ARM Researching Novel Chip Memory 88
An anonymous reader writes "ARM may be best known as processor designer but the company is now working on a non-volatile memory that could scale down to 5nm, according to an Electronics 360 report. The memory is something different called Correlated-electron RAM that was originally developed by a professor at University of Colorado. ARM is joining a research collaboration to try and make the memory an option at ARM-friendly foundries."
Re: I love ARM (Score:2, Insightful)
Same anon: I'm an idiot, please disregard that post.
Re:I love ARM (Score:3, Insightful)
ARM started as Acorn in 1978, the same time that Intel created the 8086 processor. The current popular ARM processors are actually MIPS processors which likewise goes back to the early 1980s. So this stuff is oooooold.
MIPS?!? Did you just make that up? Do you think x86 are MIPS too?!?
ARM and MIPS are processors and there the similarities end.
Re:I love ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
I love that ARM didn't initially go head to head with Intel and thus ended up not getting crushed by them (think transmeta/AMD).
Actually, they did start out (as Acorn) by going head-to-head with Intel. Others have mentioned Acorn but not really pointed out that the original 1987 ARM was a credible competitor to the 80286 and 68000 [wikipedia.org]. (By "credible competitor" I mean "left the 68k and 286 choking on its dust"). It was only ever really used in that way in the Acorn Archemedes [wikipedia.org] and RiscPC [wikipedia.org] which never made it big outside of the UK - although it outlived most of the other non-Wintel personal computers.
OK - when ARM was spun off they did, as you say, rather sensibly, end up going after the embedded market, but ARM might never have happened if Acorn had gone with the 80286 [wikipedia.org] for their BBC Micro successor.
Re:I love ARM (Score:3, Insightful)
ARM is still doing a lot of research and there is no reason they won't be able to compete with Intel on the desktop, but they're not there quite yet. They're just breaking into the server market, this will be interesting.
Re:I love ARM (Score:3, Insightful)
Most ARM fans keep repeating the same fucking mantra - It uses less power then x86. Bullshit. It's not just the CPU that results in power demand for mobile systems (Tablets, phones and what not) it's the GPU, Screen, disk and all the other parts that go into the thing and Intel has finally paid enough attention to overall power budget that they're actually beating most of the ARM based SoC's out there in both power savings and performance.
Look at the power demand of the Nvidia Tegra SoC's. Tegra3 was decent but limited GPU performance. Tegra 4 though blows through a batter like Richard Pryor did with hookers and Coke.
Even Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC doesn't do any better as the GPU blows the power budget. Intel's Atom CPU's are competitive with ARM in performance and power budget. What screwed them was the fucking north bridge and GPU. That actually used more power then the CPU did yet they've fixed that with the latest Atom's due to a new SoC design focused on Power savings and yes I've used an early Atom Netbook - painful even with XP on it. The new ones are pretty decent now.
Re:I love ARM (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard this before, but Intel likes to play games with power numbers. AMD's TDP is the limit of the processor if EVERYTHING were on. Intel's is under normal usage.
Yeah, right.
That's why, when you actually measure the power consumption, you usually find Intel CPUs are far more efficient than AMD's.
Re:I love ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that no matter how good Intel chips are only Intel makes them. ARM is widely licensed and a manufacturer has a vast selection of processors and most important system-on-chip silicone to choose from, at all performance and price levels. There is also the language issue, with far eastern manufacturers preferring support and documentation in their native languages and from local companies.
More over you generalize too much. Saying "ARM A9 consumes 4x the power" is meaningless because there is no "ARM A9" chip, only various implementations of the A9 spec and they are all different.