ARM Attacks Intel's Netbook Stranglehold 521
Barence writes "British chip designer ARM is launching an outright attack on Intel with the launch of a 2GHz processor aimed at everything from netbooks to servers. ARM claims the 40nm Cortex A9 MPCore processor represents a shift in strategy for the company, which has until now concentrated on low-power processors for mobile devices. In the consumer market, ARM is pitching the Cortex A9 directly against Intel's Atom, claiming the processor offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy. 'It's head and shoulders above anything Intel can deliver today,' ARM VP of marketing Eric Schom claims. However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows. 'We've had conversations with Microsoft and you can imagine what they entail,' says Schom."
Goody (Score:5, Funny)
Broken, first gen/beta ARM drivers for all my hardware!
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Looking at most the Atom devices around, they tend to be in small devices with a limited amount of hardware. Looking at my eeebox, ir has nothing other than a keyboard, mouse and hdtv attached. For netbooks, you know pretty well exactly what hardware you need to support.
If they can make sure there's an HD supporting graphics chipset with drivers, this will be an interesting chip.
Re:Goody (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah. With a few exceptions, about the only variation between most netbooks out there in terms of required drivers are the following:
1) WiFi chipset
2) Card reader chipset (newer ones all seem to be USB mass storage, older ones tended to be a bit less standardized)
3) Bluetooth chipset (Bluetooth chipsets are basically standardized - While I know nonstandard ones exist, Bluetooth adapters that aren't a USB device compliant with a particular USB class are extremely rare.)
This is because the Intel Atom platform is EXTREMELY standardized. With a few rare exceptions, if you use an N-series Atom processor, it'll be paired with one of two variants of the Intel 945G chipset with GMA950 graphics.
Atom Z-series are a different story - they are all paired with a particular chipset with "GMA500" graphics, which unlike most Intel chipsets has basically nonexistent Linux support. So never buy an Atom Z-series based machine if you want to run Linux, they are nearly always paired with unsupported graphics.
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On what grounds do you base this claim?
Works fine for me.
I have two real computers. I also have a netbook. I use the netbook as my primary comp
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I know, there's nothing like a lack of attention to hinder the pace of driver development. Therefore we should never adopt the alternative platform, as the drivers will obviously not improve.
On the other hand, I would like to see someone give Intel a run for their money since it seems AMD is being kneecapped. If ARM does it from the low/embedded end and moves up (leveraging their huge number of licensees) then all the more power to them.
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Great! You go ahead and be an early adopter, suffer through first gen/beta headaches, buggy drivers, random system crashes. Call me and let me know when it's stable enough for "mom". I don't know about you, but I've grown used to stable hardware, and I'm not about to go back to pre-XP SP1 crashyness for an extra hour of battery life, maybe even two. 5 hrs is plenty enough for me.
Re:Goody (Score:4, Funny)
Great! You go ahead and be an early adopter, suffer through first gen/beta headaches, buggy drivers, random system crashes.
I think you're operating on a flawed assumption. These systems won't be running Windows.
Re:Goody (Score:5, Interesting)
No Windows? Great! No Microsoft tax! (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows.
Fuck Windows. Seriously.
I've been unwillingly paying the Microsoft tax for TEN YEARS. All I ever do is wipe Windows and install Linux. If my new computer can't run Windows then... great!! Maybe I won't have to pay the tax.
I'd love a low-power, high-performance ARM notebook. I'd be happy with MIPS or Loongson (Chinese MIPS clone) as well. Debian already has a full-blown ARM port and I'll bet they could get it working on an ARM netbook in a day. Ubuntu would undoubtedly be soon-to-follow.
As a side benefit, having multiple widely-used architectures for desktop systems (x86 and ARM) would be a support nightmare for hardware companies that still keep their drivers proprietary and undocumented. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Broadcom and NVidia. This would just be another nail in the coffin for their obstructionist attitudes towards free/open-source operating systems.
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However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows.
Fuck Windows. Seriously.
I've been unwillingly paying the Microsoft tax for TEN YEARS. All I ever do is wipe Windows and install Linux. If my new computer can't run Windows then... great!! Maybe I won't have to pay the tax.
On a serious note, why not get your computer built for you (or DIY if you can). I had mine built by a small local company (Intel core2 quad, 4Gig RAM and 250Gig hard drive so a decent spec) and it cost well under £300. It came 'empty' - no OS - so I could install Ubuntu with NO Windoze contamination. It works geat. It's never given me any trouble at all and it does everything I want, quickly and very well.
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Doing so incurs a performance hit, quite a significant one, as well as using extra memory.... When DEC did it with the Alpha, current Alpha processors were hugely faster than any available x86 so even with the performance hit you got comparable or better performance than using a real x86 system. ARM processors are not as fast as current x86, and the performance would be so poor as to eliminate the benefits ARM has over Atom.
What does it support? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose Ubuntu Linux is just chopped liver.
C'mon people. Wake up! There are tons of operating systems out there. Some are even better than Windows! *gasp*
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Re:What does it support? (Score:4, Insightful)
...(albielt shrinking as linux netbooks gain popularity)...
I don't know where you've been seeing the growth, but linux has held pretty steadily at sub-1% desktop market share for years. Netbooks gave it a slight boost when first released, but MS quickly squashed that and now dominates the netbook market. It's true that Windows has been losing ground, but it's OSX that has been gaining, they are up to almost 10% share last time I looked, just a few years ago they were at less than 5%, so that's pretty darn good.
Linux? Not so much. As for the popularity, ARM is pretty popular as is on small devices, one could say they dominate, and MS already has some software that runs on ARM processors, so if this new breed of ARM is popular then we could see MS make the jump. But it will have to work in that order, the ARM will need to be popular and THEN MS will jump on it, it won't magically happen the other way around (unless MS has a major stake in ARM, which I don't think they do).
Re:What does it support? (Score:4, Informative)
linux has held pretty steadily at sub-1%
Steve Ballmer says otherwise [osnews.com]
Re:What does it support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What does it support? (Score:5, Interesting)
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MPlayer already takes advantaje of several different processors characteristics, requiring a simple recopile. If it doesn't aready, it doesn't take a lot to take full advantaje of this chip.
Also, flash does run on ARM, but I guess it doesn't optimize for each processor. If we are luck, that will make Google start streaming Youtube videos on a way that uses mplayer. They can even keep the flv format.
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"Nevertheless, netbook manufacturers running the ARM processor will be forced to adopt an alternative such as Google's Android, Windows CE or even Windows Mobile."
They mentioned running windows mobile over the ability to run fully fledged distributions such as debian with huge repositories.
I can't wait for these laptop to start coming out, microsoft can't even pay people to put XP on them this time.
A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:5, Insightful)
For example - they brag that the ARM "offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy". But, netbooks rarely use all of the processing power they have right now. If the ARM had equal processing power, but five times the battery life, they'd have a compelling product. The current standard of eight hours on a XP-based netbook is barely enough; a netbook that lasted forty hours would be a market breakthrough, and would be compelling enough to get people to switch to Linux.
Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:5, Insightful)
Having owned an XP netbook (aspire one) I must say that an eight-hour standard is optimistic beyond belief, and likely only possible if you leave it sitting there. The Atom processor is power hungry and once you start actually using it the battery life plummets considerably.
ARM already has an advantage on power consumption, if they can match the Atom on performance I suspect they'll win on battery life by default.
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> (aspire one) I must say that an eight-hour standard is optimistic beyond belief
It depends on the _battery_. With my 9-cell battery, my aspire one gets 8 hours of continuous usage.
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Lithium-Ion-AOA150-1777-AOA150-1840/dp/B001OXRTVU/ [amazon.com]
Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, even cutting the CPU power consumption to zero wouldn't give you anywhere near 40 hours of battery life in a netbook. The CPU is just one piece of it.
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There are already Arm based netbooks out there, using the current low-perofmance chips, so presumably Arm has a reasonable reference on how fast their new chip will run a Linux netbook.
Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:5, Informative)
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but TFA is about an ARM chip with a a 2GHz clock and a low power footprint.
Or in other words, a chip with the same processing power as an Atom, but with better battery life.
Or in other words- is that what you were after?
Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it sort of does. Battery life and CPU power are actually somewhat convertible.
When the CPU isn't doing work, its power consumption drops considerably -- if you have two CPUs with the same designed maximum consumption, but one has twice the computing power available, then for the same workload that processor will use (a little bit more than) half the energy.
Of course the real picture is not so rosy, because a CPU that uses that little power to start with is probably accounting for less than half of the total power consumption of the system, and of course the workload is likely to increase if you have more CPU available (people watch video fullscreen instead of windowed, games will generally render as fast as they can and use all available CPU, etc.).
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Far too little, far too late, I'm afraid.
Two years ago, I'd be all behind this. Now, Intel and Microsoft have such a lead in the market, it's going to be a much harder market for ARM to enter.
Re:A compelling Linux on ARM netbook will worry MS (Score:5, Informative)
And Microsoft would still lose. The only thing Windows really has going for it is the existing library of PC software. That's the network effect that keeps Windows out front, otherwise the market would have dumped Windows ages ago. Windows on ARM runs existing Windows x86 software about as well as Linux does: not at all.
In fact, ARM netbooks running Windows might actually be at a disadvantage relative to Linux. People would see the Windows logo on the box and take it home, assuming that they could run PC-Windows software. When that software fails to load, the netbook gets returned to the store.
Netbooks running Linux on an ARM processor with insanely long battery life and a true dedicated mobile operating system may be what it takes to get people to realize that netbooks were not intended to be merely smaller laptops.
"Windows CE or even Windows Mobile" (Score:2)
That's like saying "Linux or even Ubuntu". :)
Microsoft used to have a laptop/netbook-friendly Windows CE version back in the late '90s, but dumped it in favor of the "Tablet PC" build of Windows NT around 2000-2001. It would be interesting to see them bring that back.
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That's like saying "Linux or even Ubuntu". :)
Microsoft used to have a laptop/netbook-friendly Windows CE version back in the late '90s, but dumped it in favor of the "Tablet PC" build of Windows NT around 2000-2001. It would be interesting to see them bring that back.
They still do, the problem is it's shit and it won't run any off-the-shelf applications. It's used in a number of industrial PDAs, particularly ruggedized, intrinsically-safe ones.
The way I see it, using CE on a laptop is far worse than Ubuntu because it looks like windows (95), behaves (mostly) like Windows, but won't run any Windows apps. In some ways it's the perfect combination - you get all the 'It-won't-run-Outlook/Oblivion/Photoshop' problems of Linux, all the 'It-won't-work-with-my-USB-doodad' pro
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They still do, the problem is it's shit and it won't run any off-the-shelf applications. It's used in a number of industrial PDAs, particularly ruggedized, intrinsically-safe ones.
Is it? I haven't seen any devices using the Handheld PC user interface since around 2001. I'm not talking about the Pocket PC fork that Windows Mobile is based on and Symbol and others use in their PDA-form-factor devices. The Handheld PC fork required a larger screen and a keyboard, and disappeared when Microsoft decided that the
Porting code to a new architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Porting code to a new architecture (Score:5, Funny)
Let's say 30 years ago I gave you one end of an infinitely long piece of yarn and told you to start knitting a sweater. At first, it's not too bad. The yarn has a pretty standard consistency, although it sucks compared to some other yarn on the market. Then I start changing things up. Adding some knots and tangles in the yarn I hand to you. You do your best to accomodate and actually come up with a pretty nice sweater. Then you start re-designing the sweater to take advantage of the knots and tangles, and I just keep putting more and more complex knots in there since you seem to be doing great with the ones I've sent so far. Your sweater grows thick with piles of yarn and by the time 30 years rolls around, you've got yourself a pretty great sweater. Of course, you had some massive screwups like sweater ME and sweater Vista.
Now let's say I ask you to knit the same sweater using a beautifully crafted roll of thread.
I think you can see how hard that would be.
Re:Porting code to a new architecture (Score:5, Funny)
Does the sweater go on a car?
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What is involved in porting code to a new chip? I've done some programming in my life, but it has mostly been limited to personal interest and school projects. I imagine it can't be as simple as just recompiling. So what does it take to port code?What are the hurdles? Assume (accurately) that I'm a total noob.
The main issue will be handling of virtual page tables in the OS. The code for x86 will not work for ARM.
There will be some other issues with the boot sequence (BIOS), and of course the need to be able to drive the devices attached to the ARM, as some people have noted with respect to getting Linux to run on the ARM-based netbooks.
I expect the code base for Windows has been hacked for so many years by so many different people that moving it to another architecture would not be as easy as it is for Li
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It depends on how the original code is written. In a well-structured OS like Linux and NetBSD, they isolated the idiosyncrasies of the CPU and focused on using common high-level features across most CPUs (memory paging and interrupt handling among the chief of them), and can optionally adapt when a particular feature is not available on some architecture (e.g. high resolution timer, atomic instructions). In such case, porting to a new architecture just entails writing the assembly language glue that bridges
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It all depends on how close you're getting to the hardware, and to what extent you're using specific hardware features of a chip. In some cases it really is as simple as tweaking a few things and recompiling, if the software was designed to be portable. The original windows NT (from which 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 are all evolved from) was designed to be portable, in the early days it ran on RISC also.
Re:Porting code to a new architecture (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, this is assuming the operating system interfaces are the same. If you're on something like OpenBSD, for example, then the OS does a good job of isolating the userspace code from having to know anything about the underlying architecture. Linux, on contrast, exposes a lot of architecture-specific details to programmers (and that's ignoring the fact that embedded Linux often ships with a non-GNU libc, which lacks a lot of features). Wince is about the worse at this, where every single device implements some subset of the Win32 APIs and so you end up having to do some tweaking for every device.
I don't think you know anything about Linux portab (Score:5, Informative)
I've written networking kernel code for Linux, and never encountered any CPU specific requirements - it's all abstracted behind function calls.
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In an ideal world, you just recompile your C code.
In the real world, your code (indirectly) uses low-level libraries and system calls that only work on a given chip because they make use of specific hardware, either through assembly or through hardware-mapped structures.
More rarely, some basic C operations don't work as expected. A common gotcha on previous ARM architectures were that all memory accesses had to be 32-bit aligned (it saved transistors and power). That meant that you couldn't use a char[] arr
Re:Porting code to a new architecture (Score:4, Interesting)
Another ARM gotcha is that "char" is "unsigned" unless you specifically make it "signed", because "unsigned char" can be manipulated more efficiently by the instruction set. This is not what C programmers usually expect, although it is permitted by ANSI C. It can cause some interesting bugs.
Re:Porting code to a new architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
no windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Phone like devices are getting larger and more powerful, and laptops/tablets are getting smaller and lower power. It is converging on a market space where ARM has no competition, and is exactly where the A9 would thrive. Microsoft is even entering the game with the Zune HD packing an Nvidia Tegra. This is not a low volume niche either. Think of the iPhone, Android devices, PSP, DS/DSi, Windows Mobile phones, etc.
That is just on the mobile end too. It makes no sense to stick Windows Embedded and a Celeron in a router, network storage, or a printer when Linux/A9 is cheaper and as powerful.
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I wouldn't be so sure about that. There are significantly more ARM devices out there than x86, Sparc, and Power combined.
This is not true. PowerPC is doing very well; it is in every current-generation console and most new cars. If you buy a BMW, you are getting something like 40 PowerPC chips for the various control functions. In automotive and industrial control applications, PowerPC is the dominant player. SPARC is doing less well, although it has, I believe, the highest market share once you leave the atmosphere (radiation-hardened SPARC chips are very popular on satellites, helped a lot by the fact that ESA funded the
Re:no windows? (Score:5, Informative)
There is nothing special about the ARM ISA that makes it require less power.
Yes there is. The ARM instruction set is simpler to decode than x86, which means that the (fixed) power cost of the instruction decoder is higher on x86 chips (you can't turn off the decoder as you can, say, the FPU or an adder while not in use because it's always in use unless the whole CPU is in power-saving mode). The Core 2 has to do a lot of clever stuff with the x86 instruction set because it doesn't match up at all well to a modern microarchitecture; not only does it split complex instructions into smaller operations, it also has to combine sequences of micro-ops into things that can be executed. Atom doesn't do any of these things, so it is a lot slower (per clock) in an effort to save power. ARM also gets to cheat a lot with things like Thumb code. This is a simpler, 16-bit ISA, which achieves very good cache density at the cost of some flexibility. You can switch ISA on a call with ARM chips, so you can have some routines in Thumb code and some in the full instruction set. Unlike the compression that Intel gets from a variable-length instruction set, this helps power saving because you can turn off the thumb decoder when it's not in use (and turn off the other instruction decoders when in thumb mode).
And that's ignoring things like the predicate instruction and barrel shifter that make ARM code denser and more cache-friendly than x86 code (which has the same advantage over something like SPARC). This means that ARM chips can get away with smaller instruction caches, which saves power.
If you want a more detailed explanation, Jon Stokes does a good job of explaining the advantages ARM has over x86 in his analysis of the Atom.
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It's time for apple to step in (Score:2)
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Actually, microsoft supported non intel before. Anyone remember the DEC Alpha chips? There was an NT flavor for that. It ran faster then the intel chips of the day.
It would not surprise me that in an microsoft lab there was windows for power PC, windows for ARM, windows for . It would be in microsoft's best interests to have them.
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Will ARM compete? (Score:2, Interesting)
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No, but NVidia has gone ahead and integrated ARM [nvidia.com].
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Just to put things into perspective, the Pandora ships with an OMAP3530 and will have as one launch "title" a PlayStation emulator, which has already been demonstrated to run smoothly
What does Linux on ARM support? (Score:2)
I've only been running Linux on x86 hardware... so would Linux on ARM:
a) Run a typical distro only recompiled or is a lot of software x86-specific?
b) Run wine?
c) Run virtualbox w/windows?
d) Be able to use w32codecs so everything plays?
I'm sure there's a few that's removed all traces of Windows, but I'm not one of them...
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A) much simply needs recompiled, if it doesn't - with an app with the source - it's usually a bug.
B) No - wine is simply a conversion layer between the windows and linux calls - the windows program is never emulated.
C) No - again - not without emulation.
D) I think you can probably guess this one - but again no.
Emulation may be _lots_ slower than the host processor - slowdowns of ten times or more are not uncommon.
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a) Almost all of the open source stuff will run on ARM (GTK/Qt stuff, interpreted language apps, Firefox, etc).
b) No, Wine Is Not (an) Emulator.
c) No, because again you would need an emulator.
d) Not the MS ones. OSS equivalents might.
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b) In principle it could; but there wouldn't be much point. Wine on ARM would allow y
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It depends on the distro. Debian has a complete ARM-port, Ubuntu was working on one last time I checked. Maemo is an ARM-only distro.
Nope.
Nope.
Not likely (assuming these are binary blobs). Flash video, avi/mpeg's and various other formats shouldn't be a problem though.
An ARM netbook wouldn't be someones only PC, just like current netbooks aren't
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With serious improvements within ffmpeg stack, w32codecs as mandatory package is already gone for some time. Most of newest netbook oriented distros (Moblin, Maemo, Ubuntu Netbook Remix) uses Gstreamer as multimedia engine, which has serious developers working for speeding up things for ARM platform. Also I bet ffmpeg guys already have been working on this.
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Most things actually.
a) Run a typical distro only recompiled or is a lot of software x86-specific?
Debian has an ARM version of their distro. From personal experience, I found everything to run an nslu2 server without exception. http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ [nslu2-linux.org] Very, very efficient platform. The nslu2 had no crypto coprocessor, so ssl stuff was slow, but still, the nslu2 was one of the most useful devices ever.
b) Run wine?
No. Wine isn't an emulator, so all of those x86 Windows compiled apps won't work.
c) Run
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a) Run a typical distro only recompiled or is a lot of software x86-specific?
Some is, but most *NIX software is portable.
b) Run wine?
Maybe. There is a project that integrates WINE with QEMU, but I don't know its status. This would (in theory) run the app in QEMU, but every call to WINE stubs would be proxied to the native WINE libraries so code inside WINE would run the native versions (including things like DirectX). This would be fast enough for all but the most CPU-intensive Windows applications.
c) Run virtualbox w/windows?
No, VirtualBox is x86 virtualization software so obviously won't work on a non-x86 chip. You
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There was a build of Wine at one time that used a special version of QEMU to translate instructions. Seems to me like it might be time for someone to try again, as the ability to run Win32 applications on ARM would be a huge boon to the platform. I haven't kept up with things in a while, so it's possible that there's already a stable way to use Wine with ARM.
Does it really need to support windows? (Score:2, Insightful)
netbooks are a great place to quietly slip in non-windows OS's that meet customer needs. the mobile phone/smart phone market has shown that customers aren't slavishly devoted to Windows. they will buy what works.
The Windows era (Score:2)
chip supports OS? Hmmm, backwards... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:chip supports OS? Hmmm, backwards... (Score:5, Insightful)
LoB
A call to ARMs! (Score:4, Interesting)
A Microsoft refusal to support a really cool netbook technology would be a good opening for Linux.
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It'd be good for Linux users, as all the devices are sold cheap.
Windows users will still pay the premium (in cost or power) to stick with what they know, unless this netbook is incredibly good. Apple is practically the definition of a polished product, they've fantastic brand awareness, they're commonly held to be superior, and they're still not really knocking Microsoft off their perch. I don't see why this is likely to make linux netbooks any more successful than the x86 ones have been.
real solution (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a lot of barriers to Windows adoption on the ARM processor that go beyond MS not really wanting it. If they really want to gain market share above and beyond cell phones and PDA's, ARM needs a strong partner to create a real, integrated, polished solution. And by solution I don't mean a device. They need to do something akin to the iPhone, in creating a nice device or set of devices with a consistent polished operating system and with an integrated ecosystem of solutions. The project is large in scope and they need a partner that preferably has an existing position to leverage, experience, money, and which is not beholden to Microsoft. A cell phone service company might be a viable partner or Canonical and someone, or RIM or Google or an appliance maker that has not entered the netbook market yet.
If they really want to sell netbooks with ARM processors in them they have to think big. They need to better than hope MS is scared. They need to commit to building a system that bypasses MS's core monopolies through vertical integration. This is no small task. They need the hardware, which has to be cheap and hit a sweet spot. They need an OS and applications. They need dev tools for applications and services. They need Web and network services integrated with the device. More than all those pieces which are out there, they need someone to put it all together in a nice package and usability test the whole user experience from buying to opening the box right up through using it for all the common tasks: Web surfing, E-mail, chat, word processing, potentially phone calls and videophone, playing games, playing music and video, and adding new applications. The problem with a lot attempts at this sort of thing is the assumption that someone else will take care of parts or that blaming someone else somehow makes a failure better.
Re:real solution (Score:5, Insightful)
ooh (Score:3, Funny)
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I will buy one (Score:2, Funny)
I want one. Now. (I assume that it runs a full Linux distro of course).
Re:I will buy one (Score:5, Insightful)
Just for kicks (Score:5, Funny)
If anyone ever starts a new CPU-related company, can you please call it LEG for the sake of "it cost an ARM and a LEG" jokes?
Thank you.
Re:Just for kicks (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing about it (Score:5, Insightful)
it doesn't support Windows.
That's not a bug, its a feature.
Re:The best thing about it (Score:4, Informative)
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It's not as easy as all that, Windows is built on the core x86 instruction set. x64 changed things a bit, but that was still built on x86, so it was not all that big of a deal.
ARM is a completely different architecture altogether, and porting isn't so easy. Not to anywhere near the edge of their capability, but I imagine they will run into quite a few more problems than just re-writing the compilers will fix.
In any case it should be interesting, if ARM can gain some ground and create another alternative i
Re:No windows support? (Score:4, Insightful)
That'll be news to the folk that have been using computers with ARM processors since the very early 1990s.
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Well, you wouldn't necessarily expect x86 support on a non x86 architecture, would you.
It need not, and should not, be a deal breaker though. Windows has run on other architectures in the past - Windows NT and its successors have variously run on PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS and Itanium.
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The apps issue was only secondary. When NT 3.1 first came out, boatloads of apps were ported to MIPS/Alpha
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Re:No windows support? (Score:5, Informative)
Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 is a bit faster than the Atom on most workloads (in about 10% of the power envelope). The A8, however, typically ships at about half the clock speed of an Atom (they go up to 1GHz, but 600MHz is the most common speed). The A9 is slightly faster than the A8 clock-for-clock, but goes to twice the clock speed and scales to four cores, so it's not a stretch to imagine that it's more than five times the speed of a single-core Atom. I've not seen any figures for the A9's power consumption yet though...
It's worth noting that ARM doesn't make chips, they are an IP-only company. ARM licenses designs to other companies who combine their cores with other stuff and ship them. One of the more high-profile Cortex A9 licensees is nVidia, who are using it in their Tegra line. Other existing ARM licensees, like Qualcomm, TI, Samsung and Freescale have already signed up for the A9 as well.
It's also worth noting that the A9 isn't really news. The designs have been available from ARM for a while now. I don't know of any shipping chips including A9 cores yet (being mass-produced, anyway; there are a few being sampled), but TI announced the OMAP4 series a little while ago which is based around the A9 and looks like a very nice chip for handheld machines.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, that's kind of a silly comparison to mak
Re:No windows support? (Score:5, Informative)
32-bit only becomes a limitation on NetBooks when you start to get applications that can't fit comfortable in less than 4GB of RAM. This is not likely to be a problem for a few years. NetBooks may start getting more than 4GB of RAM in the next couple of years, but that doesn't require major changes, as long as the OS can address it and map it into processes' 32-bit address spaces (we still aren't getting many machine shipping with more RAM than a Pentium Pro with PAE can address).
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It doesn't look like we'll have to wait too long to see these implementations in action either. Schorn reckons we'll be seeing ARM ecosystem products containing Cortex A9 designs in the first half of 2009 and then Osprey related silicon to appear later that year.
From the Hexus Article..
It sure would be nice to have an update to that linked article that was written a year ago. I've seen lots of info on ATOM since then, but not much on the A9 systems that should already be out.
Re:No windows support? (Score:5, Informative)
Look through the Slashdot archives for the article containing benchmarks - I am too lazy to dig it out. It is a gross mistake to regard ARM as a RISC architecture. It is in the sense that the instruction set is orthogonal, but it is incredibly dense (much denser than x86). Almost every instruction can be predicated on one of the condition codes, which eliminates the need for a lot of branching (and, therefore, reduces the overhead from superscalar designs) and every instruction gets free use of a barrel shift on the result. Added to that, most ARM chips from the last decade support one or more of the Thumb instruction sets, which are 16-bit versions of the ARM instruction set, and most ABIs let you switch between these on a per-function basis, so you can compile functions that don't touch more than 64KB of RAM into thumb code and get even better cache usage.
You'd also be surprised at SIMD performance. The Cortex A8 and A9 support both Neon and VFP vector instruction sets. They are not so fast for double-precision vector floating point workloads, but on single-precision and integer SIMD loads they do reasonably well. For very FPU-intensive workloads you are generally better off using the DSP that comes with most ARM SoCs.
Re:But, does it run DOS? (Score:5, Interesting)
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uh what? I didn't read anything saying it was x86 incompatible, merely "can't run windows right now". This is more a licensing issue - MS will have to make a case as to why they don't want to support ARM, and as the AC says will affect that.
Can't say I saw coming that ARM might be an Intel/AMD competitor, but depending on how things shape up that could be the case in a solid fashion.
Re:But, does it run DOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not all that bright. Some might even call you an idiot.
The ARM instruction set is not x86 compatible. End of story.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
ARM is not x86, I know that. The issue here is more about the emulation. Nothing says ARM can't be emulated on X86, except microsoft currently. Save the ad hominem.
Re:NO WINDOWS ARM APPS SO -- SO WHAT? (Score:4, Informative)
There are 75,000 apps for ARM iPhone OS X.
There are 10,000+ apps for ARM Android OS.
There are loads of apps for ARM Maemo.
There are loads of apps for ARM Symbian.
There are loads of apps for ARM Windows CE and derivatives.
There are loads of apps for ARM Linux and derivatives.