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The article overstates the case against ARM in the mobile marketplace. Counterpoints not mentioned are: 1. The single company Intel can never match the wide var

The article overstates the case against ARM in the mobile marketplace. Counterpoints not mentioned are: 1. The single company Intel can never match the wide variety of SoC (System on a Chip) components that the diverse ARM fabricators will offer. 2. The ARM fabricators will remain close behind Intel with regard to lithography generations. 3. Intel's Medfield has not been independently benchmarked on shipping mobile devices. 4. Industry partnerships established for the previous Intel mobile part did not create any notable results. 5. In order to dismantle ARM, Intel would have to significantly underprice commodity ARM fabricators - which would destroy Intel's historical margins. Note that Intel sold off a former ARM-compatible division - XScale - for this reason. 6. Furthermore some ARM partners plan to invade the x86 server market with low power, but capable alternatives to Intel servers, thus enlarging the potential ARM market and possibly counter-disrupting Intel's highest margin business.

mbreese 15y ago
I think that #1 is the more important "pro" for ARM, while #4 is the most important "con" for Intel. How many times have we seen Intel announce a hardware partnership with a company (especially in mobile) that ultimately went nowhere? I think this comes down to, I'll believe it when I see the devices shipping.
r00fus 15y ago
Furthermore, the major proprietary player (Apple) will likely never give up on their ARM chip to favor Intel. Unlike in the 80s where IBM used Intel chips and Microsoft software and created two heirs to their monopoly, this time will be wildly different. ARM (and the mobile market) will crush Intel. Intel is seriously late to the game here, and never took performace/watt seriously for decades, and ARM is going to disrupt them hard.
- mrsebastian 15y ago
  Interesting that you mention Apple/ARM -- don't forget that, eventually, Apple had no choice but to shift from PowerPC chips in its laptops and desktops to Intel. The performance difference was just too vast. I am fairly sure that the same thing will now happen with x86 and ARM -- it just depends on the timeline.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Apple had to move to x86 because IBM wouldn't invest in development of a fast and low power processor for just one client (Apple) and Intel had a product (Core Duo) ready for them. One client, even Apple, is a very small market. Unit sales of ARM processors combined dwarf x86 sales and there is a huge market for higher performance ARM devices, something that didn't exist for PPC.
    - fieldforceapp 15y ago
      That's correct. If you remember, Tim Cook described this limits on PPC based products as a "thermal problem" which is what drove them towards Intel. Presumably, ARM's licenses don't have this problem, in part, as @rbanffy implies, because the ARM architecture doesn't rely on a single source as the PPC did.
  - rsynnott 15y ago
    That was rather different, as Apple was entirely dependent on IBM and Motorola to produce new chip designs (and Motorola had effectively quit the desktop market). The G5 was actually reasonably competitive with the P4 at the time the move was made, and beat it on some SIMD work. The real trouble was that IBM had repeatedly slipped on its deadlines to produce a low-power laptop-appropriate G5, and the aging G4 architecture just wasn't good enough. Today, the story is very different. Apple can produce its own SoC designs, as with the A5, or even produce its own ARM _core_ designs, like Qualcomm does, or it can buy from one of a number of healthy vendors who show no signs of quitting ARM anytime soon. If this Intel core had a genuine dramatic performance advantage over the A15 (which it will be competing with, given the timescales), at the same power usage, that would be one thing, but that's far from clear right now.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    It wasn't just that Intel chips were faster. They also consumed less power. Just before the switch, Apple shipped a G5 desktop Mac with liquid cooling built in, which shows just how desperate the situation was for them. Things are much different now. Intel chips are faster than ARM, of course, but they are also vastly more power hungry. Power consumption matters more than speed in most devices these days (otherwise Intel would already be in everybody's phone) and will likely continue to do so for a long time. Intel shows no sign of being able to reduce their power consumption to the level needed while still retaining decent speed, whereas ARM shows every sign of being able to keep increasing their speeds while keeping power consumption where it needs to be.
lgeek 15y ago
Two other things: * ARM's big.LITTLE promises to drastically reduce power consumption under low CPU load. It seems unlikely Intel will be able to offer something similar anytime soon. * If you compare Atom Z2460 with SoCs based on Cortex-A15 (both are supposed to start selling by the end of the year), it doesn't look that well.
- berkut 15y ago
  Yeah, due to the fact they're out-of-order, the A15s will should be back on top. When the Pentium Pro was introduced with OOO pipeline, it got a 20% speed increase over similarly clocked Pentiums. The issue might be can the A15s keep their pipeline full with such a small cache and memory bandwidth. And how good (if it even has one) is the pre-fetcher? If the float units can't be given data fast enough, it's not going to matter how fast it is in theory.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Note that OOO isn't a boolean checklist feature. It's a design choice that opens up a ton of optimization possibilities (the obvious big one being the ability to issue instructions around a DRAM load). But you need to dedicate silicon to actually make those work. How big is the register renaming pool? What are the edge cases where OOO doesn't work (flags registers are a big one here). Do the SIMD registers get renamed too, or are they serialized? Lots of questions, with AFAICT no public answers.
mrsebastian 15y ago
I think point 2 is the most important -- and I think you're wrong. Intel is already way, way ahead of TSMC, GloFo, and Samsung -- and the gap, if anything, shows signs of extending. Price will definitely be important, but judging by how hard Intel is coming into this segment, I can only assume that it's willing to match or get very close to ARM component costs.
- wolf550e 15y ago
  It looks like a worse ISA will win because it happens to be owned by the owner of the better lithography process. In a really efficient market, those would not be tied. Microsoft using Windows to push Office was bad for society. Why is Intel good for society?
  - berkut 15y ago
    The old RISC vs CISC is completely dead now. Intel have now shown they can match ARM's equivalent powered CPUs in terms of energy efficiency, and that was the last argument the RISC proponents had in the argument. Intel's chips are internally RISC, with the only overhead of decoding and fusing the ops and the transistors to do this. And despite this overhead, they're still miles ahead. The only argument left then is the actual instruction sets at asm level, and here, CISC has an advantage, because they can do so much more in one instruction (take memory addressing modes for example), so they're more compact from an executable point-of-view and instruction cache point-of-view.
    - jules 15y ago
      CISC isn't necessarily more compact. Since there are more instructions, each instruction takes up more space. For example in ARM's thumb encoding, each instruction takes up 16 bits. A typical x86 instruction takes much more space. I wonder how much of an x86 chip is dedicated to handling legacy instructions or largely unnecessary instructions. How much saving could be achieved by a radically simpler instruction set (for example no neg/call/ret/push/pop/bcd instructions). If you look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings then most of the instructions seem unnecessary. Does anybody have some information about this?
berkut 15y ago
1. Intel have a deal with TSMC to allow TSMC to fab Atom silicon for custom SoC solutions. 2. Intel is way ahead of other fabricators - die size alone isn't the only metric, there's things like powergating which Intel are way ahead on. They're about 1 year ahead. You also can't compared process sizes between fabricators, because they're not the same. 6. Only relevant for non-CPU / memory bound stuff - ARM's still very poor on float throughput and memory bandwidth (bus size is crap and still only 32-bit access to memory), so it'll only be things like VMs and webservers that use them for power consumption. It'll probably hurt AMD more. They still can't get their 64-bit stuff going, they're trying to do PAE (Physical Address Extension), and we know how well that worked on Intel's P4...

mbreese 15y ago

I think that #1 is the more important "pro" for ARM, while #4 is the most important "con" for Intel. How many times have we seen Intel announce a hardware partnership with a company (especially in mobile) that ultimately went nowhere? I think this comes down to, I'll believe it when I see the devices shipping.

r00fus 15y ago

Furthermore, the major proprietary player (Apple) will likely never give up on their ARM chip to favor Intel. Unlike in the 80s where IBM used Intel chips and Microsoft software and created two heirs to their monopoly, this time will be wildly different. ARM (and the mobile market) will crush Intel. Intel is seriously late to the game here, and never took performace/watt seriously for decades, and ARM is going to disrupt them hard.

mrsebastian 15y ago
Interesting that you mention Apple/ARM -- don't forget that, eventually, Apple had no choice but to shift from PowerPC chips in its laptops and desktops to Intel. The performance difference was just too vast. I am fairly sure that the same thing will now happen with x86 and ARM -- it just depends on the timeline.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Apple had to move to x86 because IBM wouldn't invest in development of a fast and low power processor for just one client (Apple) and Intel had a product (Core Duo) ready for them. One client, even Apple, is a very small market. Unit sales of ARM processors combined dwarf x86 sales and there is a huge market for higher performance ARM devices, something that didn't exist for PPC.
  - fieldforceapp 15y ago
    That's correct. If you remember, Tim Cook described this limits on PPC based products as a "thermal problem" which is what drove them towards Intel. Presumably, ARM's licenses don't have this problem, in part, as @rbanffy implies, because the ARM architecture doesn't rely on a single source as the PPC did.
- rsynnott 15y ago
  That was rather different, as Apple was entirely dependent on IBM and Motorola to produce new chip designs (and Motorola had effectively quit the desktop market). The G5 was actually reasonably competitive with the P4 at the time the move was made, and beat it on some SIMD work. The real trouble was that IBM had repeatedly slipped on its deadlines to produce a low-power laptop-appropriate G5, and the aging G4 architecture just wasn't good enough. Today, the story is very different. Apple can produce its own SoC designs, as with the A5, or even produce its own ARM _core_ designs, like Qualcomm does, or it can buy from one of a number of healthy vendors who show no signs of quitting ARM anytime soon. If this Intel core had a genuine dramatic performance advantage over the A15 (which it will be competing with, given the timescales), at the same power usage, that would be one thing, but that's far from clear right now.
- mikeash 15y ago
  It wasn't just that Intel chips were faster. They also consumed less power. Just before the switch, Apple shipped a G5 desktop Mac with liquid cooling built in, which shows just how desperate the situation was for them. Things are much different now. Intel chips are faster than ARM, of course, but they are also vastly more power hungry. Power consumption matters more than speed in most devices these days (otherwise Intel would already be in everybody's phone) and will likely continue to do so for a long time. Intel shows no sign of being able to reduce their power consumption to the level needed while still retaining decent speed, whereas ARM shows every sign of being able to keep increasing their speeds while keeping power consumption where it needs to be.

lgeek 15y ago

Two other things: * ARM's big.LITTLE promises to drastically reduce power consumption under low CPU load. It seems unlikely Intel will be able to offer something similar anytime soon. * If you compare Atom Z2460 with SoCs based on Cortex-A15 (both are supposed to start selling by the end of the year), it doesn't look that well.

berkut 15y ago
Yeah, due to the fact they're out-of-order, the A15s will should be back on top. When the Pentium Pro was introduced with OOO pipeline, it got a 20% speed increase over similarly clocked Pentiums. The issue might be can the A15s keep their pipeline full with such a small cache and memory bandwidth. And how good (if it even has one) is the pre-fetcher? If the float units can't be given data fast enough, it's not going to matter how fast it is in theory.
- ajross 15y ago
  Note that OOO isn't a boolean checklist feature. It's a design choice that opens up a ton of optimization possibilities (the obvious big one being the ability to issue instructions around a DRAM load). But you need to dedicate silicon to actually make those work. How big is the register renaming pool? What are the edge cases where OOO doesn't work (flags registers are a big one here). Do the SIMD registers get renamed too, or are they serialized? Lots of questions, with AFAICT no public answers.

mrsebastian 15y ago

I think point 2 is the most important -- and I think you're wrong. Intel is already way, way ahead of TSMC, GloFo, and Samsung -- and the gap, if anything, shows signs of extending. Price will definitely be important, but judging by how hard Intel is coming into this segment, I can only assume that it's willing to match or get very close to ARM component costs.

wolf550e 15y ago
It looks like a worse ISA will win because it happens to be owned by the owner of the better lithography process. In a really efficient market, those would not be tied. Microsoft using Windows to push Office was bad for society. Why is Intel good for society?
- berkut 15y ago
  The old RISC vs CISC is completely dead now. Intel have now shown they can match ARM's equivalent powered CPUs in terms of energy efficiency, and that was the last argument the RISC proponents had in the argument. Intel's chips are internally RISC, with the only overhead of decoding and fusing the ops and the transistors to do this. And despite this overhead, they're still miles ahead. The only argument left then is the actual instruction sets at asm level, and here, CISC has an advantage, because they can do so much more in one instruction (take memory addressing modes for example), so they're more compact from an executable point-of-view and instruction cache point-of-view.
  - jules 15y ago
    CISC isn't necessarily more compact. Since there are more instructions, each instruction takes up more space. For example in ARM's thumb encoding, each instruction takes up 16 bits. A typical x86 instruction takes much more space. I wonder how much of an x86 chip is dedicated to handling legacy instructions or largely unnecessary instructions. How much saving could be achieved by a radically simpler instruction set (for example no neg/call/ret/push/pop/bcd instructions). If you look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings then most of the instructions seem unnecessary. Does anybody have some information about this?

berkut 15y ago

1. Intel have a deal with TSMC to allow TSMC to fab Atom silicon for custom SoC solutions. 2. Intel is way ahead of other fabricators - die size alone isn't the only metric, there's things like powergating which Intel are way ahead on. They're about 1 year ahead. You also can't compared process sizes between fabricators, because they're not the same. 6. Only relevant for non-CPU / memory bound stuff - ARM's still very poor on float throughput and memory bandwidth (bus size is crap and still only 32-bit access to memory), so it'll only be things like VMs and webservers that use them for power consumption. It'll probably hurt AMD more. They still can't get their 64-bit stuff going, they're trying to do PAE (Physical Address Extension), and we know how well that worked on Intel's P4...