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How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

theguardian.com

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Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#31

Post by dogma1138 »

rwmj wrote: post #28
dogma1138 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rath…

You're only looking at 32 bit ARM CPUs. 64 bit ARM is quite literally a different beast, and (for example) the 48 core Cavium that I have access to at work[1] is easily comparable to an Intel Xeon. [1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/48-core-arm-64-bit-ser...

No I'm looking at consumer offerings just like the OP mentioned - mobile devices, but that's fine lets compare apples to apples then, but keep in mind that these aren't 4W devices either. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#32

Post by dogma1138 »

timthorn wrote: post #25
dogma1138 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rath…

The server focussed SOCs shipping currently (none of which are listed in those benchmark links) can have much better performance than Atom. There's a broad spectrum of ARM cores for different markets, and different optimisations that can be applied to SoC design decisions to target a part at different markets.

The OP was talking about mobile not server SOC's but fine.... The server SOC's also have a power consumption several times greater. So if that's what you want lets look at the Xeon-D performance wise they are very competitive to Intel's discrete CPU's, and beat the AppliedMicro X-Gene 2.4 quite harshly... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#33

Post by matt2000 »

rzzzt wrote: post #8
runn1ng wrote: post #7

I actually didn't know ARM is from England. For whatever reason, I thought the company resides somewhere in Asia.

I recommend watching "Micro Men", a drama/documentary depicting the early days of Acorn and the battle with Sinclair for producing the BBC's official microcomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o for anyone interested in checking it out.

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#34

Post by pja »

randomsearch wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?

Given ARMs dominance of the mobile processor industry for any large tech company to buy them would invite the close scrutiny by anti-trust authorities that none of the major tech companies are particularly keen to attract.

Since ARM is happy to license their designs to all & sundry, what would be the benefit to any individual company of buying them out? Little to none: Even if you want to invest in your own CPUs and add your own special sauce (like Apple) then you can do that much more cheaply than the cost of buying out the company by simply buying the appropriate licenses. You can’t buy them and lock out your competitors because the anti-trust regulators would have a fit. I’m sure every large tech company has looked at the pros & cons and decided that the status quo is by far the best option for them & that the same arguments apply to their competitors.

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#35

Post by TeMPOraL »

0942v8653 wrote: post #24
bpicolo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I don't expect the general public to care at all about CPU architecture...

It does matter to them, though, because if the computing market turns towards ARM tablets (tablets seem to be what Microsoft is pushing), and they get one without realizing it, they won't be able to run any of the stuff they used to be able to on Windows. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and if ARM becomes dominant, it will end up being pretty much pointless. CPU architecture isn't a huge differe…

Still, it's not something the GenPop will know or care about. From their POV, it's a product issue - this tablet does or does not run some software. It's easy to paper over 99% of those differences by... writing new software. I mean, people don't complain that iPad doesn't run vanilla MS Office.

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#36

Post by RockyMcNuts »

dogma1138 wrote: post #20
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #10

With Intel skipping a 'tick' and fabs like Samsung and TSMC catching up in process, ARM-based CPUs are competitive in performance with the low end of Intel's desktop lines up to Core i5 - and use less power. There seems to be a window for ARM to make inroads into servers, in addition to low-end laptops like Chromebooks. The trend of mobile devices replacing desktops for more and more tasks (> 50% of emails read on mo…

ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rath…

those blog benchmarks are 2013 and 2014.

current benchmarks linked in the blog post show ARM competitive with Core i5 (single-core) although not i7.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/11/ipad-pro-review-mac-lik...

blog post also links to published reports saying Intel has 1,000 people working on a SOC for iPhone.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/16/intel-has-1000-people-work...

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#37

Post by m-i-l »

gjvc wrote: post #30
mst wrote: post #17

> The computer powered by the chip that came out of the design was called the Acorn Risc Machine – or ARM. NO NO NO NO NO. The computer was the Acorn Archimedes. The first one I had contained an ARM26. Gah.

Correct. This was England's last hope in the computer market.

Or the INMOS transputer[0] based Abaq (which later became the Atari Transputer Workstation[1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INMOS_transputer [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#38

Post by rwmj »

dogma1138 wrote: post #32
timthorn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The server focussed SOCs shipping currently (none of which are listed in those benchmark links) can have much better performance than Atom. There's a broad spectrum of ARM cores for different markets, and different optimisations that can be applied to SoC design decisions to target a part at different markets.

The OP was talking about mobile not server SOC's but fine.... The server SOC's also have a power consumption several times greater. So if that's what you want lets look at the Xeon-D performance wise they are very competitive to Intel's discrete CPU's, and beat the AppliedMicro X-Gene 2.4 quite harshly... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...

The X-Gene 1 was a development platform designed to work out the software bugs (and it's also obsolete now, since it was first produced in 40nm in 2013). Obviously if you compare latest Intel SoC with some 2+ year old dev-kit, the latest Intel looks great! They should compare Xeon with Cavium ThunderX, X-Gene 2/3, AMD Seattle, Qualcomm's latest server SoC or the HiSilicon D0x.

http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/...

http://www.cavium.com/ThunderX_ARM_Processors.html

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#39

Post by diqu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35
0942v8653 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter to them, though, because if the computing market turns towards ARM tablets (tablets seem to be what Microsoft is pushing), and they get one without realizing it, they won't be able to run any of the stuff they used to be able to on Windows. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and if ARM becomes dominant, it will end up being pretty much pointless. CPU architecture isn't a huge differe…

Still, it's not something the GenPop will know or care about. From their POV, it's a product issue - this tablet does or does not run some software. It's easy to paper over 99% of those differences by... writing new software. I mean, people don't complain that iPad doesn't run vanilla MS Office.

Which boils down to the old "consumers view computers as black boxes" argument. The question is whether we should care about that or not, and whether the pain of not being able to run GenPop's favorite software grows too big. Being locked into the respective device's app store hides that pain to a degree. And whenever it becomes noticable, GenPop rather considers switching to a different vendor than considering the tech in question. As long as people put band-aids around the architecture, I'm not sure why any consumer would want care about the underlying hardware in question.

Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

#40

Post by dogma1138 »

rwmj wrote: post #38
dogma1138 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP was talking about mobile not server SOC's but fine.... The server SOC's also have a power consumption several times greater. So if that's what you want lets look at the Xeon-D performance wise they are very competitive to Intel's discrete CPU's, and beat the AppliedMicro X-Gene 2.4 quite harshly... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9185/intel-xeon-d-review-perfo...

The X-Gene 1 was a development platform designed to work out the software bugs (and it's also obsolete now, since it was first produced in 40nm in 2013). Obviously if you compare latest Intel SoC with some 2+ year old dev-kit, the latest Intel looks great! They should compare Xeon with Cavium ThunderX, X-Gene 2/3, AMD Seattle, Qualcomm's latest server SoC or the HiSilicon D0x. http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploa…

Well the Xeon-D 1540 sits just below the E5 in most benchmarks, unfortunately I can't conjure benchmarks out of think air, but you don't seem to be able to do so either (but for all accounts Cavium isn't shipping anything yet, all i could find are press releases that some one said they'll be building servers based on their SOC bot nothing else). I wasn't comparing anything, anantech was they compared an available Intel Xeon-D SOC against a commercially available HP micro-server that was launched 6 months prior so either HP chose to use an "obsolete development platform that was designed to work out software bugs" or that what was available for them at the time. Again I wasn't saying that ARM CPU's are bad, I was saying that anyone that is saying that they currently can beat Intel on either price/performance or performance/wattage across the board is delusional.
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