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The End of x86?

fernstrategy.com

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Re: The End of x86?

#11

Post by nl »

I think ARM is going to continue to bite into x86 market share significantly.

But this article is wrong to right off x86 so easily.

Firstly, power consumption. It's right that ARM has lower power draw than x86. The article is wrong by how much, though. Very low power ARM chips draw much, much less than 2-3 watts. These are mostly for embedded systems, though.

The 2-3 watts vs 5 watts for ARM vs Atom isn't too significant. The big problem with Atom was that the support systems (memory controller etc) draw ~20 watts. That situation is being improved for netbook systems atm.

For sub-netbook systems, Intel is launching it's Moorestown architecture. This is probably still isn't dropping into the Smartphone market in this generation (despite Intel's marketing: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/01/moblin-linux...), but should be great for tablets: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/intel-fires-open...

The article also implies that Intel's foundries are a liability. That would be true if there really was useful "competition in the foundry market". Sure, if you want 45nm+ chips produced, there are a number of foundries that can do it. But once you start looking for 32nm foundries they get a lot rarer, and Intel has just announced it's building its new 22nm foundries. That's a whole generation ahead of anyone else in the industry and is a big competitive advantage (Smaller scale in chip foundries means more performance for the same power, or less power for the same performance.)

Re: The End of x86?

#12

Post by aidenn0 »

Intel is aware of this. Atom is the shot across the bow. They are working on making smaller and lower-power parts. It's interesting to watch ARM race up as Intel races down.

Re: The End of x86?

#14

Post by gecko »

nivertech wrote: post #6
contextfree wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NT doesn't currently run on ARM (WP7 is still based on CE), though it was originally designed to be CPU independent. Probably the biggest obstacle for MSFT porting Windows to ARM is not the expense of the port itself, but reluctance to put out a version of Windows that's binary incompatible with all the Windows software out there. Incidentally (and speaking of breaking compatibility), MSFT is working on a brand new k…

Windows NT originally was CPU independent, but only for Little Endian architectures.

That can't be correct, since I remember running Windows NT 4 on a PowerPC system.

Re: The End of x86?

#15

Post by Geee »

That will surely happen. CPUs have for some time been limited by heating problems and the architecture with more performance with the same power consumption will win. If ARM can deliver that, then there's no question about it.

Re: The End of x86?

#16

Post by jbarham »

pkaler wrote: post #10
neilc wrote: post #3

Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? If an Atom-based CPU consumes ~2-3 extra watts but offers marginally better performance and (more importantly) compatibility with an enormous base of existing applications, that doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for switching.

Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? I'll bet $5 that the MacBook Air in the future (18-24 months) will switch to ARM once the >2GHz ARM processors start shipping en masse. The Asus Eee PCs running Android with Snapdragon processors already embed the Cortex-A9 MPCores.

"4GB RAM ought to be enough for anybody."

ARMS's Achilles' heel is that it's only 32-bit, and I don't think anyone wants to go back to a segmented address space any time soon.

Re: The End of x86?

#17

Post by rbanffy »

aidenn0 wrote: post #12

Intel is aware of this. Atom is the shot across the bow. They are working on making smaller and lower-power parts. It's interesting to watch ARM race up as Intel races down.

If we compare the RISC nature of ARM with the CISC-implemented-over-RISC approach of contemporary x86s, it's easy to believe it will prove simpler to upscale ARM than to downscale the Atom.

Transmeta-style emulation could be one possible way out of this death spiral for Intel.

Re: The End of x86?

#18

Post by tesseract »

gecko wrote: post #14
nivertech wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows NT originally was CPU independent, but only for Little Endian architectures.

That can't be correct, since I remember running Windows NT 4 on a PowerPC system.

PowerPC (except PPC970 aka G5, as I recall) is bi-endian (configurable endianness); so are Alpha and Itanium which also had Windows NT ports.

Re: The End of x86?

#19

Post by nl »

wmf wrote: post #5
praecipula wrote: post #2

I think the largest hurdle for ARM to get over is the preponderance of Windows installations with kernels only complied for x86. Linux and OS X (Mach) already run on ARM, and I think that possibly the NT kernel runs on ARM (Windows phone 7 is ARM, right?) I have trouble seeing Microsoft port over Windows proper to ARM until there's a really strong market for it. That being said, perhaps low power consumption ARM devi…

I don't think Windows Phone is based on NT. Apple and Android have shown that you can build a mainstream platform ecosystem from nothing in 2-3 years, so who needs Windows compatibility?

Neither Apple iOS or Android were "build from nothing in 2-3 years".

iOS is based on OS-X, which is based on NeXT, which is based on BSD (~40 years of work)

Android is based on Linux (so ~20 years of work)

Re: The End of x86?

#20

Post by dstein »

I ran some rough numbers once. I couldn't find exact numbers but estimated for about $1.5 million worth of ARM-based plug servers, you would have close to enough raw CPU power (in terms of FLOPS) compete with the 2003-version of Google.
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