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No kidding, my thoughts exactly. Nowadays embedded development is revolving around ARM pretty heavily. Maybe RISC-V in the future, but for now, it's ARM, defin

No kidding, my thoughts exactly. Nowadays embedded development is revolving around ARM pretty heavily. Maybe RISC-V in the future, but for now, it's ARM, definitely not x86. Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different.

kenjackson 5y ago
Is there a good telling of why ARM won in the embedded space? I "assume" it is related to power consumption, but I didn't actually follow this very closely.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Probably cost too. Intel had a big profit margin on their chips.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  I recall a story about someone is arm's early days testing the chip and finding that it was workign normally was shocked when he saw the power wasn't actually going into it. excess power bleed going to it from other parts was providing all the energy it needed.
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    I've heard this, too. I don't know if it's true, but it is feasible.
  - Hublium 5y ago
    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ
- protomyth 5y ago
  Intel loved big profits (note the lack of an under $300 market for much of the WinTel years), and MIPS was just a confusing mess with SGI.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  I have not read anything but here's my understanding... Hot off their success in the 80s with the desktop market, in the 90s Intel decided to go up market and target workstations, datacenter, and mainframes. They launched the P6 architecture with HPC in mind and eschewed power efficiency. By the mid/late 90s they didn't have an x86 product that could work well in the mobile space let alone the embedded space. The recognized that the laptop market was poised to explode and started work on Pentium M which eschewed their P6 derived Netburst architecture for something closer to the P5. ARM wisely chose not to compete with Intel and instead went for markets Intel wasn't in. This included mobile and embedded. At the time Intel was trying to optimize x86 for Laptops (Pentium M / Core), ARM was working down market from embedded to microcontrollers (ARM M). When Smartphones started to take off, ARM was positioned to be the processor of choice due to it's focus on low power and efficiency AND the fact that anyone could design their own SoC around it. Intel on the other hand was still trying to scale down x86 from the laptop space and chose to develop their SoCs entirely themselves. Intel also has this on going problem of eschewing SoCs for discrete chips because they want to sell you as many chips as possible. Fast forward to today and Intel's Atom line is comparable to ARM's high performance line (ignore Apple) in terms of performance and battery but it lacks the SoC integration you see in products from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Samsung.
- ksec 5y ago
  It is the same reason with everything Intel for the past 10-20 years. Profits. And I have been ranting on it for most part of the last decade. Far too focused on profits. I mean Intel is still making record profits quarter after quarter. Embedded space are high volume low margin business, why waste their Wafer capacity for that? 4G Modem is a loss leader, why use latest node on it when they could be used for Server CPU at 100x the revenue and profits. Mobile SoC is also a high volume and low margin business, we cant use our most advance, industry leading fab for that. Let's partner with a Chinese companies and use contra revenue to gain market share. And oh, let's use TSMC because they are cheaper. ARM also has business model that doesn't make sense from Intel's perspective. Earning a measly xx cents per unit on IP? ( Yes Intel actually laughed about it in 00s era ) Did I mention XScale? And I could go on and rant about it for hours.....
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  ARM being fabless first and pretty liberal with the licenses helped alot. Nobody feared to help there competitors when developing on arm.. they were as neutral as the swiss before they were acquired, and thats a great thing for embedded development projects.
cptskippy 5y ago
> Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different. One of the fundamental challenges for x86 at that time would have been the CISC ISA and decoder complexity overhead. The overhead of the full CISC ISA was just unacceptable for an embedded application. That's probably why Intel was fiddling around with XScale around that time. With the P6 lineage, the x86 instructions were decomposed into micro-ops, RISC like instructions, that were executed by the CPU. I've read that decoders at the time accounted for up to 10% of power consumed. Intel really didn't start to address this problem until Pentium M and later Core. Had Intel launched something alongside P6 in the early 90s they might be relevant in that space but they were targeting the datacenter and mainframe space at that time so they were thinking big, not small.
r00fus 5y ago
>Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different. Someone at Intel must've thought the same thing and even executed it - they bought StrongARM in 1997! But then they put it to the torch in 2003 and EOL'd everything so that you could see Windows bluescreens in your ATM and kiosks later that decade.

kenjackson 5y ago

Is there a good telling of why ARM won in the embedded space? I "assume" it is related to power consumption, but I didn't actually follow this very closely.

jonplackett 5y ago
Probably cost too. Intel had a big profit margin on their chips.
cultofmetatron 5y ago
I recall a story about someone is arm's early days testing the chip and finding that it was workign normally was shocked when he saw the power wasn't actually going into it. excess power bleed going to it from other parts was providing all the energy it needed.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  I've heard this, too. I don't know if it's true, but it is feasible.
- Hublium 5y ago
  Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ
protomyth 5y ago
Intel loved big profits (note the lack of an under $300 market for much of the WinTel years), and MIPS was just a confusing mess with SGI.
cptskippy 5y ago
I have not read anything but here's my understanding... Hot off their success in the 80s with the desktop market, in the 90s Intel decided to go up market and target workstations, datacenter, and mainframes. They launched the P6 architecture with HPC in mind and eschewed power efficiency. By the mid/late 90s they didn't have an x86 product that could work well in the mobile space let alone the embedded space. The recognized that the laptop market was poised to explode and started work on Pentium M which eschewed their P6 derived Netburst architecture for something closer to the P5. ARM wisely chose not to compete with Intel and instead went for markets Intel wasn't in. This included mobile and embedded. At the time Intel was trying to optimize x86 for Laptops (Pentium M / Core), ARM was working down market from embedded to microcontrollers (ARM M). When Smartphones started to take off, ARM was positioned to be the processor of choice due to it's focus on low power and efficiency AND the fact that anyone could design their own SoC around it. Intel on the other hand was still trying to scale down x86 from the laptop space and chose to develop their SoCs entirely themselves. Intel also has this on going problem of eschewing SoCs for discrete chips because they want to sell you as many chips as possible. Fast forward to today and Intel's Atom line is comparable to ARM's high performance line (ignore Apple) in terms of performance and battery but it lacks the SoC integration you see in products from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Samsung.
ksec 5y ago
It is the same reason with everything Intel for the past 10-20 years. Profits. And I have been ranting on it for most part of the last decade. Far too focused on profits. I mean Intel is still making record profits quarter after quarter. Embedded space are high volume low margin business, why waste their Wafer capacity for that? 4G Modem is a loss leader, why use latest node on it when they could be used for Server CPU at 100x the revenue and profits. Mobile SoC is also a high volume and low margin business, we cant use our most advance, industry leading fab for that. Let's partner with a Chinese companies and use contra revenue to gain market share. And oh, let's use TSMC because they are cheaper. ARM also has business model that doesn't make sense from Intel's perspective. Earning a measly xx cents per unit on IP? ( Yes Intel actually laughed about it in 00s era ) Did I mention XScale? And I could go on and rant about it for hours.....
PicassoCTs 5y ago
ARM being fabless first and pretty liberal with the licenses helped alot. Nobody feared to help there competitors when developing on arm.. they were as neutral as the swiss before they were acquired, and thats a great thing for embedded development projects.

cptskippy 5y ago

> Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different. One of the fundamental challenges for x86 at that time would have been the CISC ISA and decoder complexity overhead. The overhead of the full CISC ISA was just unacceptable for an embedded application. That's probably why Intel was fiddling around with XScale around that time. With the P6 lineage, the x86 instructions were decomposed into micro-ops, RISC like instructions, that were executed by the CPU. I've read that decoders at the time accounted for up to 10% of power consumed. Intel really didn't start to address this problem until Pentium M and later Core. Had Intel launched something alongside P6 in the early 90s they might be relevant in that space but they were targeting the datacenter and mainframe space at that time so they were thinking big, not small.

r00fus 5y ago

>Had Intel done that 20-25 years ago the story might be completely different. Someone at Intel must've thought the same thing and even executed it - they bought StrongARM in 1997! But then they put it to the torch in 2003 and EOL'd everything so that you could see Windows bluescreens in your ATM and kiosks later that decade.