6 ms·

Who killed the Intel microprocessor?

62 points by strandev 16y ago

ergo98 16y ago
Another terrible asymco entrant. Interesting how the author pushes one philosophy for processors (the inevitable superiority of a licensed model) but if you've read their many pro-Apple screeds, exactly the opposite conclusion is pursued relative to Android. Quite humorous really.
- Hagelin 16y ago
  I read it as the inevitable superiority of customized components over off-the-shelf components.
- simonh 16y ago
  Supporting a given business model in one industry doesn't mean that you must support the same business models in all industries, regardless of the different market conditions, in order to be consistent. That would be blind fundamentalism, not analysis. ARM's business model is well matched to their market (mobile phone designers). Apple is selling to a different market (mobile phone users) with different requirements and dynamics, and so a different business model is appropriate.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  It's worse than that. Asymco has this "modular"/"integrated" split, which they refer to in this post as well, though reversed from their usual position as you note, but they happily admit that Nokia and RIM are "integrated" but in trouble while downplaying HTC and Samsung's success (and Motorola's miraculous reversal) on the "modular" side. They leave these inconsistencies dangling as long as they can massage the data enough to conclude that Apple is great and so are the people who buy Apple products. It's blatantly pandering sophistry masquerading as overwrought analysis.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Here's a prediction, Intel will still be a dominant player in CPUs 10 years from now. ARM is making progress, great, good luck competing with Intel in FAB capacity and engineering capability. The world isn't going to suddenly switch to 100% mobile CPUs, desktops and severs are still not just a big business but the biggest part of the business.
- DenisM 16y ago
  FAB capacity? Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like. These guys certainly do have all the requisite capacity as they provide the silicon for all of the world's mobile phones. Granted, the Big Gorilla is faster to shrink the processes, because they have no problem dropping a few billions on a brand-new fab, but what good did that do? On both supposed benefits of the smaller process (cost and power drain / performance) ARM CPUs are still winning. This whole situation is a replay of the Pentium 4 Megahurtz madness. Back then Intel was pushing raw performance disregarding power consumption, then they hit the heat dissipation wall, AMD snuck in from behind and punished them in a major way with Athlon-64. Intel regrouped with Core* series, won back the market share, pushed AMD back into oblivion, and relaxed about the whole thing. Now they are doing the same thing - prioritizing performance at the cost of power drain, and this time it will be ARM who will punish them. It's not clear how long it will take Intel to change their ways this time. The last time they still had Pentium 3 / Pentium M group of engineers to lean on, and that they did rather well. This time they are not so lucky - they have actually sold off their embedded CPU division a few years back, and now I doubt whether there is anyone left inside Intel to insist on a much needed pivot. [EDITED for typos]
  - pjscott 16y ago
    > Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like. Not quite. With the exception of Samsung, those companies design ARM-based systems-on-a-chip, but do not manufacture them. They take an ARM core, perhaps modify it, add on a bunch of other stuff like graphics accelerators, memory controllers, ethernet MACs, and so on. Then once the design checks out, they send it to another company, like TSMC, UMC, or GlobalFoundries, that actually does the manufacturing. The capital costs of building each new generation of chip fabs have grown tremendously, which led to this centralization and commoditization of chip manufacturing. Intel is one of the few holdouts, and they're usually a bit ahead of everybody else, which is one of their big competitive advantages.
DanBlake 16y ago
The only real advantages ARM has over x86 currently is: a: licensing cost / production cost b: Power consumption If you think that intel wont have both of those factors down to ARM levels shortly, you dont know intel very well. They are very competitive and dont like to get beat.
- melling 16y ago
  Intel has been trying to reach ARM's power consumption for years. Not so easy with legacy chips. Anyway, if ARM gains a strong foothold in tablet computing and Chrome netbooks, for example, what's the motivation for switching to Intel in 3-4 years? Intel needs to be a lot better, not just competitive.
  - DanBlake 16y ago
    ARM feels like its attempting to have a offering that would have tons of cores, but lower clock speed ( ie- a 24 core, 1ghz processor ) whereas Intel has the advantage in clock speed- In a few years I would not doubt Intel to hit 5ghz+. The graphically intensive games of tomorrow are not optimized for many cores (still) and will need the raw power of a higher clock. This is especially true for strategy games like starcraft that make heavy use of the CPU. As time moves on, I do imagine the ability to run x86 operating systems / applications will be worth a lot as well. Yes, there may be virtualization as a option but I am not optimistic in the performance of such a feature. Back to your question. When you asked what the motivation will be to switch to x86 in 3-4 years, I think the answer is: Even in 3-4 years, the amount of developers familiar with x86 and the sheer amount of software already available for it will trump the offerings of ARM.
    - pjscott 16y ago
      If you want clock rates, you might be interested in IBM's Power6 processor. One of the newer models runs at 5 GHz, and they were considering raising that. They didn't, though; the Power7 actually runs at a somewhat lower clock speed.
    - potatolicious 16y ago
PostOnce 16y ago
Speculation, by the numbers: AMD P/E: 5.46 Intel P/E: 11.12 ARM P/E: 86.94
- BvS 16y ago
  These are number for 2009. For 2010 ARM P/E should be "only" around 50, for 2011 it might fall below 30. Still expensive but not as extreme.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
dexen 16y ago
I take issue with the notion of Intel's model being obsolete in the mobile world. Quite the opposite; Intel's business model of treating CPUs as commodity is for market of mature technology, while current mobile model of heavily (and costly) customizing SoCs is one for technology being still insufficient for achieving market goals. If anything, it's the current mobile model that will go obsolete at some point -- simply because it's costly, both in terms of customizing SoCs, taping out small batches of silicon and customizing software for it. Mobile will shift to commodity components at some point.
- simonh 16y ago
  >Mobile will shift to commodity components at some point. Selling tens of millions of a single hardware model doesn't count as commodity? Even discounting that, ARM's business model doesn't preclude the emergence of 'commodity' ARM processors. Maybe such a shift might play to Intel's strengths, but then ARM has total domination of the mobile CPU market in their favour. I have no idea where this market will go in say 10 year's time, but right here, right now ARM have a lot going for them and there are no short or medium term reasons to suspect that's likely to change.
alexandros 16y ago
I wonder if AMD could become the ARM of x86. They've already spun out their foundries anyway.
jrockway 16y ago
There are really two markets for processors: consumer electronics, and real computing. ARM may be the best processor (whatever that means, as it's a design you license, not a piece of hardware) for looking at ads on a 3" display, but I think Intel is still going to be relevant in the server market for a while. Think about some of Intel's key assets like being really fast and having a C++ compiler that makes C++ even faster. This is important because programmers write horrendous code that needs hardware assistance to produce answers in a reasonable amount of time. (There are also problems to solve that require a lot of CPU power, like protein folding and finding the next Mersenne prime. ARM processors are not used for this.) Now, if you're saying, "yeah, but not for desktops", I can agree with you. Desktops are going to become less and less powerful as the average computer user becomes more and more computer illiterate ("the Facebook dumb terminal", I'll call it), and ARM may help keep the cost down. But I'm probably not going to be running Emacs on an ARM box anytime soon. (Hell, I even use x86 for my router.)
- gnufs 16y ago
  Actually, a typical browser session tends to be more resource-hungry (in both memory and processor) than a typical Emacs session these days.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Hah! Clearly you do not use cperl-mode.
thebootstrapper 16y ago
Make sense. Although given that Honeycomb (next version of Android for Tablet) mandates dual core processor how this applies?

62 points by strandev 16y ago

Another terrible asymco entrant. Interesting how the author pushes one philosophy for processors (the inevitable superiority of a licensed model) but if you've read their many pro-Apple screeds, exactly the opposite conclusion is pursued relative to Android. Quite humorous really.

Hagelin 16y ago
I read it as the inevitable superiority of customized components over off-the-shelf components.
simonh 16y ago
Supporting a given business model in one industry doesn't mean that you must support the same business models in all industries, regardless of the different market conditions, in order to be consistent. That would be blind fundamentalism, not analysis. ARM's business model is well matched to their market (mobile phone designers). Apple is selling to a different market (mobile phone users) with different requirements and dynamics, and so a different business model is appropriate.
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
It's worse than that. Asymco has this "modular"/"integrated" split, which they refer to in this post as well, though reversed from their usual position as you note, but they happily admit that Nokia and RIM are "integrated" but in trouble while downplaying HTC and Samsung's success (and Motorola's miraculous reversal) on the "modular" side. They leave these inconsistencies dangling as long as they can massage the data enough to conclude that Apple is great and so are the people who buy Apple products. It's blatantly pandering sophistry masquerading as overwrought analysis.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Here's a prediction, Intel will still be a dominant player in CPUs 10 years from now. ARM is making progress, great, good luck competing with Intel in FAB capacity and engineering capability. The world isn't going to suddenly switch to 100% mobile CPUs, desktops and severs are still not just a big business but the biggest part of the business.

DenisM 16y ago
FAB capacity? Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like. These guys certainly do have all the requisite capacity as they provide the silicon for all of the world's mobile phones. Granted, the Big Gorilla is faster to shrink the processes, because they have no problem dropping a few billions on a brand-new fab, but what good did that do? On both supposed benefits of the smaller process (cost and power drain / performance) ARM CPUs are still winning. This whole situation is a replay of the Pentium 4 Megahurtz madness. Back then Intel was pushing raw performance disregarding power consumption, then they hit the heat dissipation wall, AMD snuck in from behind and punished them in a major way with Athlon-64. Intel regrouped with Core* series, won back the market share, pushed AMD back into oblivion, and relaxed about the whole thing. Now they are doing the same thing - prioritizing performance at the cost of power drain, and this time it will be ARM who will punish them. It's not clear how long it will take Intel to change their ways this time. The last time they still had Pentium 3 / Pentium M group of engineers to lean on, and that they did rather well. This time they are not so lucky - they have actually sold off their embedded CPU division a few years back, and now I doubt whether there is anyone left inside Intel to insist on a much needed pivot. [EDITED for typos]
- pjscott 16y ago
  > Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like. Not quite. With the exception of Samsung, those companies design ARM-based systems-on-a-chip, but do not manufacture them. They take an ARM core, perhaps modify it, add on a bunch of other stuff like graphics accelerators, memory controllers, ethernet MACs, and so on. Then once the design checks out, they send it to another company, like TSMC, UMC, or GlobalFoundries, that actually does the manufacturing. The capital costs of building each new generation of chip fabs have grown tremendously, which led to this centralization and commoditization of chip manufacturing. Intel is one of the few holdouts, and they're usually a bit ahead of everybody else, which is one of their big competitive advantages.

DanBlake 16y ago

The only real advantages ARM has over x86 currently is: a: licensing cost / production cost b: Power consumption If you think that intel wont have both of those factors down to ARM levels shortly, you dont know intel very well. They are very competitive and dont like to get beat.

melling 16y ago
Intel has been trying to reach ARM's power consumption for years. Not so easy with legacy chips. Anyway, if ARM gains a strong foothold in tablet computing and Chrome netbooks, for example, what's the motivation for switching to Intel in 3-4 years? Intel needs to be a lot better, not just competitive.
- DanBlake 16y ago
  ARM feels like its attempting to have a offering that would have tons of cores, but lower clock speed ( ie- a 24 core, 1ghz processor ) whereas Intel has the advantage in clock speed- In a few years I would not doubt Intel to hit 5ghz+. The graphically intensive games of tomorrow are not optimized for many cores (still) and will need the raw power of a higher clock. This is especially true for strategy games like starcraft that make heavy use of the CPU. As time moves on, I do imagine the ability to run x86 operating systems / applications will be worth a lot as well. Yes, there may be virtualization as a option but I am not optimistic in the performance of such a feature. Back to your question. When you asked what the motivation will be to switch to x86 in 3-4 years, I think the answer is: Even in 3-4 years, the amount of developers familiar with x86 and the sheer amount of software already available for it will trump the offerings of ARM.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    If you want clock rates, you might be interested in IBM's Power6 processor. One of the newer models runs at 5 GHz, and they were considering raising that. They didn't, though; the Power7 actually runs at a somewhat lower clock speed.
  - potatolicious 16y ago

PostOnce 16y ago

Speculation, by the numbers: AMD P/E: 5.46 Intel P/E: 11.12 ARM P/E: 86.94

BvS 16y ago
These are number for 2009. For 2010 ARM P/E should be "only" around 50, for 2011 it might fall below 30. Still expensive but not as extreme.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

dexen 16y ago

I take issue with the notion of Intel's model being obsolete in the mobile world. Quite the opposite; Intel's business model of treating CPUs as commodity is for market of mature technology, while current mobile model of heavily (and costly) customizing SoCs is one for technology being still insufficient for achieving market goals. If anything, it's the current mobile model that will go obsolete at some point -- simply because it's costly, both in terms of customizing SoCs, taping out small batches of silicon and customizing software for it. Mobile will shift to commodity components at some point.

simonh 16y ago
>Mobile will shift to commodity components at some point. Selling tens of millions of a single hardware model doesn't count as commodity? Even discounting that, ARM's business model doesn't preclude the emergence of 'commodity' ARM processors. Maybe such a shift might play to Intel's strengths, but then ARM has total domination of the mobile CPU market in their favour. I have no idea where this market will go in say 10 year's time, but right here, right now ARM have a lot going for them and there are no short or medium term reasons to suspect that's likely to change.

alexandros 16y ago

I wonder if AMD could become the ARM of x86. They've already spun out their foundries anyway.

jrockway 16y ago

There are really two markets for processors: consumer electronics, and real computing. ARM may be the best processor (whatever that means, as it's a design you license, not a piece of hardware) for looking at ads on a 3" display, but I think Intel is still going to be relevant in the server market for a while. Think about some of Intel's key assets like being really fast and having a C++ compiler that makes C++ even faster. This is important because programmers write horrendous code that needs hardware assistance to produce answers in a reasonable amount of time. (There are also problems to solve that require a lot of CPU power, like protein folding and finding the next Mersenne prime. ARM processors are not used for this.) Now, if you're saying, "yeah, but not for desktops", I can agree with you. Desktops are going to become less and less powerful as the average computer user becomes more and more computer illiterate ("the Facebook dumb terminal", I'll call it), and ARM may help keep the cost down. But I'm probably not going to be running Emacs on an ARM box anytime soon. (Hell, I even use x86 for my router.)

gnufs 16y ago
Actually, a typical browser session tends to be more resource-hungry (in both memory and processor) than a typical Emacs session these days.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Hah! Clearly you do not use cperl-mode.

thebootstrapper 16y ago

Make sense. Although given that Honeycomb (next version of Android for Tablet) mandates dual core processor how this applies?