7 ms·

64-bit ARM chips in iPhone 5S serve up taste of Intel-free future for Apple

34 points by boh 13y ago

minikites 13y ago
>Because both Mac OS X and iOS are now 64-bit, it will be easier to port the more demanding (but fewer in number) Mac apps to a single, converged future-state Apple device OS. It seems like Microsoft has shown that strategy to be a dud. Touch interfaces are awkward with a mouse and mouse interfaces are too fiddly to touch.
- WayneDB 13y ago
  How has Microsoft shown that strategy to be a dud? Surface RT didn't sell too well, but the Surface Pro has sold out a number of times. As a matter of fact, they're re-upping on the whole strategy with a 2nd version. Have you tried the Surface Pro? I use it everyday and have no problem interacting with any "legacy" desktop apps.
- dljsjr 13y ago
  If your business logic (Models/Controllers) are strongly decoupled from your Views, you still maintain a pretty large amount of code that becomes easier to port.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    It really doesn't, though. The 32/64-bit divide is not all that consequential for this.
    - dljsjr 13y ago
      In 99.9% of cases, true. I was just trying to point out that the comment about UI's was invalid. If your code drops down to ASM or anything like that, then it becomes an issue. But that's not most use cases.
- untog 13y ago
  And the 32bit/64bit thing seems to be largely irrelevant, too. You just set 64bit or 32bit flags when compiling the vast majority of projects. There's no discernable difference.
Aloha 13y ago
I think this is spot on, if you're buying 2 million units of X its nearly always cheaper per unit than buying 1 million. That said, I dont expect to see a total platform convergence, I see a future where you have iOS and OSX, and where you could for example run iOS apps on OSX, I dont see them following the same route Microsoft did with Windows 8.
danbruc 13y ago
Albeit the about box says the author has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, at no point does the article convince me that the author understands the difference between a 32 bit and 64 bit processor.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The amount of misinformation on the 5S's 64-bitness is hilarious. I've yet to see a single person get it right aside from people I know personally.
  - jsf 13y ago
    Care to share? I haven't heard a good explanation of what it's good for.
    - eddieplan9 13y ago
      It's less about word size and more about the underlying CPU architecture, i.e. ARMv8. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMv8#ARMv8_and_64-bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMv8#ARMv8_and_64-bit It's much easier to market 64-bit than ARMv8. But what really matters are a new instruction set, more registers and better SIMD. You have to give credit to Apple as they are indeed the first one to come out with a commercial SOC based on this and the first to get the OS support added.
    - fleitz 13y ago
      Mostly expanding RAM beyond 4GB. If you have tight numerical code that requires 64 bit floats/integers you may see a speed up. If your code is for some reason register starved you may see a speedup. Take the case of an app that downloads some JSON and makes a UITableView, it's not going to run much faster on 64 bit vs. 32 bit unless you're doing some extremely compute intensive image transforms.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        >unless you're doing some extremely compute intensive image transforms. Which a lot of the best apps for the iPhone do quite a lot. Especially since nobody cares about the performance of todo apps, those are good enough already.
twoodfin 13y ago
Disagree. Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt. The ARM universe has a flexibility advantage, but Apple might not care, since Intel will surely make them the SoC they want if it means a spot in the iPad. I don't think the outcome here is ordained, nor would Apple want it to be: Competition for supplying them fast, efficient CPUs is exactly what they didn't have in the PowerPC days, and it nearly killed them.
- joezydeco 13y ago
  Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt. Citation, please?
  - vicaya 13y ago
    Google atom silvermont
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    This is the kind of thing I have in mind: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7117/haswell-ult-investigation http://www.anandtech.com/show/7117/haswell-ult-investigation Even their "ultrabook"-class Haswell parts are becoming power competitive with ARM tablet chips. The Y series should get even closer to parity. Broadwell is, in theory, right around the corner, with Intel claiming another 30% power improvement in the 14nm process. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7318/intel-demos-14nm-broadwell-up-to-30-lower-power-than-haswell http://www.anandtech.com/show/7318/intel-demos-14nm-broadwel... Intel will have a significant process advantage over the ARM partners for at least another couple of years, and possibly longer. I would be surprised if they failed to overcome the engineering challenges required to exploit that process advantage in mobile. My point isn't that I'm sure who's going to win, but rather that Apple is not inextricably tied to ARM.
grecy 13y ago
I don't buy that Apple will merge iOS and OS X. At the last All Things D that Steve appeared at (9? 10?), he talked at length about this, and said they'd thought about it and worked on it for a very long time. In the end, they figured that phones and Mac Pros are too different to share the same OS, and it just doesn't make sense.
- chiph 13y ago
  Agreed. The tablet-like features that got added into the recent versions of OS X are something I don't particularly care for. If I'm on a desktop/laptop, I want a desktop-like experience. If I'm on a mobile device, the paradigm is sufficiently different that it justifies having a different OS. Good example: the default scroll direction got changed in OS X to operate like a touch device. Hated it with a passion. First thing I changed back.
  - Zr40 13y ago
    Some people like moving the scroll bar (which seems to be your preference). Other people like moving the document (which is my preference). There's no right or wrong choice here. The current default logically makes sense -- your cursor is located at a document, and when you're moving your fingers upward, the document also moves upward. But like any changed default, there are people who liked the previous setting. And there are of course people who want to use (or have to use) other OSes where this setting can't easily be changed. Those people can change the OS X setting at will.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  This was true then and it is still pretty true, but it will not be true forever. It isn't difficult for me to imagine the Ubuntu strategy of having a phone which runs an OS which can be used as a phone as usual or a desktop/laptop if placed in an appropriate shell (perhaps turning the phone part into a graphical touchpad) becoming a pretty common hybrid solution. Having said this, I still think there are some practical problems with Apple switching to non-Intel in the near term. Quite a lot of people I know who are diehard MacBook users use Boot Camp often, and some actually use their Macs as dedicated Windows boxes. I work at a place that is about 90% Mac laptop users but about half of them wouldn't be able to use Mac laptops for work if not for the ease of running Windows on their MacBooks.
revelation 13y ago
Just because Apple says the processor is "desktop-class", does not make it so. If it consumes 5W, you are only going to get 5W worth of perfomance. Any half-recent Intel processor will easily blow this out of the water.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Of course it's desktop-class! If your desktop was built in 2005....
  - reeses 13y ago
    Or the early 1990s if you were unfortunate enough to have an Indigo. Mid-1990s if you were really unfortunate and had an Indy, or were fortunate enough to have an Indigo2 with decent gfx. About the same amount of RAM then, too. :-)
  - lttlrck 13y ago
    What was wrong with the desktop in 2005?
    - wmf 13y ago
      Nothing... when running 2005 software. But due to Gates's Law you probably don't want to run 2013 software on 2005 hardware.
      - x0054 13y ago
        Name one software package (not a game), released in 2012-13, that would not work on a midrange 2005 desktop.
        karl_gluck 13y ago
        "Work" is pretty broad. Let's define it as "have a productive experience" because any non-period matched programs have issues other than pure compatibility. For example, bring many old DOS programs up on modern hardware and they will "work" but be entirely unusable unless you do something to slow them down. So, 2013 programs that don't "work" on 2005 hardware? Off the top of my head: SolidWorks 2013, VMWARE running Ubuntu 12 on top of Windows, Avid, Visual Studio 2013.
jrockway 13y ago
Switching from Intel to ARM for their "real" computers sounds like a decision that Apple's current leadership would make.
ryanobjc 13y ago
Apple did a bang up job accelerating their deployment of ARMv8 and A7. The question is, what now Intel? On one hand Intel did a huge mis-step and is missing out, on the other hand at the time "low cost ARM cpus" probably didn't seem like a good market for a company that has typically sold premium high end CPUs. One thing is for certain, Apple is unwilling to let Intel or anyone else dictate features via CPU roadmap. Did anyone else notice that the A7 has 1 billion transistors? That's on the scale of a desktop/mobile CPU - the latest intels have about 1.4b or so. That's a big deal. And don't give me the CPU vs GPU, because intel ships with a GPU on die.
zaroth 13y ago
Place your iPhone 8S next to your Thunderbolt display, and you have full blown OSX appear on the screen, and you use keyboard/mouse as usual. OSX and iOS will be running concurrently on the same hardware, when it gets fast enough. Of course as soon as you "undock" your phone (which doesn't actually involve a cable, or any physical connection), the OSX "VM" is instantly suspended. By the way, you could do the same thing with a MacBook Air type device which is nothing more than monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and battery. Phone stays in your pocket. Open the lid, and boom, there your desktop OS is. Except it's actually being served over AirPlay from your "phone". Maybe an early iteration would require connecting the phone to the shell with Thunderbolt. Although I think it's fundamentally two different OSs, I think the line will blur to the point where it's a meaningless distinction. For example, apps which support both modalities will install with a single click in both places.
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
  Sounds silly to have two separate operating systems. Sure they're going to converge those? What about Chrome OS and Android?
  - mortenjorck 13y ago
    At least Microsoft has shown the market how not to do it. Long-term, a converged, unified OS makes sense, but a lot more work is going to have to go into making a truly context-responsive UI system.
randyrand 13y ago
It doesn't seem like th author has a very clear grasp of what 64-bit word sizes actually allow over 32 bit. Here's a hint - not much. Sure, eventually more ram and more registers (which is very important but not really inherent to 64 bit as far as I know). It seems like the author thinks 64 bit magically makes things run faster or easier to develop for - neither of these are true except in the very small minority of circumstances. I'll leave with this: Nintendo came out with a 64 bit game console ~15 years ago at half the cost of the iPhone. This is not ground breaking stuff.
- wtallis 13y ago
  The "more registers" bit doesn't require going 64-bit, but it does require changing the instruction format, at which point it would be foolish not to take the opportunity to go 64-bit.
drill_sarge 13y ago
I am having nightmares if the future is hundreds of arm cores on workstation class systems. I'd rather have a couple big x86_64 cores which are "just there and work" without having to deal with all kinds of scary things. Also I think it's funny how people fall for this 64bit marketing bs. It's like back in the days of AMD Athlon64 when people though everything it's faster just because of 64 bits. I am interested in the new Atom generation too, which seems really promising.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is an interesting article for the theme, but not the content :-). Intel and ARM are on a collision course. What is interesting to me is that the previous two trains on these tracks were Intel and the bespoke computer makers. Some folks here will recall the great microprocessor wars for the general purpose computer. Starting with the Z80, 8080, 6502, and 6809, moving to the 80286/386, 68000/68020, and SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC/POWERPC. Intel pretty much won that war by coming up from the bottom, powering 'toy' computers (IBM PC) running a 'toy' operating system 'MS-DOS' with 'toy' peripherals (640 x 480 graphics). They came up and ate workstations, and then they ate servers. And here is the salient fact for me, they could do that because while the market for workstations might be 1 million/year, the market for PCs was 1 million a month (or more at its peak). So while a PC couldn't do what a workstation could early on, the PC market was generating a ton of cash which was going into improving the PC, much more cash and investment than was going into improving the Workstation. One by one the Workstation vendors dropped out of the market or replaced their offering with a "high end" PC. ARM set up the same scenario today, although this time it was portable devices that were the 'toys' and clever and useful but not nearly as powerful as PCs were so hardly a threat, but for every million PCs sold there were 5-10 million phones sold. And all that money and all that investment goes into making the chips that power these phones better and better, and the PC king is sitting on there trying to make a more powerful PC when what people are buying are more powerful phones. At IDF (in 2010 if memory serves) Intel noted that they were going to move into the embedded space more aggressively but it didn't actually follow through too well focusing in multi-chip solutions which didn't work well in space constrained phones. Meanwhile ARM was getting design win after design win with their SOC partners. So last year Intel started going all out on making a lower power version of the x86 architecture which could compete with ARM and this years IDF they took aim at the SOC business. All in an effort to pull enough oxygen out of the ecosystem to slow ARM down. After all, if today you could choose between two chips, one ARM and one x86-64, with the same cost and power curve, you'd probably go with the x86-64 for the assurance that software support would be easier. But once software support isn't an issue it gets to be more of a horse race, and ARM has notably had much better licensing terms than Intel has after being nearly usurped by AMD the first time they tried it. If ARM can get to 64 bits and I/O channel bandwidth faster than Intel can get to ARM's power envelope and cost, it will be a very interesting fight indeed.
kabdib 13y ago
Current ARM memory systems are terrible compared to what you find on even medium scale x86 chips. There's going to have to be a LOT of investment here before you'll see ARM approach the scale of large (or even medium) iron.
vicaya 13y ago
It'll be an interesting fight with Intel's Silvermont Atom, which finally gets out of order execution. Intel claims that dual-core Silvermont chips can outperform quad-core ARM chips by a factor of 1.6 when power draw is similar. Intel also says Silvermont can draw 2.4 times less power when delivering similar performance as the quad-core, ARM-based competition.

34 points by boh 13y ago

>Because both Mac OS X and iOS are now 64-bit, it will be easier to port the more demanding (but fewer in number) Mac apps to a single, converged future-state Apple device OS. It seems like Microsoft has shown that strategy to be a dud. Touch interfaces are awkward with a mouse and mouse interfaces are too fiddly to touch.

WayneDB 13y ago
How has Microsoft shown that strategy to be a dud? Surface RT didn't sell too well, but the Surface Pro has sold out a number of times. As a matter of fact, they're re-upping on the whole strategy with a 2nd version. Have you tried the Surface Pro? I use it everyday and have no problem interacting with any "legacy" desktop apps.
dljsjr 13y ago
If your business logic (Models/Controllers) are strongly decoupled from your Views, you still maintain a pretty large amount of code that becomes easier to port.
- mikeash 13y ago
  It really doesn't, though. The 32/64-bit divide is not all that consequential for this.
  - dljsjr 13y ago
    In 99.9% of cases, true. I was just trying to point out that the comment about UI's was invalid. If your code drops down to ASM or anything like that, then it becomes an issue. But that's not most use cases.
untog 13y ago
And the 32bit/64bit thing seems to be largely irrelevant, too. You just set 64bit or 32bit flags when compiling the vast majority of projects. There's no discernable difference.

Aloha 13y ago

I think this is spot on, if you're buying 2 million units of X its nearly always cheaper per unit than buying 1 million. That said, I dont expect to see a total platform convergence, I see a future where you have iOS and OSX, and where you could for example run iOS apps on OSX, I dont see them following the same route Microsoft did with Windows 8.

danbruc 13y ago

Albeit the about box says the author has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, at no point does the article convince me that the author understands the difference between a 32 bit and 64 bit processor.

mikeash 13y ago
The amount of misinformation on the 5S's 64-bitness is hilarious. I've yet to see a single person get it right aside from people I know personally.
- jsf 13y ago
  Care to share? I haven't heard a good explanation of what it's good for.
  - eddieplan9 13y ago
    It's less about word size and more about the underlying CPU architecture, i.e. ARMv8. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMv8#ARMv8_and_64-bit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARMv8#ARMv8_and_64-bit It's much easier to market 64-bit than ARMv8. But what really matters are a new instruction set, more registers and better SIMD. You have to give credit to Apple as they are indeed the first one to come out with a commercial SOC based on this and the first to get the OS support added.
  - fleitz 13y ago
    Mostly expanding RAM beyond 4GB. If you have tight numerical code that requires 64 bit floats/integers you may see a speed up. If your code is for some reason register starved you may see a speedup. Take the case of an app that downloads some JSON and makes a UITableView, it's not going to run much faster on 64 bit vs. 32 bit unless you're doing some extremely compute intensive image transforms.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >unless you're doing some extremely compute intensive image transforms. Which a lot of the best apps for the iPhone do quite a lot. Especially since nobody cares about the performance of todo apps, those are good enough already.

twoodfin 13y ago

Disagree. Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt. The ARM universe has a flexibility advantage, but Apple might not care, since Intel will surely make them the SoC they want if it means a spot in the iPad. I don't think the outcome here is ordained, nor would Apple want it to be: Competition for supplying them fast, efficient CPUs is exactly what they didn't have in the PowerPC days, and it nearly killed them.

joezydeco 13y ago
Intel looks to be getting better at low power faster than ARM and partners are getting better at perf/watt. Citation, please?
- vicaya 13y ago
  Google atom silvermont
- twoodfin 13y ago
  This is the kind of thing I have in mind: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7117/haswell-ult-investigation http://www.anandtech.com/show/7117/haswell-ult-investigation Even their "ultrabook"-class Haswell parts are becoming power competitive with ARM tablet chips. The Y series should get even closer to parity. Broadwell is, in theory, right around the corner, with Intel claiming another 30% power improvement in the 14nm process. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7318/intel-demos-14nm-broadwell-up-to-30-lower-power-than-haswell http://www.anandtech.com/show/7318/intel-demos-14nm-broadwel... Intel will have a significant process advantage over the ARM partners for at least another couple of years, and possibly longer. I would be surprised if they failed to overcome the engineering challenges required to exploit that process advantage in mobile. My point isn't that I'm sure who's going to win, but rather that Apple is not inextricably tied to ARM.

grecy 13y ago

I don't buy that Apple will merge iOS and OS X. At the last All Things D that Steve appeared at (9? 10?), he talked at length about this, and said they'd thought about it and worked on it for a very long time. In the end, they figured that phones and Mac Pros are too different to share the same OS, and it just doesn't make sense.

chiph 13y ago
Agreed. The tablet-like features that got added into the recent versions of OS X are something I don't particularly care for. If I'm on a desktop/laptop, I want a desktop-like experience. If I'm on a mobile device, the paradigm is sufficiently different that it justifies having a different OS. Good example: the default scroll direction got changed in OS X to operate like a touch device. Hated it with a passion. First thing I changed back.
- Zr40 13y ago
  Some people like moving the scroll bar (which seems to be your preference). Other people like moving the document (which is my preference). There's no right or wrong choice here. The current default logically makes sense -- your cursor is located at a document, and when you're moving your fingers upward, the document also moves upward. But like any changed default, there are people who liked the previous setting. And there are of course people who want to use (or have to use) other OSes where this setting can't easily be changed. Those people can change the OS X setting at will.
georgemcbay 13y ago
This was true then and it is still pretty true, but it will not be true forever. It isn't difficult for me to imagine the Ubuntu strategy of having a phone which runs an OS which can be used as a phone as usual or a desktop/laptop if placed in an appropriate shell (perhaps turning the phone part into a graphical touchpad) becoming a pretty common hybrid solution. Having said this, I still think there are some practical problems with Apple switching to non-Intel in the near term. Quite a lot of people I know who are diehard MacBook users use Boot Camp often, and some actually use their Macs as dedicated Windows boxes. I work at a place that is about 90% Mac laptop users but about half of them wouldn't be able to use Mac laptops for work if not for the ease of running Windows on their MacBooks.

revelation 13y ago

Just because Apple says the processor is "desktop-class", does not make it so. If it consumes 5W, you are only going to get 5W worth of perfomance. Any half-recent Intel processor will easily blow this out of the water.

mikeash 13y ago
Of course it's desktop-class! If your desktop was built in 2005....
- reeses 13y ago
  Or the early 1990s if you were unfortunate enough to have an Indigo. Mid-1990s if you were really unfortunate and had an Indy, or were fortunate enough to have an Indigo2 with decent gfx. About the same amount of RAM then, too. :-)
- lttlrck 13y ago
  What was wrong with the desktop in 2005?
  - wmf 13y ago
    Nothing... when running 2005 software. But due to Gates's Law you probably don't want to run 2013 software on 2005 hardware.
    - x0054 13y ago
      Name one software package (not a game), released in 2012-13, that would not work on a midrange 2005 desktop.
      - karl_gluck 13y ago
        "Work" is pretty broad. Let's define it as "have a productive experience" because any non-period matched programs have issues other than pure compatibility. For example, bring many old DOS programs up on modern hardware and they will "work" but be entirely unusable unless you do something to slow them down. So, 2013 programs that don't "work" on 2005 hardware? Off the top of my head: SolidWorks 2013, VMWARE running Ubuntu 12 on top of Windows, Avid, Visual Studio 2013.

jrockway 13y ago

Switching from Intel to ARM for their "real" computers sounds like a decision that Apple's current leadership would make.

ryanobjc 13y ago

Apple did a bang up job accelerating their deployment of ARMv8 and A7. The question is, what now Intel? On one hand Intel did a huge mis-step and is missing out, on the other hand at the time "low cost ARM cpus" probably didn't seem like a good market for a company that has typically sold premium high end CPUs. One thing is for certain, Apple is unwilling to let Intel or anyone else dictate features via CPU roadmap. Did anyone else notice that the A7 has 1 billion transistors? That's on the scale of a desktop/mobile CPU - the latest intels have about 1.4b or so. That's a big deal. And don't give me the CPU vs GPU, because intel ships with a GPU on die.

zaroth 13y ago

Place your iPhone 8S next to your Thunderbolt display, and you have full blown OSX appear on the screen, and you use keyboard/mouse as usual. OSX and iOS will be running concurrently on the same hardware, when it gets fast enough. Of course as soon as you "undock" your phone (which doesn't actually involve a cable, or any physical connection), the OSX "VM" is instantly suspended. By the way, you could do the same thing with a MacBook Air type device which is nothing more than monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and battery. Phone stays in your pocket. Open the lid, and boom, there your desktop OS is. Except it's actually being served over AirPlay from your "phone". Maybe an early iteration would require connecting the phone to the shell with Thunderbolt. Although I think it's fundamentally two different OSs, I think the line will blur to the point where it's a meaningless distinction. For example, apps which support both modalities will install with a single click in both places.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
Sounds silly to have two separate operating systems. Sure they're going to converge those? What about Chrome OS and Android?
- mortenjorck 13y ago
  At least Microsoft has shown the market how not to do it. Long-term, a converged, unified OS makes sense, but a lot more work is going to have to go into making a truly context-responsive UI system.

randyrand 13y ago

It doesn't seem like th author has a very clear grasp of what 64-bit word sizes actually allow over 32 bit. Here's a hint - not much. Sure, eventually more ram and more registers (which is very important but not really inherent to 64 bit as far as I know). It seems like the author thinks 64 bit magically makes things run faster or easier to develop for - neither of these are true except in the very small minority of circumstances. I'll leave with this: Nintendo came out with a 64 bit game console ~15 years ago at half the cost of the iPhone. This is not ground breaking stuff.

wtallis 13y ago
The "more registers" bit doesn't require going 64-bit, but it does require changing the instruction format, at which point it would be foolish not to take the opportunity to go 64-bit.

drill_sarge 13y ago

I am having nightmares if the future is hundreds of arm cores on workstation class systems. I'd rather have a couple big x86_64 cores which are "just there and work" without having to deal with all kinds of scary things. Also I think it's funny how people fall for this 64bit marketing bs. It's like back in the days of AMD Athlon64 when people though everything it's faster just because of 64 bits. I am interested in the new Atom generation too, which seems really promising.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

This is an interesting article for the theme, but not the content :-). Intel and ARM are on a collision course. What is interesting to me is that the previous two trains on these tracks were Intel and the bespoke computer makers. Some folks here will recall the great microprocessor wars for the general purpose computer. Starting with the Z80, 8080, 6502, and 6809, moving to the 80286/386, 68000/68020, and SPARC/MIPS/PA-RISC/POWERPC. Intel pretty much won that war by coming up from the bottom, powering 'toy' computers (IBM PC) running a 'toy' operating system 'MS-DOS' with 'toy' peripherals (640 x 480 graphics). They came up and ate workstations, and then they ate servers. And here is the salient fact for me, they could do that because while the market for workstations might be 1 million/year, the market for PCs was 1 million a month (or more at its peak). So while a PC couldn't do what a workstation could early on, the PC market was generating a ton of cash which was going into improving the PC, much more cash and investment than was going into improving the Workstation. One by one the Workstation vendors dropped out of the market or replaced their offering with a "high end" PC. ARM set up the same scenario today, although this time it was portable devices that were the 'toys' and clever and useful but not nearly as powerful as PCs were so hardly a threat, but for every million PCs sold there were 5-10 million phones sold. And all that money and all that investment goes into making the chips that power these phones better and better, and the PC king is sitting on there trying to make a more powerful PC when what people are buying are more powerful phones. At IDF (in 2010 if memory serves) Intel noted that they were going to move into the embedded space more aggressively but it didn't actually follow through too well focusing in multi-chip solutions which didn't work well in space constrained phones. Meanwhile ARM was getting design win after design win with their SOC partners. So last year Intel started going all out on making a lower power version of the x86 architecture which could compete with ARM and this years IDF they took aim at the SOC business. All in an effort to pull enough oxygen out of the ecosystem to slow ARM down. After all, if today you could choose between two chips, one ARM and one x86-64, with the same cost and power curve, you'd probably go with the x86-64 for the assurance that software support would be easier. But once software support isn't an issue it gets to be more of a horse race, and ARM has notably had much better licensing terms than Intel has after being nearly usurped by AMD the first time they tried it. If ARM can get to 64 bits and I/O channel bandwidth faster than Intel can get to ARM's power envelope and cost, it will be a very interesting fight indeed.

kabdib 13y ago

Current ARM memory systems are terrible compared to what you find on even medium scale x86 chips. There's going to have to be a LOT of investment here before you'll see ARM approach the scale of large (or even medium) iron.

vicaya 13y ago

It'll be an interesting fight with Intel's Silvermont Atom, which finally gets out of order execution. Intel claims that dual-core Silvermont chips can outperform quad-core ARM chips by a factor of 1.6 when power draw is similar. Intel also says Silvermont can draw 2.4 times less power when delivering similar performance as the quad-core, ARM-based competition.