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Intel Dismisses 'x86 Tax', Sees No Future For ARM
MrSeb writes "In an interview with ExtremeTech, Mike Bell — Intel's new mobile chief, previously of Apple and Palm — has completely dismissed the decades-old theory that x86 is less power efficient than ARM. 'There is nothing in the instruction set that is more or less energy efficient than any other instruction set,' Bell says. 'I see no data that supports the claims that ARM is more efficient.' The interview also covers Intel's inherent tech advantage over ARM and the foundries ('There are very few companies on Earth who have the capabilities we've talked about, and going forward I don't think anyone will be able to match us' Bell says), the age-old argument that Intel can't compete on price, and whether Apple will eventually move its iOS products from ARM to x86, just like it moved its Macs from Power to x86 in 2005."
What did you expect him to say... that an Intel product was not suitable for the mobile marketplace? That would have been career suicide for him. He is singing from the Intel songbook. Those songs may not be sung with what is best for the customer in mind.
Intel spent many years chasing performance with little thought of power draw.
Now they are putting all their engineering muscle into minimizing power requirements, while maintaining high performance.
I don't see any reason to think they won't succeed, and if they do, then ARM will end up a niche architecture.
Compounding this fact, ARM isn't that great of an architecture. It's got variable length instructions, not enough registers, microcoded instructions, and a horrible, horrible virtual memory architecture.
The big thing that ARM has is the licensing model. ARM will give you just about everything you need for a decent applications SOC. Processor, bus, and now even things like GPU and memory controllers. Sprinkle in your own companies' special sauce, and you have a great product. All they ask is for a little bit of royalty money for every chip you sell. And since everyone is using pretty much the same ARM core, the tools and "ecosystem" is pretty good.
But there's not much of an advantage to the architecture... the advantage is all in the business model, where everyone can license it on the cheap and make a unique product out of it.
And nowadays, the CPU is becoming less important. It's everything around it -- graphics, video, audio, imaging, telecommunications -- is what makes the difference.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Intel won the CPU wars because of manufacturing, not because of a superior instruction set. They are always able to get a smaller manufacturing process.
For example, taking your point about data bandwidth, because the x86 has so few registers, it has to do data IO a lot more compared to something like the PowerPC or SPARC.
To make up for that, Intel built a lot of logic in microcode and pipe-lining. It was a lot of work, but they did it well, so the x86 gets acceptable performance. All that extra logic takes power though. So Intel has a tradeoff between power consumption and performance that they can make. This guy seems to be saying they will switch to reduce power consumption, and then make up for it by having the best manufacturing process once again.
And they do. For probably as long as chips continue to get smaller, Intel will have the advantage.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
ARM works because 1) it's good enough while being 2) cheap enough. As far as I know, ARM is getting license royalties in the pennies per chip or SoC core using their design. For how much better Intel can make their low power x86 CPUs, its going to have to compete with dozens of foundries churning out millions of ARM devices when it comes to pricing...and thats where I see Intel having a hard time.
And we know who lost that one. Badly.
We do? The world's fastest supercomputer (K computer) is RISC based, and ARM is RISC, so it seems very much alive. Also CISC now has pipelining which was the thing that originally made RISC awesome, and RISC has gotten more complex, so they have evolved to be closer to each other. I am sure there are other factors that are more important for energy efficiency (mainly transistor size) and I don't have an opinion on that, but I don't understand where you are coming from.
The GP didn't say anything of the sort. He was pointing out that to say "CISC won" is only true if you consider that x86 is CISC and Intel spend gobs of money to be at the forefront of CPU manufacturing technology, both in shrinking die size/increasing clock speed and shoehorning all the negative characteristics of the x86 design into a form that was more RISC like so it could allow for super-scalar and deep pipeline designs. Intel deserves a lot of credit in proving just how far CISC design can go. But it certainly wasn't that CISC won because it had greater strengths.
Sounds like Linux on the x86, actually. Seriously, though, RISC design tends to have a few very strong design elements: it tends to have a good many registers which absolves a lot of cache/stack work, it tends to have a fixed opcode size and requires aligned memory which usually improves throughput and allows for a much more streamlined instruction decoding engine, and precisely because there's a lot less need to support legacy platforms there's a lot more leeway to segment memory for power considerations.
Well, you can think MS's monopolistic actions for that. Seriously, "ugly and hackish"* might well describe near everything MS and Intel can be known for, in their question to maintain backwards compatibility. And if Intel had started out with an 8-bit RISC design, I'm certain there'd be the same problems, so it's not really an x86/CISC thing. Never the less, it's precisely the fact that Intel is unlikely to allow platform segregation points that x86 will probably never be low power.
*And please realize, I say this with a great deal of respect towards both Intel and MS in maintaining performance giving how many hacks they've put in over the years to compensate for not only their own bugs but the bugs of other developers. So, as pretty and clever as a lot of the hacks may be, it's still ugly overall to have the hacks in the first place and to have so many over so many places and to be so incapable of removing any without the risk of significant backlash or simply to lose their customer base. Ie, the code may be pretty but it's put them in an ugly place.
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