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Intel Fires Warning Shot At Qualcomm and Microsoft Over Windows 10 ARM Emulation (hothardware.com)
MojoKid quotes a report from HotHardware: Qualcomm and Microsoft are on the verge of ushering in a new class of always-connected mobile devices that run full-blown Windows 10. The two are enabling ARM-based Snapdragon 835 processors to run Windows 10 with full x86 emulation, meaning that devices will be capable of not only running Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps from the Windows Store, but legacy win32 apps as well. There is little question, Intel is likely none too pleased with it and PC OEM heavyweights Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and ASUS have also signed-on to deliver Windows 10 notebooks and 2-in-1 convertibles powered by Qualcomm. Until now, Intel sat by quietly while all of this unfolded, but the company today took the opportunity to get a bit passive-aggressive while announcing the fast-approaching 40th anniversary of the world's first x86 microprocessor. The majority of the press release reads like a trip down memory lane. However, Intel shifts into serious mama bear mode, with significant legal posturing, touting its willingness to protect its "x86 innovations." Intel goes on to say that Transmeta tried and ultimately failed in the marketplace, and has been dead and buried for a decade. The company then pivots, almost daring Microsoft and Qualcomm to challenge it by making Windows on ARM devices commercially available. "Only time will tell if new attempts to emulate Intel's x86 ISA will meet a different fate. Intel welcomes lawful competition... However, we do not welcome unlawful infringement of our patents, and we fully expect other companies to continue to respect Intel's intellectual property rights."
Between the fact that current ISA is actually AMD64 (which is x86 compatible, but not intel-designed) and the fact that many key patents should have expired by now, it's going to be interesting if intel has the legal bass to actually stop this from happening.
How fast can Snapdragon processors run Windows software? I'm sure that productivity software - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice Acrobat Reader, Edge, Firefox, Chrome et cetera - will run just fine. That stuff doesn't need huge CPU power to begin with. What about something more CPU-heavy like Adobe Photoshop, AfterEffects, AutoCAD, 3D Max,Blender, Handbrake? How fast will that software run on Snapdragon? Of course this is no big problem - if ARM can't run it today, you can always run it on an Intel or AMD box. But the question remains - how fast is emulated Windows on ARM?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Windows 10 on ARM is not Windows RT. It's full Windows 10 compiled for ARM so even without the emulation you can install and run ARM applications just as you would install x86 applications for Windows 10 on x86. Having the ability to run x86 apps on ARM would be a nice feature. I hope legal wrangling doesn't prevent it from shipping.
...the writing on the wall?
The future is mobile, and in mobile RISC wins (for now). First you emulate, then you go native. Microsoft has seen the new Samsung S8 working as a desktop replacement with a dock, and is sweating cold. If that trend goes on (and why shouldn't it, as phones become more powerful), and mobile apps adapt to the "desktop mode", soon Windows will have a real competitor. I can see plane stewardesses distributing keyboards to the passengers, so as to use the entertainment screens with your "desktop mobile". I can see "laptops" that are just a screen, a keyboard, a humongous battery and a dock bay for your phone.
You cannot fight the tide. In three years smartphones will ship with 1 Tb storage, 16 Gb memory, and 16 cores CPU. All of them itching to do something more demanding than displaying your last photo of your cat. If Microsoft doesn't emulate in firmware, VMWare will emulate in software, and soon you won't care in which OS is your app working. You will have one and only one computer, that will incidentally have the capacity of making phone calls. Congratulations everybody, we are just now entering the era of the PC.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I have heard that Intel is delighted about AMD's new 32 core server CPU and 16 core desktop CPU. If I remember correctly, the last time Intel was this delighted with AMD they started bribing system manufacturers into not offering any AMD-based products.
Proposition: Apple are planning to release low end macOS products based on their ARM64 SoCs.
Imagine having a common ARM-based hardware spec for Watch, Mac Mini, iPhone, iPad, MacBook and iMac - only select 'Pro' models would require Intel Inside.
Such a transition would require checking an extra box in XCode for fat-binaries. Optionally they could develop a Rosetta-style translation layer for 'legacy' amd64 only binaries.
I imagine they'd be more upset if MS partnered with Nvidia.
Nvidia's Denver architecture does some on-silicon code morphing (similar to Transmeta?) but specifically as an ARM licensee. If they used that technology to speed up x86 without paying the Intel Tax, I imagine it'd be lawyers getting busy.
There isnt much software that is 64-bit only... therefore 32-bit emulation is a big deal.
"His name was James Damore."
Lawyers are the last argument of technology companies that have lost the power to innovate. Intel wouldn't be saying these things if they had invested in technology rather than idiotic purchases of horrid anti-virus companies, bizarre offshore strategies, and generally letting wall st. run them rather than engineers and technologists.
I read, "We welcome new competitors at the x86 architecture market but we will sue the shit out of you if you actually try".
I got two systems in my collection / office ;-) Each time I read Intel press like this I power them up just for the warm feeling :-)
https://www.t2-project.org/har...
https://www.t2-project.org/har...
They are also visible on my desk in some of my recent videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/r...
Buying Windows ? when you can get Linux for Free ?
aaaaaaa
Yeah, because that hasn't been the case for like 20 years now.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Yeah, because Intel hasn't been there with AMD before. Remember the Pentium 4 with it's ridiculously deep pipeline and equally ridiculous branch prediction failure rate? Intel got complacent and was more concerned with Ghz than actual performance. AMD pulled ahead.
Then the sleeping giant woke up and where has AMD been for the last 11 years? 2nd place, and usually a distant second.
I'm glad that AMD is putting out a few good products these days - it's been a while. And it keeps everyone honest. I want a strong AMD, because in the end we all win when Intel can't just sit on a silo of laurels; the same way I want a strong Apple *and* Android. Tough competition benefits the customers.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
My thought was if they are celebrating 40 years of x86, HOW THE HELL are they talking about patents? Overall the term of any patent dating 40 years ago should be long gone.
Before I get jumped on, yes they could be talking about certain parts of it added on later, but still it was strange seeing sword rattling like that on a document celebrating 40 year old tech.
It seems that Intel is threatening to use their patents to lock competition out of the market like Qualcomm does. Isn't this against the principles of FRAND?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem here is that Intel has no legal basis to threaten anyone over x86, so instead they are just blowing smoke to scare away investors using the press. Both side know that Intel's x86 patents have expired and AMD owns all the patents for x86_64 which is also known by it's original name AMD64. Since Intel is now powerless, they are reverting back to their old anti-competitive habits.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Buying Windows ? when you can get Linux for Free ?
I'd rather put my gentlemans vegetables in a blender
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
The good news is that this week Freescale's iMX6 was freed - it can boot Android blob-free. It's not a widely popular SoC though, in terms of market share in phones and tablets.
That's all I needed to hear. Kiss Android goodbye!
ARM sells about 14 billion processor a year. Intel sells about 400 million processors a year.
Every device running an ARM processor isn't running an Intel processor.
Tell me again how Intel is going to "wake up". They're fighting AMD for scraps.
1. Intel wants into the mobile market. 2. Intel's attempts with Atom to get into the mobile market go nowhere. 3. Microsoft wants into the mobile market. 4. Microsoft's attempts with Windows RT to get onto ARM architecture go nowhere. 5. Intel can't beat ARM on cost. 6. The Wintel Monopoly. 7. The Wintel Monopoly... no more! 8. Shrinking PC shipments. 9. Android surpasses Windows as world's most installed OS. 10. Windows on ARM. 11. Will that work? Battery life? Performance? Experience? 12. What will Intel do? They still want into mobile.
I dont think there is too much danger of AMD going bust at this point given that both the XBOX One and PlayStation 4 are using custom AMD 64 bit CPUs and AMD Radion GPUs and neither system looks like disappearing anytime soon.
Considering that the information regarding all this talks about current/recent Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, they definitely contain all sorts of stuff you cant control. Qualcomm are worse than Intel when it comes to publishing any kind of technical specs for their processors or providing anything beyond binary blobs for key parts of the system.
On some Snapdragon parts (likely including the high-end stuff involved here) the CPU cores running the "application processor" stuff (e.g. the Linux kernel and Android userland on an Android device) are actually under the control of another bunch of code running on a separate untouchable CPU core (or cores).
Will he get a Golden Parachute or nice severance package?
Too bad TI isn't still making mobile SOCs that can compete with the latest from Qualcomm, the TI OMAP CPU in my Nokia N900 is largely blob free with the exception of the PowerVR GPU drivers and some stuff for the DSP to do hardware accelerated video and the documentation I have seen for it is extremely comprehensive for the most part.
I like how Microsoft labels win32 as legacy, yet even though their app store is 5 years old now, nobody uses it or the crappy apps it has. Likewise, Windows 10 S will surely flop because Microsoft's crap app ecosystem is wanted by nobody.
Windows 10 on ARM would hurt them as much as it would Intel.
Because AMD has ARM chips in its portfolio. A lateral move is ok for them.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If this catches on, I'm looking forward to the flood of cheap Windows 10 tablets that will have support dropped after two years because the BSP for their SoC is no longer being updated or maintained.
Granted, I expect Microsoft to do marginally better with Windows on ARM than Google does with Android because Microsoft has much tighter control over the Windows ecosystem. But at the end of the day, if you want to play in the ARM playground, you're going to get burned by short chip life cycles.
On the other hand, I could be completely wrong. Please, someone prove me wring. I'm tired of being a cynic.
DEC sold their semi business to Intel as a part of their lawsuit settlement, and that happened a while before Compaq acquired DEC
The issue w/ Windows RT was that applications could only be made available via the Windows Store, in order to avoid any confusion b/w an application bought for Windows 8 that wouldn't then install on RT. The general public is not familiar w/ ARM vs x86, which is why they did that. Here, if one tries to install a Wintel application on Windows 10 for ARM, it'll install, but then run emulated. And that performance is more likely to suck, given the history of better microprocessors before it trying the same thing - particularly DEC on the Alpha.
Instead, Microsoft should encourage vendors to cross compile for both x86 and ARM, so that any tablet/laptop can download the relevant binaries and go from there.
Take that, every English teacher you've ever had from grade 3 onwards.
There's the difference. Calvin is fighting the good fight. Whereas the above sentence is clown-car laser water-canon own-goal toward the cause of youthful creative autonomy.
Advantage, Miss Wormwood.
Well, AMD nearly went bankrupt in 2016 despite the XB1/PS4 (they lost half a billion dollars that year and had less than a billion in cash at one point). They're doing a bit better now, and Ryzen is going to be a big boost, but they're not completely out of the woods yet.
Ironic, but Microsoft does ship Linux. Ubuntu is in the Windows Store, and Azure has Linux distro options.
If we ignore anything they've done to x86 in the past 20 years, that basically puts us at the 486 instruction set, since even MMX was only 1997.
Yes.
Smartphones have what is called a "baseband". It is the part that manages all radio functions, plus others. It can be separate or integrated in the main SoC. In the case of the Snapdragon 835, it is integrated.
The baseband is actually a complete system with its own CPU, RAM and OS, with complete access to the rest of the system. It is completely closed. It also cannot be disabled because it is essential to the phone normal functions, overwriting its firmware may cause a hard brick.
Intel AMT is small fry by comparison.
Did you Google? https://clearlinux.org/
They might...if we start seeing x86_64 emulators. We're only seeing 32-bit Intel emulators.
"In the early days of our microprocessor business, Intel needed to enforce its patent rights against various companies including United Microelectronics Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix Corporation, Chips and Technologies, Via Technologies, and, most recently, Transmeta Corporation. Enforcement actions have been unnecessary in recent years because other companies have respected Intel’s intellectual property rights."
Actually, enforcement became unnecessary as most were driven out of the chip business, or out of business entirely.
How can application developers help undermine such rent-seeking behavior on the application side? Are cross-OS, cross-instruction-set fat-binaries a thing?
That's fine, but nobody buys it that way, opting for steam 98% of the time instead.
Canonical partners with Micro$oft:
Micro$oft joins the Linux Foundation
The Ubuntu phone/tablet:
Micro$oft and Intel in mobile market:
These are'nt just rantings of a madman, though as a Linux user, I am pissed. If you check the dates, you can see that as soon as Micro$oft found a better way to get into the mobile market, using Intel to help, they somehow got Ubuntu Touch to the shanty state it is in now. It has nothing to do with demand because I remember how badly all us Linux users wanted it to be a success and all the orders made for tablets. Matter of fact, for a short period, more people were ordering Ubuntu-based mobile devices than Window$ phones. They saw this and waved their magic patent wand with manufacturers and in my eyes made Canonical its "bitch," which is why I will never use anything Ubuntu-based ever again; I cannot trust them anymore, which is sad because I really like Xubuntu. Micro$oft is the king of backstabbing and will just do the same to Intel, placing them in their "emulator" pool they got going on now so they can maintain their "Big Brother" cloud system.