you can use pretty much whatever ISA you like and make the chip work well, and CISC isn't a big deal for modern compilers.
If you see Intel do ARM chips, I think it will just be for mobile phones and tablets. If their attempt to muscle in to that market with x86 chips is unsuccessful, they may elect to play the ARM game, which they'd have an advantage on most other fab since they are generally a node ahead in process technology.
I can only see a desktop ARM chip getting released if ARM starts to become the One True Way(tm) and I don't think that is all that likley.
If you're going to troll like this, you could at least learn the difference between vertical and horizontal. And really, what difference would it make? I don't really see the downside for horizontal.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
What you are saying is true today, but what about tomorrow?
I am still reading the articles, but IIRC ARM was going to launch a line of low end server CPU in about 2 years - which would aim squarely at Intel. As ARM grows, both Intel and ARM will start invading each others territories.
If I look around and count the NASes, routers, phones and tablets and media player, then I have more devices using ARM CPUs than Intel CPUs. I also find that I'm using the phone and tablet more and the laptop and desktop less, but that is another story.
Usually, when ceo's talk like this about their competitors, it's because there have been buyout talks. Offers, counter offers, maybe ARM is shopping around. There was talk a few years ago that Apple would buy ARM. We know that Intel is interested, how could they not be? My best guess is that there have been talks, maybe they've recently broken down, or ARM is trying to get Intel to the table to initiate talks. Either way, expect ARM to be acquired by someone over the next year. You heard it here first.
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I have Cortex-A15s in the lab right now, finished simulation and verification, and samples are being boxed up this week, and we're shipping them this year. And for quantity we can do as many as TSMC can make for us. Then it boils down to if any devices makers are willing to pay the premium we have to charge for the bigger faster chip. You will see about half of Jellybean devices running a Cortex-A15, and nearly all Windows 8 devices when it first ships.
The 22nm technology is very good, and Intel can use it to "bless" specific ARM market segments and thereby control them.
Intel could feasibly make the fastest and most power-efficient ARM processors with a 22nm foundry, and could craft customer contracts in such a way as to prevent those CPUs from entering devices that compete with the x86 products.
If and when Intel develops an architecture that is competitive to ARM, it would then have established supply relationships into the targeted market segments.
And from an engineering standpoint, ARM could use extra wasted die space on x86 wafers.
Furthermore, in the Android world, who particularly cares about the cpu? Seen any "ARM Inside" logos lately? Intel felt the opposite side of this when they lost xbox to power.
I can't argue with Intel's success, but they make a lot of decisions that don't make financial sense to me.
I always like the random tech cheer for stuff like arm and linux. C'mon guys, you need a business driver and there isnt one. You don't just take technology and look for a problem for it to solve, you identify the most important problems to solve and then implement technology to solve that problem.
ARM built up to do what a desktop cpu does will look just like the cpu it intends to replace. It won't have significant power or energy advantages. It'll require a ton of software work and rework.
This is MIPS and PowerPC all over again. Nobody needs it. But we'll certainly spend a billion on it before realizing that it doesn't do anything for anyone.
Good luck to the ARM ceo. Bravado doesn't make the payroll.
US Federal Trade Commission is not likely to let either Intel (component market share ) or Apple (finished product market share, effect on direct competitors) buy ARM. Qualcomm, NVIdia, TI, Samsung and others would all be lining up to testify what havoc and destruction either aquisition would cause.
ARM may be based in the UK, but I'm sure this would have to pass US regulatory scrutiny.
URA troll w\ many sockpuppet reg accts on /. (2 upmod urself n others down): Proof = barbara.hudson@unjava.com from http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2C+not+Barbie = barbara.hudson@barbara-hudson.com from http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson and we see ur moddin urself up again too here that way.
No. It's going to be hard for ARM.
See the source.
Today one of the most significant features of the ARM family is its low power consumption. But that hadn't been an initial goal, according to Furber. “We designed the ARM for an Acorn desktop product, where power isn't of primary importance. But it had to be cheap. Cheap meant it had to go in a plastic package, plastic packages have a fairly high thermal resistance, so we had to bring it in under 1W.”
The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board [we] plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
it's Intel that's heating up this battle. someone should watercool Intel before they overheat.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
ARM licensed about 6 billion CPU cores year 2010 and holds about 75% of the embedded market. Total embedded CPU core market is about 8 billion and almost 20 times bigger than PC market. ARM does business differently, it licenses so there are like 100 manufacturers of ARM core based SoCs and the whole ARM based ecosystem is vastly bigger than Intel. MIPS is another embedded CPU core designer which licenses to chip makers and I think even it has bigger numbers than Intel.
Big embedded numbers don't mean big money. ARM receives on average about 8 cents per core. ARM has however built a formidable ecosystem. It is that which is going after Intel and will and already partly have made Intel just one of the many manufacturers.
So where are those ARM based SoCs? Everywhere in new electronic devices. ADSL modems, WiFi routers, smart Ethernet switches, navigators, smart and dumb mobile phones, TVs, Blu-ray players, media players (my WDTV has MIPS based Sigma Designs TangoX SoC, remember ARM has only 75%) and many others. And guess what, they more often run Linux than not. That makes Linux the most popular OS. It actually has been several years already.
Or, perhaps AMD is circling the bowl, and Intel needs a technical competitor in order to keep it from holding a monopoly position in a competitive market. Much the same way Apple was "competition" years ago for Microsoft, it just may be that Intel needs someone else selling CPUs in a market that they don't want government hands in. I mean, really, when you start to speculate, anything's possible, given a vivid enough imagination.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_servers/
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thank you for replying. I do have a user account, but this discussion is kinda trollish on both sides.
The Internet will almost certainly be run off a unix variant, but at the moment linux is pretty entrenched; I believe (without evidence beyond hearsay) that most of the routing devices involved also are based on linux. I am also not aware that the BSD community has more active development than linux; for better or worse I don't anticipate BSD taking marketshare until it has a preponderance of developer mindshare/activity. At this point it seems like Beastie will be shivering at home before that happens, but who knows.
I don't believe any measurements of linux deployment. In terms of desktop use I would probably tend to trust Wikimedia's usage statistics but linux is probably within the error bars for any methodology. It's also not relevant to discuss without a measurement of the total number of devices. And by that I mean it's retarded and disingenuous.
There's also no chain of logic connecting licensing to usage. Otherwise Windows wouldn't be popular, right? In point of fact, it seems there's an inverse relationship there, if BSD is 'most free' and least used.
I appreciate that you have an axe to grind, but when you bring up Android we have to have a separate discussion about kernels and userland and desktop environment, and what is fugly and what is comparable to BSD and what is not. Frankly I suspect neither of us are qualified to entertain such.
Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to be upholding XP as some sort of achievement in operating systems. It may indeed be fast on your hardware. It certainly doesn't come with much out of the box. However, I can only conclude from this that you know very little about operating systems. I am sure that there are many windows enthusiasts who have a more extensive knowledge on the features of various windows releases, but I will single out UAC as being something that you are rock-stupid to not have on your system. Additionally, many others claim that Win7 is as fast or faster than XP on the same hardware.
Now, as far as stability goes, I don't expect Fedora to be stable. I would ask if you were using Debian stable or some other variety. You're also being a complete asshat in claiming that "no distro ... is as fast or as stable [as XP]." You can have no factual basis for that remark without having actually tested a wide variety of environments, and it should be a foregone conclusion that any OS stable enough to be used on millions of servers should be stable enough for desktop use. If your experiences are otherwise, it may safely be assumed that the problem lies with your particular environment. At this point I would expect any OS having millions of installs to be stable. But then I would also not expect to find someone championing a decade-old OS and singling out the release where a built-in firewall was a major new feature.
To the best of my knowledge Wine's implementation of the Windows API as of XP SP2 is fairly complete. If you can find a program that runs on XP SP2 that does not run in Wine, file a bug. Given that the vast majority of linux software could in theory be compiled for Win32 it's hard to say outright that linux has more software, but if we can set aside the issue of app portability then it becomes very easy to say that linux has a wider range of software available.
You have successfully yanked my chain. If that was the goal, congratulations. If you actually believe what you say, my condolences. At this point XP isn't something I'd wish on anyone with a network connection.
Besides, everyone knows ChromeOS is where it's at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyonix_PC
+many others. so 10 years ago someone already did what you were suggesting. that's how long this arm vs. x86 media hype shit has been going on. and that's discounting the previous round from a decade before that.
that's the joke. arm is a design company whose designs intel can and has used. but intel is a chip fabbing and design operation.
if tide really turned on their x86 they could be rolling the sweetest arm chips around out in pretty short order. sure they'd have to buy the gpu design but that's what they did for their phone-socs already, because intel can't design gpu for shit(political history reasons, most likely).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It is the power consumption silly... and asymmetric is OK.
We as a group are quite pleases with "COMPUTERS"
where graphics and raw horsepower is needed. Further we
are interested in what happens when the bug is pegged at
100%.
However like automobiles where a hybrid car can sit at
a stop light and sip power to keep the radio active and
then respond when the light changes.
HOWEVER the OS folk are well stuck on SMP system
design and all that flows from there.
The OS should run on a very low power device perhaps
a bit more than a simple state machine. I/O should be
tied to quick responsive engines with no FPU....
Computation intensive work can run on what runs it
best....
The point is that there are a lot of transistors today but
the easy solution involves cut and paste + glue. Building
a power friendly system requires much more design and
is harder to program at first. Then there is the problem where
the differences get in the way and we begin to see N! different
design spaces.
INMOS had it close back in the '80s with the Transputer
but that is a distraction.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
ARM is in almost all tablets (Apple SoC, Nvidia tegra, Qualcomm, Marvell, and all major tablet designs are ARM based) ...
no doubt tablet is eating up notebook market and PC market. there is only limited cash in people's hands. if you buy iphone and ipad upgrades every year, most likely you would postpone your PC upgrades. in that sense, they are competing