Slashdot Mirror
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."
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly. And the reason for that is because the bandwidth outside the processor, the I/O, is so damnably slow compared to what's possible on the die itself. That's why the data transfers to and from the CPU are only about 1/30th or less the speed at which the CPU runs internally. The only logical course of action is to do as much as you can on each byte of data coming off the bus as you can. Besides, look at Nvidia's GPU cores: They throw hundreds of cores onto the die, but it eats hundreds of watts as well. Massively parallel and simple instruction sets don't appear to translate into energy savings.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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
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.
From Intel: Work done per watt
From ARM: System power draw small enough for handheld & long battery life
A year or two ago, I read a study that the most ops/watt were still done by high-end Intel processors sucking tons of power each. They did so much work so fast that the per-watt work done was still beyond the tiny-power-sipping ARMs that were relatively slow but still quite capable. Has this changed in the last generation or two of CPUs?
Oh come on moderators.
That link is the 2nd most disgusting thing besides Goatse and I am sick and tired of that Mycleanx troll (wont say it as it will increase his SEO and page ranking.
The only way we can stop that dipshit is to lower his Google ranking or the more he spams the more we will bring troll sites for his potential customers instead.
http://saveie6.com/
The topic with the *architecture* was about the simple and clean elegance of ARM vs x86 with its tons of old shit.
And the topic with the *processors* was about efficiency.
ARM processors are 10 times as efficient as Intel ones. The architecture isn’t even mentioned in that.
Those are two completely separate things!
And yet Intel's first real entry into the phone processor market, Medfield, is equivalent to ARM in terms of power efficiency. ARM is 1x as efficient as x86, not 10x.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
They don't have all the legacy instruction set issues to deal with. Intel must be backward compatible with all previous versions. Remember, the 8080 subset is still alive and well in the INTEL architecture. This comes with a cost.
It's easier to move up from a lower power system to a higher power system. In this context power can be thought of as both electrical power consumption and as compute power. Moving down means something must be simplified/eliminated, and the backwards compatibility issues makes this much harder.
When it comes to mobile devices, ARM owns the market and has the network effect working for it. This is how INTEL kept a stranglehold on the PC market, but it works against them for mobile.
ARM is not monolithic in the same way as INTEL. Because of the license based IP model, there are many more variations of ARM chips then INTEL chips. The resources to make variations comes from the IP user base, not from ARM. A single company, no matter how dominant, cannot afford to support that many variants. If some of the versions fail, the cost is not born by ARM. If INTEL guesses wrong and makes a dud, they have to absorb the cost.
INTEL is no pushover, but I think ARM has the advantage.
Why is Snark Required?
Simply put, as Intel has no standing in the ARM market (and AMD has now), Intel has every motivation to distort the facts.
That said, there is indication that while x86 is not in principle more power-hungry than ARM,in practice, on silicon, it is today. The main reason is that it requires more chip area and more complex circuitry, which in practice leads to higher power consumption because of communication and signal distribution overheads and because complex circuits are far harder to optimize, not only for power consumption. Again, that does not mean that in principle it is infeasible. But note that larger chip area is also a strong argument against x86 if size matters.
There is also the fact that low-power ARM is more energy efficient than low-power x86 when you look at the market. So maybe this person is just saying that Intel messed up and failed to make good low-power x86 implementations while ARM did not. Looking back at power-disasters like the P4, this would be plausible as well. If, on the other hand, I look at CPUs like the AMD LX800 x86 offering, (e.g. used in the Alix boards), these are pretty power efficient and may even get into ARM ranges. They are pretty slow at full load though and have a large chip area.
So my impression is that the Intel person just said that while they do not have any offering comparable to ARM, it is their fault and not a fundamental problem of x86. I am unsure this is right, although I certainly agree that Intel does not have a leg to stand on in the market for power-efficient CPUs.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
rel="nofollow" is what you use with a link to indicate that it should not be considered for page rank. Slashdot already uses that as you note.
It will still show up as a hit in a search.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Considering the usernames chosen for these posts, I have to conclude it's just GNAA-style trolling. A company paying people to post here probably wouldn't allow them to pick usernames like "JonesFuckAssFucker".
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It's actually a surprise that ARM is taking off more in higher end systems (higher end meaning tablets and smart phones).
Since the iPhone and iPad are in effect the start of those becoming really widespread things, they are the definition of backwards compatible, the base... that's what will make it difficult to move the market away from them.
The Motorola chips never had a totally massive market penetration the way Arm does now in mobile/tablet worlds... I am not sure even slightly superior chips from Intel would sway many hardware makers.
I think Intel is really banking on Windows 8 to make headway in the tablet market so they can build up marketshare again to base an attack on Arm from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My examination of the link content (using Chrome, right-click the link and pick "Inspect element"), shows that there is NO rel=nofollow attribute for any link
Maybe Chrome just sucks then, since the rel=nofollow is in fact there for all the links.
I think that you are totally right about this. Maintaining x86 compatibility may hurt Intel a little, but it's not the key issue.
ARM-based SoCs cost under $10 in volume, and Intel simply cannot compete in that space. It doesn't want to. It likes large prices and huge profit margins.
Meanwhile, ARM keeps improving the performance of their cores, while the SoC manufacturers keep improving the capabilities of their SoCs, including (critically) power savings. It's a marriage made in heaven, and the only way that ARM can lose this market to Intel is by upping their license royalties massively so that ARM-based SoC prices move into Intel's territory. There is no sign of that happening.
Short version of the above: Intel fails in the mobile space because of price inertia. There is no sign of that changing either, at least judging by the article. They refuse to compete on SoC pricing. And they're in denial that price matters.
Morgaine.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra