4 ms·

Can ARM stand up against rivals Intel and AMD in the server market? Wrong question. If they're pushing into servers, I'd expect ARM to worry more about two thi

by ableal 17y ago

Can ARM stand up against rivals Intel and AMD in the server market? Wrong question. If they're pushing into servers, I'd expect ARM to worry more about two things: - Sun/Oracle Sparc doing DB/web server loads at low power (with IBM Power playing the high-VM-capacity game). - It's not so much the core CPU/ISA, which ends up being a small portion of the chips. It's the expertise in multi-core buses, caches, and all related paraphernalia. Not exactly where ARM have been playing ... Might be that ARM will be happy to let Google/Agnilux work on that, and cooperate on CPU tweaks, keeping the license revenue.

rbanffy 17y ago
I think they are considering doing to x86 servers what x86 servers did to RISC servers. They grab the low-end, get volume and become more competitive. x86 competes by going further in the same direction it is now, which is by becoming faster. Like RISC, they will ultimately be reduced to a niche if they go this route. And that would make me happy. I never liked the 8008 and its offspring. The ARM is much more elegant.
- ippisl 17y ago
  I think things have changed since clayton christensen wrote his book on disruptive innovation. Intel is very much aware of disruptive innovation, and is really trying to compete on the low end, see the celeron processor ,and the efforts intel is putting into lower cost, lower power atom processors .
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    It takes a lot of balls to put a low-margin product to compete with your cash cows. I doubt many Intel execs are willing to sacrifice their short-term bonuses for the survival of the company after they left or retired.
    - ippisl 17y ago
      Clayton christensen, in his book , recommended to assign disruptive innovation projects, to seperate business units.I remember that the celeron development was one of the highest achievement of the israel intel branch. so maybe they implmented christensen's advice.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        IIRC, it was the Pentium M that came from the Israel branch. The first Celerons (again, IIRC) were common Pentium IIs without cache in the processor cartridge.
        ippisl 17y ago
        "What Intel did was set up a separate business unit in Israel down at the low end. They have a product called the Celeron chip which is much cheaper and came in at the low end of the market. " http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~cs671/interview.doc http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~cs671/interview.doc
  - hga 17y ago
    Kudos for the theme of your analysis, but is Intel really serious enough about the Atom? I haven't looked in quite a while, but when I did one of the big problems was that the chipsets they provided were not optimized for low power and consumed more than the processor itself. Have they corrected this, especially for the mobile market? Then there's the question I have WRT to it being a horse race; as I understand it: The Atom is in-order superscalar, 64 bit (all recent versions), faster than anything from ARM and consumes more power. The Cortex A9 is out-of-order, 32 bit, slower than the Atom (don't know how that might play out with ARM 2-4 cores) and of course consumes less power. On a speed/power basis, ARM still wins.
    - ippisl 17y ago
      I don't know about the chipset issue, and yes this is an important point. But the biggest move that points to the seriousness of their approach , is moving to selling ATOM cores at TSMC. selling cores is a low margin business, but it makes sense to enable fast time to market , and high integration, which are important for consumer products. That of course that doesn't mean that intel would win, but i think they seriously try.
      - hga 17y ago
        WHOA! OK, absolutely yes, Intel is deadly serious about this market given that they did that. On the other hand it looks like they've got a customer demand problem with this attempt: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/a-tie-up-between-intel-and-tsmc-fizzles/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/a-tie-up-between-in...; the partnership is on "hiatus" as of the end of February but Intel hasn't given up. And on the third hand, much of the commentary I found on the net suggests that Intel has a disruptive technology problem here. Until they have a few notable successes that may be the way to bet, however hard they are trying.
        ippisl 17y ago
        except for tsmc , intel also works hard on developing it's own SOC: "LG Unveils GW990 Smartphone with Intel's Moorestown Platform " jan2010. so intel has one design win for it's platform. Also they have moorsetown-w which supports windows.i wonder what would a windows capable phone would look like.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > I never liked the 8008 and its offspring. The ARM is much more elegant. I agree very much with you, even the 68K architecture was clean in comparison, and then there is MIPS. But it's been a long time ago when the underlying CPU was visible enough for me to worry about its architecture, the only way I'm aware of it nowadays is by what kind of toolchain I have to use and a few optimization flags.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    It may be buried under layer upon layer of runtime code, but I know it's there. Oh boy... Now I'm getting depressed I have to use a PC... Just thinking it probably has a complete IBM 5150 in its chipset makes me want to wash my hands.
timthorn 17y ago
> It's not so much the core CPU/ISA, which ends up being a small portion of the chips. It's the expertise in multi-core buses, caches, and all related paraphernalia. Not exactly where ARM have been playing ... ARM have been playing in this space for many years now. SoC fabric, such as the AMBA bus design, is a central part of the ARM offering.
- ableal 17y ago
  Thanks for the point. I'm aware of the SoC issues in general - analog bits, etc. I meant high-performance items like 6MB caches, buses like the EV one in Alpha chips (with AMD and Intel descendents), etc. That was my doubt. (self-note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Microcontroller_Bus_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Microcontroller_Bus_Ar...)

by ableal 17y ago

rbanffy 17y ago

I think they are considering doing to x86 servers what x86 servers did to RISC servers. They grab the low-end, get volume and become more competitive. x86 competes by going further in the same direction it is now, which is by becoming faster. Like RISC, they will ultimately be reduced to a niche if they go this route. And that would make me happy. I never liked the 8008 and its offspring. The ARM is much more elegant.

ippisl 17y ago
I think things have changed since clayton christensen wrote his book on disruptive innovation. Intel is very much aware of disruptive innovation, and is really trying to compete on the low end, see the celeron processor ,and the efforts intel is putting into lower cost, lower power atom processors .
- rbanffy 17y ago
  It takes a lot of balls to put a low-margin product to compete with your cash cows. I doubt many Intel execs are willing to sacrifice their short-term bonuses for the survival of the company after they left or retired.
  - ippisl 17y ago
    Clayton christensen, in his book , recommended to assign disruptive innovation projects, to seperate business units.I remember that the celeron development was one of the highest achievement of the israel intel branch. so maybe they implmented christensen's advice.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      IIRC, it was the Pentium M that came from the Israel branch. The first Celerons (again, IIRC) were common Pentium IIs without cache in the processor cartridge.
      - ippisl 17y ago
        "What Intel did was set up a separate business unit in Israel down at the low end. They have a product called the Celeron chip which is much cheaper and came in at the low end of the market. " http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~cs671/interview.doc http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~cs671/interview.doc
- hga 17y ago
  Kudos for the theme of your analysis, but is Intel really serious enough about the Atom? I haven't looked in quite a while, but when I did one of the big problems was that the chipsets they provided were not optimized for low power and consumed more than the processor itself. Have they corrected this, especially for the mobile market? Then there's the question I have WRT to it being a horse race; as I understand it: The Atom is in-order superscalar, 64 bit (all recent versions), faster than anything from ARM and consumes more power. The Cortex A9 is out-of-order, 32 bit, slower than the Atom (don't know how that might play out with ARM 2-4 cores) and of course consumes less power. On a speed/power basis, ARM still wins.
  - ippisl 17y ago
    I don't know about the chipset issue, and yes this is an important point. But the biggest move that points to the seriousness of their approach , is moving to selling ATOM cores at TSMC. selling cores is a low margin business, but it makes sense to enable fast time to market , and high integration, which are important for consumer products. That of course that doesn't mean that intel would win, but i think they seriously try.
    - hga 17y ago
      WHOA! OK, absolutely yes, Intel is deadly serious about this market given that they did that. On the other hand it looks like they've got a customer demand problem with this attempt: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/a-tie-up-between-intel-and-tsmc-fizzles/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/a-tie-up-between-in...; the partnership is on "hiatus" as of the end of February but Intel hasn't given up. And on the third hand, much of the commentary I found on the net suggests that Intel has a disruptive technology problem here. Until they have a few notable successes that may be the way to bet, however hard they are trying.
      - ippisl 17y ago
        except for tsmc , intel also works hard on developing it's own SOC: "LG Unveils GW990 Smartphone with Intel's Moorestown Platform " jan2010. so intel has one design win for it's platform. Also they have moorsetown-w which supports windows.i wonder what would a windows capable phone would look like.
jacquesm 17y ago
> I never liked the 8008 and its offspring. The ARM is much more elegant. I agree very much with you, even the 68K architecture was clean in comparison, and then there is MIPS. But it's been a long time ago when the underlying CPU was visible enough for me to worry about its architecture, the only way I'm aware of it nowadays is by what kind of toolchain I have to use and a few optimization flags.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  It may be buried under layer upon layer of runtime code, but I know it's there. Oh boy... Now I'm getting depressed I have to use a PC... Just thinking it probably has a complete IBM 5150 in its chipset makes me want to wash my hands.

timthorn 17y ago

> It's not so much the core CPU/ISA, which ends up being a small portion of the chips. It's the expertise in multi-core buses, caches, and all related paraphernalia. Not exactly where ARM have been playing ... ARM have been playing in this space for many years now. SoC fabric, such as the AMBA bus design, is a central part of the ARM offering.

ableal 17y ago
Thanks for the point. I'm aware of the SoC issues in general - analog bits, etc. I meant high-performance items like 6MB caches, buses like the EV one in Alpha chips (with AMD and Intel descendents), etc. That was my doubt. (self-note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Microcontroller_Bus_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Microcontroller_Bus_Ar...)