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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

#41

Post by dogma1138 »

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #36
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…

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...

ARS isn't loading for me, yes the a9x is a monster chip especially as far graphics and synthetic benchmarks goes, try real world applications (quite hard to near impossible on Apple devices due to the closed ecosystem) including web server performance, video compression throttling and many more aspects and you'll see that's not the case. It's very competitive with Core-M devices for sure but sorry not sold out on it being competitive against Core-I devices on any level besides maybe graphical performance so far.

As far as Intel making apple SOC's and? Intel is selling modems to Apple, and it wants to fab SOC's for them as well. Since Apple is fabless and Intel has the most advanced SC production line at the time it nailed 14nm and it's pushing for 10nm next year for launch in 2017 I don't see this being indicative of anything, Intel tested the water with ARM almost 8 years ago and it decided to continue with x86, and we've seen quite interesting things coming from them Core-M, Xeon-D, and even things like Intel Edison which showed that x86 can be scaled to pretty much every use at this time while still being very interesting and competitive in terms of both price, performance, and power consumption.

We've been hearing this gloom and doom about "Wintel" for almost 2 decades now, linux is going to beat them, no wait apple power PC, no ARM, sigh it's getting old. Intel isn't going anywhere soon and it has enough resources to push through and their technology and where they can take it so far does not seem to be obsolete on any scale.

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

#42

Post by jhallenworld »

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #36
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…

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...

The A9X sounds impressive.. too bad it's only available to Apple.

Here is a counter-point to the article you link:

http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/14/ipad-pro-a9x-chip/

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

#43

Post by jimmaswell »

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.

Personally I like using my Windows laptop-tablet hybrid for old games from GoG, and I'm sure a fair amount of other people run old programs that aren't going to be updated for new architectures on these.

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

#44

Post by josh2600 »

dogma1138 wrote: post #41
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

ARS isn't loading for me, yes the a9x is a monster chip especially as far graphics and synthetic benchmarks goes, try real world applications (quite hard to near impossible on Apple devices due to the closed ecosystem) including web server performance, video compression throttling and many more aspects and you'll see that's not the case. It's very competitive with Core-M devices for sure but sorry not sold out on it…

"Nailed 14nm". Lol.

I guess maybe you missed all the news about Intel fubar'ing it's 14nm and having to order more 16nm capacity from TSMC to deal with the pain?

http://techbuyersguru.com/hotdealsblog/tbg-commentary-intels...

Intel might've once been unstoppable, but they're not perfect any more.

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

#45

Post by fit2rule »

sohcahtoa wrote: post #14
kogepathic wrote: post #2

> Hands up who knows which company designed the iPhone 6s’ 64-bit chip Apple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 > Furber and his co-designer, Sophie Wilson, had found research from the Berkeley campus of the University of California into a new type of processor: one that simplified the s…

> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.

It was neck and neck, in my opinion. In the UK, ARM ruled, but in the US, the MIPS Magnum series were well received and widely used. MIPS had a chance to be an ARM, but it was squandered.

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

#47

Post by simula67 »

fit2rule wrote: post #45
sohcahtoa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.

It was neck and neck, in my opinion. In the UK, ARM ruled, but in the US, the MIPS Magnum series were well received and widely used. MIPS had a chance to be an ARM, but it was squandered.

> MIPS had a chance to be an ARM, but it was squandered.

I have always wondered how ARM succeeded when MIPS was already around. Anyone know ?

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

#48

Post by prodmerc »

tacos wrote: post #22
sohcahtoa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.

Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.

Not to mention Intel had quite a successful line of ARM CPUs back in the day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

Which makes articles like this one: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-... ridiculous.

"the unthinkable happened. Intel revealed it was going to build ARM processors."

Do your damn research, people :-)

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

#50

Post by digi_owl »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #5

I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". Competitors and people working in the chip industry have probably been well aware of the ARM architecture and its rise for a long time. In addition, some factors that are responsible for the huge success of this architecture have probably been historical accidents as well, in the sense that a different…

> In general I think that the press and the general public only becomes aware of these things long after they have reached a dominant market position and are employed almost universally.

Exception being when it affects the journalists directly, as is the case with how the media followed Apple closely even when they were a bit player in the computer world. This because media production had for better or worse de-facto standardized on Apple.

Thus when Apple branched out into the consumer electronics world, they wrote about it. This even though Apple was hardly the first, and their offering very much wedded to the Mac.

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