6 ms·

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.
      - kuwze 8y ago
        ARM is owned by Softbank, which has a net worth of ~2x Intel.
        monocasa 8y ago
        And many many more commitments. They can't dedicate the same resources that Intel can.
    - 27182818284 8y ago
      It is rather amazing that just reading "Intel Inside" I heard the little chimes from the TV commercials and saw it in my head.
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.

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.
    - kuwze 8y ago
      ARM is owned by Softbank, which has a net worth of ~2x Intel.
      - monocasa 8y ago
        And many many more commitments. They can't dedicate the same resources that Intel can.
  - 27182818284 8y ago
    It is rather amazing that just reading "Intel Inside" I heard the little chimes from the TV commercials and saw it in my head.

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.