8 ms·

Yesterday: ARM in your phones Today: ARM in your toys (RasPI, Nintendo Switch) Tomorrow: ARM in your servers Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop? The iMac

Yesterday: ARM in your phones Today: ARM in your toys (RasPI, Nintendo Switch) Tomorrow: ARM in your servers Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop? The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-siri/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s... - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead? I, for one, welcome our new ARM overlords.

melling 9y ago
ARM has been in Chromebooks for a while. 90% of the desktop has been Microsoft Windows for about 2 decades so it's really up to Microsoft to try again. Ideally, Android and iOS will evolve so phones and tablets replace the desktop for more people.
- nine_k 9y ago
  ChromeOS is already capable of running Android apps. What makes a laptop a laptop is a decent keyboard and a reasonably large screen. There is a fundamental mismatch between the screen size comfortable for the eyes, keyboard size comfortable for typing, and device size comfortable for holding in hand. Because of this, I don't think phones and laptops will ever converge; tablets and laptops are already actively converging, though.
  - melling 9y ago
    So, you simply need to add an optional large screen, keyboard, and mouse to your phone. It has already been done. Now it just needs to be done a little better? https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
    - MarkyC4 9y ago
      See also: Microsoft Continuum, Motorola Atrix (probably the first Android that turned into a laptop)
      - Risinia 9y ago
        Yay, and with Emui and DeX growing up, it seems to be next revolution about smartphones replacing your PC's. For instance, the Mirabook from Miraxess : https://miraxess.com/samsung-note-8-laptop/ https://miraxess.com/samsung-note-8-laptop/
monocasa 9y ago
To be fair, ARM has been in Mobile Nintendos since 2001. And laptops have had ARM coprocessors for quite a while. Power management controllers, disk controllers, NICs, etc.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Hey yeah, I remember my first ARM programming was on the NDS' two 66/33MHz processors. I think it basically dedicated one to each screen, fun stuff. Are the laptop co-processors you're talking about the 'R' lines? I know 'M' is for low-power mobile stuff and 'A' is for "Real Computer" stuff, but I was never too clear on the 'Realtime' lines.
  - monocasa 9y ago
    I've seen all three in that use case (and ARM11 cores and earlier where they didn't really make the distinction as overtly). Mainly R and M though. But the distinction is something like: M - Thumb2 only, simple two or three stage pipelines typically. Optional everything like selectable (at chip design time) multiply unit that's either 1 or 32 cycles of latency. MPU (if present) only adds protection information, but doesn't remap memory like a full MMU. An ascetic M has something like 12k gates which is insanely low for a 32 bit processor. It mainly competes with AVRs, 8051s, and maybe really low end MIPS if anyone is still using R3000s. In a laptop, I've seen them in power management controllers, bluetooth, and sometimes in WiFi. R - More powerful than M. Runs Thumb and A32. Clear, deterministic. In order pipeline, tightly coupled memory, and an MPU so that you can still run hard real time cycle counting kind of code twiddling GPIOs carefully, but then also running DSP on the results afterward. I've seen a lot of these in hard disk controllers. They're sort of spiritual successors to the ARM9/7 you know from the DS. Competes with most MIPS. A - Sort of all over the place. Some are 32bit, some are both 32 and 64. Has a real, page table MMU. Typically run real, big boy kernels like Linux. Competes with Atoms, higher end MIPS (see a trend?) and POWER at the very high end if you squint enough. Typically they're complex enough that you can't cycle count and get deterministic results (longer pipelines, TLB that'll refill 'randomly', cache refills, more complex branch predictor), but give higher overall performance. I think I've seen an A8 as a sound processor? Typically though they're not really a coprocessor, the gate count is too high to make sense.
AceJohnny2 9y ago
> The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s.. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s.... - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead? The current MBP already has ARM: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-driven-macbooks-have-a-secondary-arm-processor-that-runs-touch-id-and-security/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-driven-ma... But this is similar to ARM (or MIPS or whatever) cores that already exist in all sort of peripherals (what's in your Wifi chipset? Bluetooth? SMC?), so it's nothing new. I'm dismissive of any talk of switching conventional Intel-based desktop/laptops to ARM. It's not equivalent to Apple's switch from PPC to Intel, because in that case there was a clear performance advantage. ARM may have the performance-per-watt crown on the low-power end, but Intel maintains the pure-performance lead everywhere else. Conventional desktops still care about performance (and if you don't, likely you can switch to a Chromebook), and there aren't any advantages to switching a heavily Intel-ISA-dependent desktop ecosystem (macOS/Windows) to ARM.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  "Intel maintains the pure-performance lead everywhere else" The point of the article is that ThunderX is claimed to be faster than Xeon Gold for HPC applications.
  - monocasa 9y ago
    But no where near single threaded performance.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    I see one HPC application where ThunderX 30% is faster (TeaLeaf). For the others shown, it's neck-and-neck with the Xeon. Reaching parity with Xeon is admittedly impressive even on this subset of applications, but it doesn't look consistently faster based on the information presented. I'm personally interested in how this system stacks up for quantum chemistry (GAMESS, NWChem, PySCF, Psi4...) and I hope that more benchmarks will become available soon.
wyldfire 9y ago
> Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop? And it's not just coprocessors, next year we will see real ARM SoCs - https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windows-10-arm-laptops-battery-life https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windo... Next year^H^H^H^Hdecade: RISC-V in your ______
- grawlinson 9y ago
  I'd love to see RISC-V become a huge presence, but ARM IP seems a lot more refined & hassle-free. A bit similar to Linux/FOSS not having any decent CAD alternative to proprietary ones.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    OpenSCAD is very good, having designed quite a few things using it, and FreeCAD is quite serviceable for working with legacy shapes made in other CAD software. The ecosystem has definitely improved thanks to 3D printing.
nine_k 9y ago
Finally, a chance to have a desktop CPU without a black-box coprocessor like Intel ME? (A quick web search did not find anything definitive about its presence / absence in Cavium.)
- hawski 9y ago
  Every ARM SoC is already a black-box containing black-boxes. That's one of the reasons why almost all SoCs are on some ancient version of Linux kernel. They will never be mainlined.
pm90 9y ago
I'm very happy about this development as well. Especially looking at Intel's fiasco with ME... I just don't trust proprietary chip makers anymore. And yes, I am willing to trade in performance, for more security. My MacBook should be every bit as power conserving as my iPhone, perhaps with a GPU for multi screen and playing videos.
- hawski 9y ago
  Who will make the SoC if not the proprietary chip maker? ARM does not make this thing better.
  - pm90 9y ago
    I guess my point is that the market would punish anyone for being foolish enough to do that in the form of competitors without egregious backdoors. Whereas with Intel... it is hard if not impossible to design/make competitors (AMD being possibly the sole exception)
hawski 9y ago
Next week + 1 day: your laptop is no longer supported Which ARM SoC has mainlined drivers in Linux kernel? I fear that the ARM trend will only help to make the the e-waste mountain higher.
- aseipp 9y ago
  ARM64, at least, is moving towards UEFI/ACPI for booting/peripheral support, so ideally a lot of things will "just work" once people are shipping mobos/silicon with it enabled (and they already are). That said it's unclear what the volume on those parts will be once higher-grade CPUs come out, which will impact pricing/availability. And newer parts are going to be necessary for competitive performance/power. If the only place you can get a 14nm Thunder X2 is some high-end SuperMicro workstation, it'll be somewhat limiting in the end, anyway. (You can buy a Thunder X1 prebuilt desktop on the order of $1500 USD right now, at least.) ARMv7 of course is a different bag of worms; Mali tends to ruin everything. But if you can avoid it, a lot of systems can get by with upstream U-Boot and upstream Linux... You can even get some cheap Asus chromebook laptops that can run libreboot and upstream everything (including WiFi if you buy a dongle.)
- andreiw 9y ago
  That’s exactly why the Arm servers adopt the same specs or functional equivs to x86. A single binary distribution of an OS will boot on any SBSA compatible machine - because all the weird bits are hidden through ACPI, UEFI and PSCI. No BSPs. I’d go as far as saying Arm servers are compatible to x86 designs at a platform level (eg. how PCIe and config space are wired up, how caches and DMA work, NUMA, SMP, MSI(X), and so on....
  - hawski 9y ago
    Is there any hope that it could be used to some extent on smartphones? Or maybe there is a similar effort in that space? I understand that some works may be hard to miniaturize.
    - andreiw 9y ago
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I had the idea about a beachhead too but I think it would be different. What if you had an A10 to do all of the iPhone features that you would want on your laptop or desktop. Then use the Intel for the performance . You would increase battery life and both platforms would have feature parity (something I would like a bunch ).
pvg 9y ago
ARM's already been in most of those places, in nearly reverse order of your timeline. It started as a desktop CPU, was then in a PDA (Newton), game console (3DO) and phone (Nokia) - all of them by 1997.
mtgx 9y ago
Not just for Macs, but for full Windows 10 laptops, too (soon): https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windows-10-arm-laptops-battery-life https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windo...
r00fus 9y ago
Unless the iMac Pro (unlike the current MacBookPro) has a generally addressable ARM core, it's not news that they're using ARM for the purpose of overall ARM dominance. It's like when people were all excited they were testing LiquidMetal in their SIM ejection tool (not sure if that was apocryphal).
leohutson 9y ago
Someone should make a discrete gpu with an arm cpu core or 50 sharing the same memory and maybe ssd. Then you have a really nice hierarchy of parallelism, 2 fast arm cores, 10 medium, 50 slow, then gpu. Would be great for stuff like multigrid methods where you are balancing parallelism and latency: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/high-performance-geometric-multi-grid-gpu-acceleration/ https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/high-performance-...
fh973 9y ago
Even cheap SD cards have been running on ARM for a while https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

melling 9y ago

ARM has been in Chromebooks for a while. 90% of the desktop has been Microsoft Windows for about 2 decades so it's really up to Microsoft to try again. Ideally, Android and iOS will evolve so phones and tablets replace the desktop for more people.

nine_k 9y ago
ChromeOS is already capable of running Android apps. What makes a laptop a laptop is a decent keyboard and a reasonably large screen. There is a fundamental mismatch between the screen size comfortable for the eyes, keyboard size comfortable for typing, and device size comfortable for holding in hand. Because of this, I don't think phones and laptops will ever converge; tablets and laptops are already actively converging, though.
- melling 9y ago
  So, you simply need to add an optional large screen, keyboard, and mouse to your phone. It has already been done. Now it just needs to be done a little better? https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
  - MarkyC4 9y ago
    See also: Microsoft Continuum, Motorola Atrix (probably the first Android that turned into a laptop)
    - Risinia 9y ago
      Yay, and with Emui and DeX growing up, it seems to be next revolution about smartphones replacing your PC's. For instance, the Mirabook from Miraxess : https://miraxess.com/samsung-note-8-laptop/ https://miraxess.com/samsung-note-8-laptop/

monocasa 9y ago

To be fair, ARM has been in Mobile Nintendos since 2001. And laptops have had ARM coprocessors for quite a while. Power management controllers, disk controllers, NICs, etc.

leggomylibro 9y ago
Hey yeah, I remember my first ARM programming was on the NDS' two 66/33MHz processors. I think it basically dedicated one to each screen, fun stuff. Are the laptop co-processors you're talking about the 'R' lines? I know 'M' is for low-power mobile stuff and 'A' is for "Real Computer" stuff, but I was never too clear on the 'Realtime' lines.
- monocasa 9y ago
  I've seen all three in that use case (and ARM11 cores and earlier where they didn't really make the distinction as overtly). Mainly R and M though. But the distinction is something like: M - Thumb2 only, simple two or three stage pipelines typically. Optional everything like selectable (at chip design time) multiply unit that's either 1 or 32 cycles of latency. MPU (if present) only adds protection information, but doesn't remap memory like a full MMU. An ascetic M has something like 12k gates which is insanely low for a 32 bit processor. It mainly competes with AVRs, 8051s, and maybe really low end MIPS if anyone is still using R3000s. In a laptop, I've seen them in power management controllers, bluetooth, and sometimes in WiFi. R - More powerful than M. Runs Thumb and A32. Clear, deterministic. In order pipeline, tightly coupled memory, and an MPU so that you can still run hard real time cycle counting kind of code twiddling GPIOs carefully, but then also running DSP on the results afterward. I've seen a lot of these in hard disk controllers. They're sort of spiritual successors to the ARM9/7 you know from the DS. Competes with most MIPS. A - Sort of all over the place. Some are 32bit, some are both 32 and 64. Has a real, page table MMU. Typically run real, big boy kernels like Linux. Competes with Atoms, higher end MIPS (see a trend?) and POWER at the very high end if you squint enough. Typically they're complex enough that you can't cycle count and get deterministic results (longer pipelines, TLB that'll refill 'randomly', cache refills, more complex branch predictor), but give higher overall performance. I think I've seen an A8 as a sound processor? Typically though they're not really a coprocessor, the gate count is too high to make sense.

AceJohnny2 9y ago

> The iMac Pro will have an ARM co-processor: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s.. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/19/imac-pro-a10-chip-hey-s.... - Arguably for "Hey Siri" and other mobile-inspired functionality, but wouldn't it be interesting if it were also an ARM-on-the-desktop beachhead? The current MBP already has ARM: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-driven-macbooks-have-a-secondary-arm-processor-that-runs-touch-id-and-security/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/apples-new-intel-driven-ma... But this is similar to ARM (or MIPS or whatever) cores that already exist in all sort of peripherals (what's in your Wifi chipset? Bluetooth? SMC?), so it's nothing new. I'm dismissive of any talk of switching conventional Intel-based desktop/laptops to ARM. It's not equivalent to Apple's switch from PPC to Intel, because in that case there was a clear performance advantage. ARM may have the performance-per-watt crown on the low-power end, but Intel maintains the pure-performance lead everywhere else. Conventional desktops still care about performance (and if you don't, likely you can switch to a Chromebook), and there aren't any advantages to switching a heavily Intel-ISA-dependent desktop ecosystem (macOS/Windows) to ARM.

bryanlarsen 9y ago
"Intel maintains the pure-performance lead everywhere else" The point of the article is that ThunderX is claimed to be faster than Xeon Gold for HPC applications.
- monocasa 9y ago
  But no where near single threaded performance.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  I see one HPC application where ThunderX 30% is faster (TeaLeaf). For the others shown, it's neck-and-neck with the Xeon. Reaching parity with Xeon is admittedly impressive even on this subset of applications, but it doesn't look consistently faster based on the information presented. I'm personally interested in how this system stacks up for quantum chemistry (GAMESS, NWChem, PySCF, Psi4...) and I hope that more benchmarks will become available soon.

wyldfire 9y ago

> Next week: ARM in your desktop/laptop? And it's not just coprocessors, next year we will see real ARM SoCs - https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windows-10-arm-laptops-battery-life https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windo... Next year^H^H^H^Hdecade: RISC-V in your ______

grawlinson 9y ago
I'd love to see RISC-V become a huge presence, but ARM IP seems a lot more refined & hassle-free. A bit similar to Linux/FOSS not having any decent CAD alternative to proprietary ones.
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  OpenSCAD is very good, having designed quite a few things using it, and FreeCAD is quite serviceable for working with legacy shapes made in other CAD software. The ecosystem has definitely improved thanks to 3D printing.

nine_k 9y ago

Finally, a chance to have a desktop CPU without a black-box coprocessor like Intel ME? (A quick web search did not find anything definitive about its presence / absence in Cavium.)

hawski 9y ago
Every ARM SoC is already a black-box containing black-boxes. That's one of the reasons why almost all SoCs are on some ancient version of Linux kernel. They will never be mainlined.

pm90 9y ago

I'm very happy about this development as well. Especially looking at Intel's fiasco with ME... I just don't trust proprietary chip makers anymore. And yes, I am willing to trade in performance, for more security. My MacBook should be every bit as power conserving as my iPhone, perhaps with a GPU for multi screen and playing videos.

hawski 9y ago
Who will make the SoC if not the proprietary chip maker? ARM does not make this thing better.
- pm90 9y ago
  I guess my point is that the market would punish anyone for being foolish enough to do that in the form of competitors without egregious backdoors. Whereas with Intel... it is hard if not impossible to design/make competitors (AMD being possibly the sole exception)

hawski 9y ago

Next week + 1 day: your laptop is no longer supported Which ARM SoC has mainlined drivers in Linux kernel? I fear that the ARM trend will only help to make the the e-waste mountain higher.

aseipp 9y ago
ARM64, at least, is moving towards UEFI/ACPI for booting/peripheral support, so ideally a lot of things will "just work" once people are shipping mobos/silicon with it enabled (and they already are). That said it's unclear what the volume on those parts will be once higher-grade CPUs come out, which will impact pricing/availability. And newer parts are going to be necessary for competitive performance/power. If the only place you can get a 14nm Thunder X2 is some high-end SuperMicro workstation, it'll be somewhat limiting in the end, anyway. (You can buy a Thunder X1 prebuilt desktop on the order of $1500 USD right now, at least.) ARMv7 of course is a different bag of worms; Mali tends to ruin everything. But if you can avoid it, a lot of systems can get by with upstream U-Boot and upstream Linux... You can even get some cheap Asus chromebook laptops that can run libreboot and upstream everything (including WiFi if you buy a dongle.)
andreiw 9y ago
That’s exactly why the Arm servers adopt the same specs or functional equivs to x86. A single binary distribution of an OS will boot on any SBSA compatible machine - because all the weird bits are hidden through ACPI, UEFI and PSCI. No BSPs. I’d go as far as saying Arm servers are compatible to x86 designs at a platform level (eg. how PCIe and config space are wired up, how caches and DMA work, NUMA, SMP, MSI(X), and so on....
- hawski 9y ago
  Is there any hope that it could be used to some extent on smartphones? Or maybe there is a similar effort in that space? I understand that some works may be hard to miniaturize.
  - andreiw 9y ago

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I had the idea about a beachhead too but I think it would be different. What if you had an A10 to do all of the iPhone features that you would want on your laptop or desktop. Then use the Intel for the performance . You would increase battery life and both platforms would have feature parity (something I would like a bunch ).

pvg 9y ago

ARM's already been in most of those places, in nearly reverse order of your timeline. It started as a desktop CPU, was then in a PDA (Newton), game console (3DO) and phone (Nokia) - all of them by 1997.

mtgx 9y ago

Not just for Macs, but for full Windows 10 laptops, too (soon): https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windows-10-arm-laptops-battery-life https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16495010/microsoft-windo...

r00fus 9y ago

Unless the iMac Pro (unlike the current MacBookPro) has a generally addressable ARM core, it's not news that they're using ARM for the purpose of overall ARM dominance. It's like when people were all excited they were testing LiquidMetal in their SIM ejection tool (not sure if that was apocryphal).

leohutson 9y ago

Someone should make a discrete gpu with an arm cpu core or 50 sharing the same memory and maybe ssd. Then you have a really nice hierarchy of parallelism, 2 fast arm cores, 10 medium, 50 slow, then gpu. Would be great for stuff like multigrid methods where you are balancing parallelism and latency: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/high-performance-geometric-multi-grid-gpu-acceleration/ https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/high-performance-...

fh973 9y ago

Even cheap SD cards have been running on ARM for a while https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554