ARM Hopes To Lure Microsoft Away From Intel 333
Steve Kerrison writes "With the explosion of netbooks now available, the line between PC and mobile phone is becoming much less distinct. ARM, one of the biggest companies behind CPU architectures for mobile phones (and other embedded systems), sees now as an opportunity to break out of mobiles and give Intel a run for its money. HEXUS.channel quizzes Bob Morris, ARM's director of mobile computing, on how it plans to achieve such a herculean task. Right now, ARM's pushing Android as the OS that's synonymous with the mobile Internet. But it's not simply going to ignore Microsoft: 'What if Microsoft offered a full version of Windows (as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows CE) that used the ARM, rather than X86 (Intel and AMD) instruction set? Then it would be a straight hardware fight with Intel, in which ARM hopes its low power, low price processors will have an advantage.'"
Re:Applications are the problem (Score:2, Informative)
> Remember DEC having to use FX!32 to get Office running via emulation at a fraction of native speed
I'm assuming by fraction you mean somewhere between .9 and 1.1. Yes, if you had some ancient, assed-out Multia running at 166MHz you weren't
going to be happy compared to a then-smoking 450MHz P3. However, at the same time Intel was stuck around 450MHz, Digital was cranking their
processors to much higher clock speeds.
P.S. Word and Excel had native AXP ports. You were stuck using FX!32 to run Outlook, but be honest -- who really gave a shit about Outlook 97?
That's like complaining that Schedule+ or Microsoft Bob didn't run on your PWS500
Re:Good way to enter the market (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good way to enter the market (Score:5, Informative)
Look at how quickly Apple ported Mac OS to Intel.
Apple maintained an internal cross platform port. [eweek.com]
Re:Full Windows on a phone? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the first BSOD I had in a number of years was when I installed Vista recently (fully SPed too). I quickly went back to XP until 7 RTM came out.
Yes, I will admit 7 has been quite smooth, apart from the odd lock up/crash when playing TF2. Still, there's your lock up.
Whether you're a fanboy or not, you seem to be ill informed about windows issues. They still exist and are still a thorn in Microsoft's side.
Re:ARM? x86? (Score:5, Informative)
And does ARM actually make a desktop-class CPU (as compared to Intel/AMD's mid or high end cpu's)?
ARM CPUs are advancing faster than x86 CPUs.
The Cortex A8 has roughly P3 performance (per clock), and clock speeds varying from 600-1000mhz. This is without Out of Order execution, 64bit support, or any other fancy stuff. The power envelope is about 50 milliwatts load. Most SoCs bundling GPU, DSP, LCD controller, wifi, etc. consume around or under a watt.
The Cortex A9 should be significantly faster. If I recall correctly, it has OoOe and sports a 2-4 core multicore architecture, with increased clockspeeds, in the same power envelope. Look up TI's OMAP4 SoCs. When these are released in 2010, we'll have Pentium D/GeForce 6600 level performance using up a hundred or so milliwatts, and generating a completely negligible amount of heat.
Now maybe you can see the implications of this?
Re:ARM? x86? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here's what I think would be funny... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Make MS come to you (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft fucked-over IBM when they suddenly decided to develop Windows 3 as their main OS, instead of sticking with the original OS/2 agreement. For the rest of this post, I'll just quote wikipedia because it saves typing effort:
"The majority of criticism has been for its business tactics, often described with the motto "embrace, extend and extinguish". Microsoft initially Embraces a competing standard or product, then Extends it to produce their own version which is incompatible, which in time Extinguishes competition that cannot use Microsoft's new protected version." [editors note - See Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect as examples.] [Also DR-DOS = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1#DR-DOS_compatibility [wikipedia.org] ]
"... vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet."
- Browser incompatibilities: Added ActiveX to break compatibility with existing NSCA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator
- Breaking Java's portability - Microsoft deliberately tied Java programs to its Windows platform, making them unusable on Linux, Mac, Amiga, or NeXT systems, rather than Java's original intent (platform-independence)
- Networking: In 2000, an extension to the Kerberos networking protocol was included in Windows 2000, effectively denying all products access except those made by Microsoft
- Instant Messaging: Microsoft put pressure on AOL to make its IM networks interoperable with competing instant messaging services, an outcome that eroded AOL's market leadership.
- Adobe fears: Adobe Systems refused to let Microsoft implement built-in PDF support in Microsoft Office, citing fears of EEE.
- More Browser Incompatibilities (CSS, data:, etc.): A decade after the original Netscape-related antitrust suit, the web browser company Opera Software filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the European Union
- Spreadsheet non-conformance with ODF standards
"In 2004, to prevent a repeat of the "browser wars," and the resulting morass of conflicting standards, Apple Inc., Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software formed the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group to create open standards. Microsoft has so far refused to join."
Re:ARM? x86? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash is pretty inefficient, but it does run (admittedly not great) on the N810 [wikipedia.org] which has a 400MHz ARM processor, which is a generation behind the Cortex A8s, so a Cortex A8 should have no real trouble with Flash.
I hope some non-Adobe Flash implementation is ready for real use soon as the only possible reason for Flash to be as slow as it is is that Adobe must not care at all about its speed.
Re:Compatibility layer for CE just like for 3.1 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Applications? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ARM? x86? (Score:5, Informative)
Heh... In the case of your laptop and netbook, the odds are good you don't have the power management turned on or turned up much. Stock configs for Linux leave that turned off. Windows turns it on and you deal with it or turn it off after the fact. Without the power management, it eats batteries like candy.
Now... To put this in a perspective you and others can clearly understand:
The netbooks we're about to see from ARM licensees are roughly in the same ballpark of performance and capacity (depending on RAM included with the devices...) of the eeePC when it first came out to the 900 series devices.
The Intel based devices for these models needed a 49 watt-hour battery to do 3 or so hours runtime, whether you're talking Linux or WindowsXP.
The OMAP3 boards I've had the fortune of having in my possession at one point in time were able to go roughly 10 hours...on a 13.5 watt-hour battery. While I've not abused it as much as others, some were not letting it just set idle- it did these amazing runtimes with emulators running full-tilt. It'd probably get approximately 8-ish in the same configuration if you had the 3D accel running.
Oh... By the way... That was without any power management- not that it'd been kicking in with what they did to it.
This is using the Cortex-A8. The A9, is out-of-order plus SMP capable, and has a few other gems going for it. It's like having 1-4 of the pre-Core P4M devices at the same rated clock speed as the ARM based SoC- and consuming only slightly more juice per core than the A8. That's NEXT year's crop of fun from ARM.
Re:ARM? x86? (Score:3, Informative)
Opera desktop, however, has different binaries for each architecture it runs on. As Opera's closed source, that means Opera Software gets to decide what their program runs on.
With managed code, the VM developer gets to decide what platforms the VM runs on, and the software developers just target the VM.
As an example... there's a VNC app out there written for .NET. Now, normally, you'd need one VNC app for your PC, one VNC app for an ARM-based Windows CE device, so on, so on.
With .NET, I can run the same binary on an x86 PC, an Itanium server, or two different variants of ARM-based Windows Mobile device. (Not that I'd want to, it's not as good as, say, UltraVNC on x86, but it's still an example of how it can work.)
Anyway, there is also Java as an option, and a few real, useful apps out there are written in Java - I use a couple every day. And, the ARMs have Jazelle support, which basically means a subset of Java bytecode instructions that can be accelerated by running them directly are run directly on the CPU, so Sun would just have to release a JVM for Win32/ARM that used Jazelle, and Java performance would be excellent on ARM. (I think Jazelle's there because of ARM being used on cell phones, which almost always have JVMs of some sort, often.)