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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

#81

Post by prodmerc »

daemin wrote: post #78
prodmerc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.

I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?

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

#82

Post by daemin »

prodmerc wrote: post #81
daemin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.

I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?

Based on what another commented has said it seems Intel bought the ARM license from DEC, and given that they sold off only the consumer ARM chips - keeping the task specific ones - it makes sense in a way. It was so they wouldn't have any internal competition or divided focus away from their low power x86 chips - the Atom's.

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

#83

Post by newman314 »

tw04 wrote: post #61
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…

I'm more interested to see what Amazon ends up doing with annapura (sp?) labs.

It wasn't clear if Annapurna was still going to make chips available to other companies. Their premise certainly is very interesting and it would be a bummer to be just Amazon specific

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

#84

Post by newman314 »

potrebitel22 wrote: post #67
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…

>pple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA Citation needed. Different from Anand's mentioning of "custom designed implementation of ARM ISA" on his webpage without any proof and further copied and taken to Wikipedia. One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. Of course the chip is a custom design ( as it mentioned @ Wikipedia…

Apple did buy PA Semi so they do have some chops there.

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

#85

Post by throwaway2048 »

AReallyGoodName wrote: post #65
guelo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how come nobody in the Android ecosystem is able to build a successful device with Intel? Even after Qualcomm had a very bad ARM chip for the last 2 years and Apple is beating their pants off nobody, from Sony to LG to Samsung, is willing to go with Intel.

I think it's just the extra power options arm has. Scaling ARM speed just means writing to the PLL register of the CPU. Power usage is pretty much linear with frequency and being able to go to 3Mhz one core from 2Ghz quad via the OS is excellent. x86 now has dynamic core and frequency speeds but it's not OS driven, the CPU does it on its own. Understandable since you can't just add such features to the ever compatibl…

this really isn't accurate, clock control of the processor via the OS has been possible on x86 for more than a decade.

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

#86

Post by giovannibajo1 »

bpicolo wrote: post #15
diqu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". I think that's implied when a mainstream news outlet writes about it, and not some tech magazine. > 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. which seems evide…

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

Intel has attempted brand awareness for years with its "Intel Inside" campaign. Stickers, ads, leaflets... They do strong comarketing campaigns with PC OEMs to make sure their brand is somewhat pushed to end customers. In the most unscientific statistic ever, my mother knows what Intel is, but never heard of ARM. The bad news for Intel is that nobody ever is saying "does this device have Intel? If not I'm reluctant to buy", which is possibly what they were aiming at.

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

#87

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

orf wrote: post #63
dogma1138 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC's but they yearly revenue is below 200M and they operate at break even or a loss. IT seems to be a case study of a company which it's IP is a corner stone in many consumer devices but some how never managed to capitalize on it. ARM is a very good example of how to spin off your IP and make it successful even when…

> I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC I would consider any company who's tech ships in a billion devices successful, regardless of if they have managed to capitalize on it.

I think "company" was the operative word there. They are certainly successful technologists, but perhaps not a success as a company.

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

#88

Post by thesz »

pjc50 wrote: post #74
thesz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early ARM designs have group load/store commands. This goes against RISC philosophy. You cannot call ARM a RISC because of that. It is a CISC with simplified decoder.

This is the worst single piece of pedantry that I've ever seen on HN.

I designed chips for living, despite being software engineer. Including, and not limited to, CPUs. In the design process I had to account for optimizing compilers and possible high-performance and low-energy versions.

So I am very sensitive to the misuse of "RISC trade mark".

Ideal RISC design is very easy to develop. It can be easily tailored to various application domains, including high-performance (OoO) and low-energy. RISC instruction semantics should be simple, all implementation details are hidden. In my opinion, there are only three RISC designs - DEC Alpha, IBM Power and RISC-V. Others contain various design issues that show their inner cogs and that had to be accounted in the designs different from the original one.

(in my MIPS implementation experience I've implemented 33% of MIPS commands in the first month and spent another month accounting for branch delay slot)

ARM contains three deviations from ideal RISC: user-visible PC (read of PC returns PC of command+8!), multi-cycle group load/store commands and condition codes. All three "features" make it difficult to design something different in performance than original ARM.

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

#89

Post by kogepathic »

potrebitel22 wrote: post #67
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…

>pple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA Citation needed. Different from Anand's mentioning of "custom designed implementation of ARM ISA" on his webpage without any proof and further copied and taken to Wikipedia. One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. Of course the chip is a custom design ( as it mentioned @ Wikipedia…

> Citation needed.

> One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry.

I don't work for Apple, and if I did I would value my job more over satisfying your need for a citation. But anyway, since I cannot prove or disprove that Apple did design their own chip, which they did, I will point out that NVidia, a much smaller company, has managed to do just what I claimed, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

> Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves.

Really? I think their purchase of a processor design company in 2008 speaks to the fact that they do have this talent in house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

PA Semi designed their own POWER CPU, which they developed from scratch. Don't tell me these people (who work for Apple now) don't have the capabilities and resources to design a processor which can implement the ARM ISA.

Either provide a citation that proves that Apple hasn't designed their own core implementing the ARM ISA, or stop demanding some from my claim, which has a lot more evidence behind it.

The fact that they have dual sourced CPUs from TSMC and Samsung, which are on different processor nodes, thus requiring a different layout and mask, tells me that Apple's hardware engineers absolutely know what they're doing, and can design the internals of a chip:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i...

Plus, around the time of the PA Semi acquisition, news outlets reported that the engineers were working on a custom CPU for Apple devices: http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/15/apples_pa_semi_wor...

I honestly don't know why I put so much time into refuting this. Many other people on the internet think that Apple is designing their own core inside the iPhone, how else would a dual core chip smoking the living shit out of Samsung and Qualcomm's quad and octo core processors?

Here, have another person who says Apple design it themselves. http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8083459&cid=506143...

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