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With Intel skipping a 'tick' and fabs like Samsung and TSMC catching up in process, ARM-based CPUs are competitive in performance with the low end of Intel's de

With Intel skipping a 'tick' and fabs like Samsung and TSMC catching up in process, ARM-based CPUs are competitive in performance with the low end of Intel's desktop lines up to Core i5 - and use less power. There seems to be a window for ARM to make inroads into servers, in addition to low-end laptops like Chromebooks. The trend of mobile devices replacing desktops for more and more tasks (> 50% of emails read on mobile, only 10% of people desktop-only) bodes poorly for Wintel. One could foresee an era where one can add a keyboard and big screen to a mobile device like an iPad Pro, and most folks no longer use desktops at all. Phones migrate up to replace desktops, PCs migrate up to the cloud. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/druce-vertes-cfa/the-end-of-the-pc_1_b_8613602.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/druce-vertes-cfa/the-end-of-th...

dogma1138 11y ago
ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks.html http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_tegrak1_preview&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rather than the pure CPU. So far it seems that Intel's bet was correct it will take them just as much time to reduce x86 (Skylake/Core-M, Bay-Trail/Cherry Trail/Willow Trail) power consumption to ARM SOC levels as it would take ARM SOC's to come close to x86 performance, and Intel will still win at the end. Keep in mind that in 2007-2008 Intel was very seriously considering licensing ARM and other technologies to compete in the ultra portable and mobile markets and we are all better off that it didn't do so. Intel now has offerings which are better or comparable to ARM based SOC's without fragmenting the ARM ecosystem even further and with having another avenue of technologies and intellectual property to keep the competition going and to offer an alternative to ARM/RISC with both the ability to streamline transition and having a fall back option which is always needed. An all ARM ecosystem is just as bad (or even worse since unlike x86 it doesn't guarantee compatibility) as a monopolized x86 one. We should also be quite thankful to ARM and it's users as they have been the driving force behind much of Intel's work lately as AMD was not really offering competition since the old Athlon-X64 days. The new Core-M7 offers 2 cores at a boost clock of 3.1ghz, and a 1ghz GPU and beat every ARM SOC out there in terms of performance especially in places where it actually counts while having a TDP of 4.5W which is comparable to high end SOC's like Apple's A9x/A8x and considerably lower than the NVIDIA high end offering although that one blows everything out of the water when it comes to graphical performance as it has desktop GPU core's in it.
- timthorn 11y ago
  The server focussed SOCs shipping currently (none of which are listed in those benchmark links) can have much better performance than Atom. There's a broad spectrum of ARM cores for different markets, and different optimisations that can be applied to SoC design decisions to target a part at different markets.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    The OP was talking about mobile not server SOC's but fine.... The server SOC's also have a power consumption several times greater. So if that's what you want lets look at the Xeon-D performance wise they are very competitive to Intel's discrete CPU's, and beat the AppliedMicro X-Gene 2.4 quite harshly... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-performance-per-watt-server-soc-champion http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...
    - rwmj 11y ago
      The X-Gene 1 was a development platform designed to work out the software bugs (and it's also obsolete now, since it was first produced in 40nm in 2013). Obviously if you compare latest Intel SoC with some 2+ year old dev-kit, the latest Intel looks great! They should compare Xeon with Cavium ThunderX, X-Gene 2/3, AMD Seattle, Qualcomm's latest server SoC or the HiSilicon D0x. http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/HC26-11-day1-epub/HC26.11-4-ARM-Servers-epub/HC26.11.430-X-Gene-Singh-AppMicro-HotChips-2014-v5.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/... http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        Well the Xeon-D 1540 sits just below the E5 in most benchmarks, unfortunately I can't conjure benchmarks out of think air, but you don't seem to be able to do so either (but for all accounts Cavium isn't shipping anything yet, all i could find are press releases that some one said they'll be building servers based on their SOC bot nothing else). I wasn't comparing anything, anantech was they compared an available Intel Xeon-D SOC against a commercially available HP micro-server that was launched 6 months prior so either HP chose to use an "obsolete development platform that was designed to work out software bugs" or that what was available for them at the time. Again I wasn't saying that ARM CPU's are bad, I was saying that anyone that is saying that they currently can beat Intel on either price/performance or performance/wattage across the board is delusional.

dogma1138 11y ago

ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks.html http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_tegrak1_preview&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rather than the pure CPU. So far it seems that Intel's bet was correct it will take them just as much time to reduce x86 (Skylake/Core-M, Bay-Trail/Cherry Trail/Willow Trail) power consumption to ARM SOC levels as it would take ARM SOC's to come close to x86 performance, and Intel will still win at the end. Keep in mind that in 2007-2008 Intel was very seriously considering licensing ARM and other technologies to compete in the ultra portable and mobile markets and we are all better off that it didn't do so. Intel now has offerings which are better or comparable to ARM based SOC's without fragmenting the ARM ecosystem even further and with having another avenue of technologies and intellectual property to keep the competition going and to offer an alternative to ARM/RISC with both the ability to streamline transition and having a fall back option which is always needed. An all ARM ecosystem is just as bad (or even worse since unlike x86 it doesn't guarantee compatibility) as a monopolized x86 one. We should also be quite thankful to ARM and it's users as they have been the driving force behind much of Intel's work lately as AMD was not really offering competition since the old Athlon-X64 days. The new Core-M7 offers 2 cores at a boost clock of 3.1ghz, and a 1ghz GPU and beat every ARM SOC out there in terms of performance especially in places where it actually counts while having a TDP of 4.5W which is comparable to high end SOC's like Apple's A9x/A8x and considerably lower than the NVIDIA high end offering although that one blows everything out of the water when it comes to graphical performance as it has desktop GPU core's in it.

timthorn 11y ago
The server focussed SOCs shipping currently (none of which are listed in those benchmark links) can have much better performance than Atom. There's a broad spectrum of ARM cores for different markets, and different optimisations that can be applied to SoC design decisions to target a part at different markets.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  The OP was talking about mobile not server SOC's but fine.... The server SOC's also have a power consumption several times greater. So if that's what you want lets look at the Xeon-D performance wise they are very competitive to Intel's discrete CPU's, and beat the AppliedMicro X-Gene 2.4 quite harshly... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-performance-per-watt-server-soc-champion http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...
  - rwmj 11y ago
    The X-Gene 1 was a development platform designed to work out the software bugs (and it's also obsolete now, since it was first produced in 40nm in 2013). Obviously if you compare latest Intel SoC with some 2+ year old dev-kit, the latest Intel looks great! They should compare Xeon with Cavium ThunderX, X-Gene 2/3, AMD Seattle, Qualcomm's latest server SoC or the HiSilicon D0x. http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/HC26-11-day1-epub/HC26.11-4-ARM-Servers-epub/HC26.11.430-X-Gene-Singh-AppMicro-HotChips-2014-v5.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/... http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Well the Xeon-D 1540 sits just below the E5 in most benchmarks, unfortunately I can't conjure benchmarks out of think air, but you don't seem to be able to do so either (but for all accounts Cavium isn't shipping anything yet, all i could find are press releases that some one said they'll be building servers based on their SOC bot nothing else). I wasn't comparing anything, anantech was they compared an available Intel Xeon-D SOC against a commercially available HP micro-server that was launched 6 months prior so either HP chose to use an "obsolete development platform that was designed to work out software bugs" or that what was available for them at the time. Again I wasn't saying that ARM CPU's are bad, I was saying that anyone that is saying that they currently can beat Intel on either price/performance or performance/wattage across the board is delusional.