16 ms·

Arm Announces Client CPU Roadmap For Laptops

• lx3459683 8y ago
  Is this the beginning of the end for x86?
  • ianai 8y ago
    I doubt it. But competition is sorely needed.
  • reddotX 8y ago
    yes
  • kyriakos 8y ago
    Probably not. Arm is power efficient but still x86 performance is ahead. At some point you need a balance between battery life and performance.
    • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
      • wtetzner 8y ago
        Right, but Intel CPUs are used in more than laptops. I don't know if Intel's days are numbered or not, but I don't think this alone would be enough.
      • monocasa 8y ago
        iPods could gain market share from marketing and consumer focused industrial design. ARM cores don't have the same way out.
        • mkhalil 8y ago
          Woah, fatal_error. Does "Intel Inside" sound familiar? That's because it worked amazingly well, and people chose Intel over AMD back in the day just because they "felt" better about it. Some even chose it because they didn't want to get AMD shamed ("Aw poor person; they could only a afford an AMD."). Not saying Intel CPU lineup wasn't better than AMD's product, (especially at the height of the marketing program when laptops used to have "Intel Inside" stickers), but a lot of people didn't even bother comparing. They just chose Intel-based computers. And that's the story of how so many people I know ended up buying a PC with a crappy Celeron* (I know, I know, the new ones are better). Sure, CPUs are harder than iPods to market to consumers. Most haven't a clue what ARM Cortex-A7 is. But, that could be the issue. They need to step up their brand identity. They also should probably tell people that ARM doesn't actually make hardware for consumers. They just design the architecture and license that design to silicon manufactures. Most people knew they were buying an Intel. Most people don't know they bought an ARM. They could do better. *: I assume some bought them because the salesman at Best Buy said "dude, Intel's are what you want. AMDs are slow."
          • monocasa 8y ago
            Intel has ~60x the revenue of ARM and is already a known brand with the public. If it gets into a marketing slugging match, Intel wins hands down.
            • matwood 8y ago
              I'm not sure that type of marketing will happen again though. Since then, computers have gone further down the path of being an appliance. What's inside matters less than what it can do. If Apple releases a MacBook with 1-5 days of battery life, no one will care what's inside.
              • monocasa 8y ago
                I agree, I don't think it will. It just doesn't make sense.
            • 8y ago
    • dsr_ 8y ago
      If everything goes right for ARM, next year's CPU line should be single-core competitive against Intel's laptop line; the year after, ARM could be ahead. Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area. Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.
      • dman 8y ago
        Just built a 64 core workstation based on AMD Epyc cpus, seeing how fast my simulation workloads run on it brings a smile to my face.
        • effie 8y ago
          I can appreciate the fun to be had with so many core cpu, but did you actually measure the performance? According to Passmark, both single and multithread performance of EPYC is very poor [1][2]. Passmark database is years in building and very informative, but I think for EPYC that is an erroneous result. Could you run Passmark benchmark on your rig to get another data point public? [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7501&id=3153 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7501&id=31... [2] Compare that with performance and price of something like E5-2670 from 2012: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+%40+2.60GHz&id=1220 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+...
          • dman 8y ago
            Will give that a try tonight. Have to warn you that right now 1 of my DIMM was bad, so the system is running with only 15 DIMMS (which is an unsupported config) so the results might be suboptimal until I receive a new DIMM from the seller.
            • effie 8y ago
              That's great, looking forward to the results. But, there's no rush. If you'd like to measure today anyway, please just make sure the result doesn't get reported to Passmark database so as not to spoil the small dataset with a biased result. Good luck with the replacement, hope it will stay solid from now on.
    • mkozlows 8y ago
      Literally exactly what Arm is talking about in this roadmap.
    • Symmetry 8y ago
      You can't really look at power and performance in isolation, given that you can trade one for the other by modifying their clock speeds. It would be better to say that from the milliwatt range to 20W socket draw or so ARM is more performance and current x86 designs are more performant above 20W.
  • bsder 8y ago
    Doubtful. Performance generally corresponds to active area and, hence, power. So, for ARM to become as performant as x86 means they wind up burning the same area and power. That having been said, breaking a monoculture would be welcome, especially given how cavalier Intel is about security. (You will note I didn't say "In light of" with respect to Intel and security. IBM, DEC, etc. have been preaching about the fact that x86 has lousy security for 30+ years. It's just that nobody cared until x86 became a mainframe ... err ... cloud.)
    • tomp 8y ago
      > Performance generally corresponds to active area and, hence, power Then how come ARM won on mobile?
      • gpderetta 8y ago
        x86 has overhead in small low power systems; it didn't help that the initial intel low power products were low-effort garbage.
      • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
        Atom came too late and it wasn't enough to beat ARM. All the other low power players stagnated.
      • pjc50 8y ago
        Dramatically lower performance expectations. Low power Intel is not as good as low power ARM. "High power" ARM competitive with desktop doesn't quite exist yet, although the iPhones are very close (and better than a desktop of a few years ago)
      • bsder 8y ago
        Because an enterprising engineer managed to hand code an assembly language implementation of cellular baseband on ARM thus entrenching ARM as the low cost implementation on a cell phone. After that, ARM expanded outward to run the GUI. In addition, the batteries of the time demanded a specific power envelope. Not many chips had this envelope ... pretty much only ARM , MIPS, and a handful of also rans that you've never heard of. Once ARM got going, network effects took over. There is no reason you couldn't implement a cell phone on a MIPS core, for example, at this point except for network effects.
  • Symmetry 8y ago
    Maybe. Traditionally it's hard for companies to compete with much cheaper but slightly less performant rivals. That's the whole idea behind "Disruptive Innovation." When x86 came out it was the cheap knockoff that everybody could afford and it eventually ended up eating it's way into workstations and servers as its scale let it pour more engineering resources in. ARM may be achieving that sort of scale advantage over x86 but its fragmented nature makes the story more complex.
  • scj 8y ago
    I used an ARM Chromebook with Linux installed for about 2 years. YMMV, but VLC seemed to not work anywhere near as well as it does on the x86 (in terms of playback and codec availability). Good battery life though.
• transpute 8y ago
  Will the new CPUs implement DRTM (dynamic root of trust, similar to Intel TXT) for Windows 10 SystemGuard? This appears to be planned for Qualcomm Arm CPUs that support Windows 10 and x86 emulation. https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/04/19/introducing-windows-defender-system-guard-runtime-attestation/ https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2018/04/19/... > "Windows Defender System Guard runtime attestation, which is built into the core Windows operating system, will soon be delivered in all editions of Windows. Windows Defender System Guard runtime attestation, like Credential Guard, takes advantage of the same hardware-rooted security technologies in virtualization-based security (VBS) to mitigate attacks in software."
  • tomp 8y ago
    What's the benefit of hardware-based security tech? Is it actually doing anything special, or just doing what security software is doing, but in hardware?
    • 21 8y ago
      Software based is very vulnerable to the evil maid attack. BTW, Google uses hardware-based security on all of their servers: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/google_reveals_its_servers_all_contain_custom_security_silicon/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/google_reveals_its_...
      • tomp 8y ago
        Ok, so you move from the "evil maid" reinstalling the OS to having to replace the CPU/whole computer. Yeah that definitely looks like an advantage.
        • deleted 8y ago
          [deleted]
        • bennofs 8y ago
          Yes but you can detect that. The enclave can sign a statement that you could verify with a public key for that enclave. So if you replace the hardware there is no way to do that anymore as you cannot extract the private key from the original enclave.
• baybal2 8y ago
  I'm expecting first comments in spirit "without Windows it's dead on arrival." To them¸ I tell that dozens of makers of ARM laptops in China could not be wrong manufacturing a product at huge profit for over a decade (yes, the netbook wave has ceased much in the Western world, but the need for cheap, near disposable machine that can send email and read simple websites is still around) Cheap laptops made on prehistoric Via Wondermedia chips are made by tons and are flooding places like Africa and India https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_en&CatId=&SearchText=arm+laptop https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...
  • armitron 8y ago
    The vast majority of phones, tablets, and IoT embedded devices do not run Windows and are not tied to x86 ecosystems. Achieving desktop-class performance on these platforms is indeed a major disruption and I don't see Intel being able to compete. Game over.
  • Certhas 8y ago
    From the press release: > Windows 10 systems powered by Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs are already available from ASUS, Lenovo, HP, and Samsung have also announced they will join the mix as well. E.g.: https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/30/asus-novago-review/?guccounter=1 https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/30/asus-novago-review/?gucc...
    • wyldfire 8y ago
      It's interesting, Qualcomm brands these as "always on, always connected" and I didn't quite get what that meant until recently. It truly means that these are almost more like phones/tablets than traditional laptops. Closing the lid does not halt the OS and put the CPU into a low-power mode, just like your phone it only blanks the display. So your "apps" (programs) can still execute. Great that there's minimal latency to checking email or similar stuff.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Without Windows? Are people genuinely not aware of this? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/
• raverbashing 8y ago
  I wonder if they (ok, maybe not them, they're ip only) will deliver the 7nm / 5nm processes
  • monocasa 8y ago
    In practice, ARM works very closely with the foundaries despite not selling chips. A process agnostic dump and run won't let you hit the perf that you'd expect.
  • baybal2 8y ago
    They have physical IP with verified, fab specific implementations for most of their cores. The press release state that the coming cores are also covered by that program.
• martin_bech 8y ago
  If I had the balls, I would be shorting Intel so hard right now..
  • bufferoverflow 8y ago
    I wouldn't. The computing power requirements are growing exponentially, and Intel is the biggest player with the most RnD money. Server CPUs are mostly Intel. Laptop CPUs are mostly Intel. Desktop CPUs are mostly Intel.
    • martin_bech 8y ago
      I get that, and the requirements for cloud vendors, will most likely keep growing. But Intel has already lost and even given up on mobile cpus/socs. If they loose the laptop space, desktop will not be far off. I can easily see them loosing the laptop space, if arm designs kan win on price and energy efficiency, and match them on low-mid performance.
      • surajrmal 8y ago
        Desktops and laptops are largely flanking verticals to help defend the real money maker, servers. Even if they start to lose laptop/desktop market share, it'll still take a while for someone to loosen their hold on the server market.
        • BuckRogers 8y ago
          So in other words, as he said, he would short Intel because they hold all the market, and have nowhere to go but down. As you said, even if they lose consumer shares, it'll just be a matter of time before someone loosens their hold on servers.
• keithmancuso 8y ago
  Is this the best evidence yet that Arm Macs are, in fact, coming in 2020?
  • IB885588 8y ago
    Wouldn't Apple design the whole thing internally without needing help from Arm? They have a world-class silicon design team in-house.
    • nickik 8y ago
      They would still have to pay for an ARM license, at least outside of RISC-V.
      • gsnedders 8y ago
        Do we know what Apple is paying? Remember that ARM started as a joint project from Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. Apple certainly held a full architecture license from founding, despite not designing one until comparatively recently, which to me implies there's some specific license. I certainly assume they weren't paying large amounts for a license when relatively poor in the 90s despite holding one.
      • CalChris 8y ago
        Apple has an architecture license. I don't know what the terms of the license are but it allows Apple to develop architecture compliant chips. They were one of the original developers of the original ARM and held a large stock position in ARM Ltd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
  • dchest 8y ago
    Apple doesn't use Arm-design cores, they design CPUs that use Arm ISA in-house, so this tells us nothing about Macs.
    • SmallDeadGuy 8y ago
• lamlam 8y ago
  Do ARM chips have ME or PSP equivalents? It would be great to be able to buy a new machine and use something like coreboot without having to use hacks to disable ME.
  • danarmak 8y ago
    They can have it, as ARM TrustZone. This is an independent ARM chip and is in fact used in the AMD PSP. I don't know if some or all of these laptop SoCs would have one, though. Some (most?) Android phones have one (see: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/07/trust-issues-exploiting-trustzone-tees.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/07/trust-issues-...)
    • amluto 8y ago
      ARM TrustZone isn’t a chip at all, and it’s not a thing that an SoC could have. It’s just another operating mode of an ARM processor. It’s more analogous to x86’s SMM than to PSP or ME. TrustZone is also fully documented AFAIK. So the real question is: will the laptops let end users replace the TrustZone kernel?
      • subway 8y ago
        There's a lot of SoC specific stuff moving over into the Arm Trusted Firmware that sits below the TZ kernel. The upstream ATF is BSD licensed, so while some chips have open source implementations, others might only exist as blobs. It's possible to build out SoCs that require a closed-source blob that runs on one of the ARM cores, doing basically all the same jobs a PSP or ME does.
  • turblety 8y ago
    Unfortunately it's not as easy to answer. Intel and AMD manufacture their own chips which means they can put their backdoors into all their products. However with ARM they license their IP and other companies make their chips. This means some companies have hidden proprietary code in their bootloaders. For example the Samsung Exynos have a range of ARM chips, but to boot them you must use their bootloader, which may contain spyware, backdoors or surveillance systems. You can not see the source code for this bootloader and have no way of auditing what it actually does. Rockchip is another company that makes ARM chips, and can be considered mostly free [1]. As with all hardware it's very hard to know what's going on inside, but all the code to boot into Linux (minus the optional GPU) on a Rockchip product is open source and can be audited/compiled by anyone. ARM also have TrustZone [2] that allows you to run applications in a "secure" (or separate) space. It doesn't run on a separate chip, but runs on the ARM chip, separating memory and instructions from the operating system. (Don't quote me but...) I believe you don't actually have to use TrustZone. The instructions/documentation for it doesn't appear to be available to the public, however if you don't upload a blob for TrustZone, with Rockchip it simply won't use it and will run everything on the same level. (Note this is true for Rockchip, but again depending on who is manufacturing the ARM chip, they may force you to use TrustZone). Unlike with Intel ME and AMD PSP, if you don't want to use their ME, you have no choice. If you remove the blob your system won't boot (or will restart after 30 minutes for some older models). This means if ARM TrustZone is compromised you can remove it and continue on as normal. But if ME and PSP are compromised you are at the will of Intel and any agency it may have colluded with. While we're on the subject of free and open source code, note that with (most) ARM chips, the GPU is closed source just like the Intel ME. Again, the difference is if you don't want to use the GPU, you can just not upload the blob, and use the CPU without the GPU. There are some movements being made to open the GPU [3], but it's still a long way off. 1. https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html 2. http://www.openvirtualization.org/open-source-arm-trustzone.html http://www.openvirtualization.org/open-source-arm-trustzone.... 3. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/lima https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/lima
• digi_owl 8y ago
  I am of two minds about this. While i want to see the x86 desktop get a serious contender once again, it has risen on the back of a very open and modular platform. But ARM based products are virtual black boxes by comparison. Thus i worry if ARM rising to the challenge on the desktop will lead to an acceleration of the trend of "devicification" the desktop.
• acd 8y ago
  Ponder what that means for Intel. Given that. AMD has licensed cpu to China Hygon AMD now has competitive gaming CPUs ARM is releasing laptop cpus
  • phkahler 8y ago
    >> Ponder what that means for Intel. Umm not much? Intel mostly runs Microsoft software, and what could be worse than Windows on low-end x86? Windows on ARM...
    • surajrmal 8y ago
      Are you dismissing the server market? It's entirely Intel, and mostly not windows.
      • phkahler 8y ago
        Yes, I'm dismissing the server market when the discussion is around ARMs "Client CPU Roadmap".
• notafraudster 8y ago
  Oddly, what I'd really like to see is ARM enter the NUC space. Maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like be able to pay $200-400 for a small, low power usage, decently performant machine. The 8th generation Intel NUC are good, but 28W TDP and it'd be nice to get it much, much lower than that. I know these are a small fraction of the overall market but personally I think it'd be cool.
  • ac29 8y ago
    Why not just use a Atom-based NUC? At 10W TDP (and mostly at idle for many uses), other power draws become more important anyways. Modern Atom's are surprisingly competent.
    • notafraudster 8y ago
      Intel hasn't released an Atom-based NUC in 4.5 years (they do have a few more modern "Celeron" or "Pentium" branded units -- not sure if these are intended to be efficient or just cheap). But yes, of course my original comment wasn't implying there is anything magical about ARM that Intel couldn't do -- just that historically they have really dominated the performance per watt low TDP space and Intel's current "efficient" offerings still have pretty huge power draw.
      • ac29 8y ago
        There are at least 2 recent Atom NUC's. They do use the "Celeron" branding, which is a little confusing because there are both Core-based Celerons and Atom-based Celerons. But these two are Atom: Gemini Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/nuc7cjysal.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits... Apollo Lake Atom NUC: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/nuc6cays.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
      • lhl 8y ago
        I don't track the Intel NUC SKUs super closely, but the industrial/embedded board sector is lousy with tiny low-power x86 chips in USFF/NUC, PicoITX, 3.5" form factors (Aaeon, Axiomtek, Jetway, etc or just browse through linuxgizmos.com or cnx-software.com for a constant stream of releases). On the consumer side there might be less, but the Gigabyte Brix, ECS Liva, and the Zotac mini-PC lines seem to be running strong and have a full line of TDPs - Zotac's latest P-series units look pretty great for their size: https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-p-series/all
• keymone 8y ago
  I wonder how close are Mill cpus to hitting the market
  • monocasa 8y ago
    Years out.
• floatboth 8y ago
  Now we really need (non-Qualcomm) SoC makers to get on board with actually making laptop/desktop-grade chips. Rockchip RK3399 and Marvell Armada 8k are big steps in the right direction, but we need more power (and PCIe lanes).
  • bradfa 8y ago
    And we need SoCs with 64 bit wide data DDR buses. Most of the existing non-server SoCs are only 32 bit DDR interfaces, so you can't use off the shelf DIMMs which limits so many of these existing cheap ARM "maker" board to having soldered down RAM and less than amazing memory performance.
    • floatboth 8y ago
      Marvell Armada 8k (MACCHIATObin) takes a full size DIMM (apparently with ECC support, even). Not that cheap though… but cheaper than, say, the Overdrive 1000.
• bobthedino 8y ago
  I think it's amusing to remember that ARM started off in fancy 32-bit high-performance desktop machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
  • LeoPanthera 8y ago
    The Archimedes was so far ahead of its time that no-one really knew what to do with it. They ended up in schools, especially in commonwealth countries, mainly because Acorn's previous big success, the BBC Micro, had been specifically targeted at schools. But in 1987 the ARM was so astoundingly powerful that it should have become the king of the workstation market. A failure of marketing, perhaps.
    • kstenerud 8y ago
      Similar to Commodore's failure with the Amiga line.
    • dleslie 8y ago
      Whither the software and peripherals? The failure of non-PC-clones in the 80s/90s is mostly attributable to those two deficiencies, I think.
      • LeoPanthera 8y ago
        Well the early models were available with a BSD-derived UNIX, so software was available, at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
    • cmrdporcupine 8y ago
      It doesn't help that they didn't ship it with Unix, which is what workstations ran back then. Porting System V to it and selling it with it may have helped. Then again, both Atari and Amiga tried that with their 030 machines and had no success. They were not taken seriously as workstation vendors (in the then lucrative workstation market) in many cases because of the brand on the box. I distinctly remember a UnixWorld article about the Atari TT030 with the headline "Up from toyland" (above an otherwise positive review)
• cesarb 8y ago
  Will we be able to run our own Linux kernels on these laptops? "In January 2012, Microsoft confirmed it would require hardware manufacturers to enable secure boot on Windows 8 devices, and that x86/64 devices must provide the option to turn it off while ARM-based devices must not provide the option to turn it off.[15]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_boot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_boot)
  • mjg59 8y ago
    This is no longer the case in the current hardware certification requirements
    • abrowne 8y ago
      It's no longer required that you are able to turn it off on x86-64, that you can't turn it off on ARM or both?
      • floatboth 8y ago
        From what I've seen on the internet, you can turn secure boot off, select USB boot, but a blank screen after that with linux/aarch64 images. We really need to get these laptops (NovaGo etc.) into the hands of experienced developers to figure out what the deal is.
      • mjg59 8y ago
        It is no longer required that it be force-enabled on ARM.
• jsnell 8y ago
  My impression is that every time ARM release a new big core (e.g. A73, A75) they project massive improvements. And then what's actually sold shows half the expected speedup, due to the design not clocking anywhere near as high as ARM projected. Given that history, why is everyone so willing to take these latest numbers at face value?
  • cbhl 8y ago
    Does anyone actually take "next gen is XX% faster" numbers at face value? Apple, Intel, all say things like this, and real world performance is always worse than the marketing since the tests run in ideal conditions (say, on AC power) but the real world conditions are always worse (say, throttling down the CPU to save battery). In my mind, there are two big questions: (1) is it fast enough for users, and (2) will users be able to run business-critical x86 / Windows software on it? (1) was pretty bad with the first ARM-based Chromebooks, which could handle at best 3-4 tabs, but has started getting better (see the Samsung Chromebook Plus). (2) boils down to whether the relevant parties can get x86-on-ARM emulation working. I feel like Microsoft had a pretty good tech demo of this at a past Build conference, but I wouldn't be surprised if non-technical reasons prevent it from shipping.
    • AnssiH 8y ago
      The x86-on-ARM emulation has already been in production for a while, has it not? The various Snapdragon 835 powered Windows laptops use it AFAIK.
      • SyneRyder 8y ago
        Yep, it's already shipping on the Qualcomm HP Envy x2. Performance of x86-on-ARM seems to be mixed/disappointing so far, but the bigger catch seems to be that it doesn't support x64 yet: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/154821/hp-envy-x2-qualcomm-review-check-app-compatibility https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/154821/hp-envy-x...
        • 8y ago
• bitL 8y ago
  I'd rather have a 10GHz CPU in a laptop than another mediocre CPU to the mix :-(
• caffed 8y ago
  IMHO, ARM performance is "good enough" for consumption and light editing/creation. The real test for this is software. Anyone remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 Exactly...
  • smolder 8y ago
    We've come a long way... Software vendors compiling for multiple targets doesn't seem so crazy anymore. We've got toolchains that are good at that, and we don't distribute software by floppy or cd anymore. Emulation seems like the wrong way to go.
  • kalleboo 8y ago
    No, but I do remember this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
• nathell 8y ago
  Will these chips have an equivalent of Intel IME? If not, I'll switch in a second.
• zpiro 8y ago
  Good news! Wrote a bit about getting performance gain out of vector instructions not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17704038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17704038
• blinkingled 8y ago
  I am holding on to x86 until ARM figures something out on standardization like in PC space. If I need to have custom kernel, boot loader and rely on GPU drivers from different vendors for each computer I am going to buy - no thanks.
  • userbinator 8y ago
    This, exactly this. The PC (technically the AT) grew so much because it was originally an open platform and almost completely standardised and documented. There have been many recent efforts to lobotomise it but it still remains mostly standard and well-documented. ARM platforms are extremely diverse largely due to the fact that its cores are integrated into SoCs for a wide range of uses, and I'd say the majority of ARM SoCs in use don't even have any public documentation. This is particularly true of those used in smartphones and tablets. Or put it more bluntly, "legacy-free means compatibility-free."
• ksec 8y ago
  When you factor in NAND, RAM, Wireless Network, at what point will the lower CPU price be irrelevant for leaving the x86 Desktop ecosystem? Ryzen 3 2200G cost only $99. So Assuming everything else being the same, would you pay $99 more for the NUC or board? It is the same reason why x86 doesn't work out when it is moving into mobile space, same reason ARM doesn't work out moving up to Notebook Desktop space. Two more years down the road I wouldn't be surprise to see a Dual Zen Core, 64 Vega APU selling for $59 or less.