News Intel admits to Moore's Law hiccough

If they did not control 90% of said server market you may have valid points. Till that time you just dont. They have dropped some in the last year but they need to lose another 10% by my maths before the competition board complains about them.

They have enough money to make 1 good chip for mobile, If they do Samsung or Apple will jump at them thats 200million units of said product a year. ( thats basically the profitable section of the smartphone / tablet market )

ARM itself does not really do alot just sells its licences to others like qualcomm and samsung / Apple who between the 3 of them control alot of the arm market. ( Close to 100% in phones and pretty similar in tablets )

My gut feeling is if ARM is less than twice the power per watt of the x86 chip, it's not going to catch on. It needs a big advantage. It needs to be three times the throughput per watt or better to make a big impact.

Facebook and Google will determain if ARM will be a player in the server markets if they take on ARM as there chip supplier it could take off in a big way.

 

There's also a big difference between what you expect to acheive and what you actually do achieve - maybe it's just proved more difficult than they thought?

 

I listed those companies as thats what my own research had shown as the likely companies who could take on the ARM chips and actually have the man power to recode as needed.

 

recompile ;-) ... all my linux software can run on an ARM rig using Linux. That's prolly my next working / toying rig. I'm bored of x86, need something new , freescale can have my money for an i.MX6 quad.

 

So there x86 software will auto run on ARM? They would already be on ARM servers if that was the case.

The software will need recompiling and recoding to ARM if they plan to use it.

Thats also why they are one of the few companies who could do it.

Big business wont thats for sure as they can not afford to recode that software to ARM.

 

If that is so, why is ARM making such good inroads into the server market (which it is very new to)? It is not that hard to recompile for ARM --just look at Windows RT.

There are rumours that Apple may migrate its OSX devices to ARM --it can then make its own CPUs (and tie people into their ecosystem on another level --no more hackingtoshes) and converge its iOS and OSX devices.

Meanwhile we already saw how Microsoft was disadvantaged in entering the mobile arena by Intel's complacency in developing a decent Atom CPU, hence Windows RT. Make no mistake --if Microsoft hadn't made the asinine move to lock the desktop, all that publishers would have to do is recompile their existing software to ARM and away you go: capable, long-lasting Windows laptops and tablets. But despite its dismal launch Microsoft is persisting with Windows RT. It does that for a reason.

There is no reason whatsoever for the mobile market to move from ARM to x86. It already has a capable platform, which is highly customisable and allows manufacturers a high level of control, and all their OS and apps run on it just fine. So what advantage does switching to a dependence on Intel, a total n00b in this market, bring them?

Intel has a lot of catching up to do. The only reason people are pining for powerful atoms is because they want full-fat Windows devices with decent battery life. But the day Microsoft unlocks the desktop on Windows RT it's curtains for Intel in that department.

 

Erm... what are you young-uns doing with your PCs to need a faster CPU? Seriously? I can understand the continued need to upgrade graphics cards, but I doubt there is anyone here who regularly has their CPU pegged at 100% for more than a moment.

As long as we can encode video to the latest standard, at a reasonable speed, there is no other task I can think of that needs CPUs to double in speed every 18 months.

 

I was thinking of posting something similar but then I thought about the great '640K is enough for anyone' statement. The boundaries still have to be pushed for faster performance and more graphics intense games.

 

Most servers run Apache, nginx share is also increasing. Both can be built for ARM.

Linux is available for arm, e.g. debian which is a popular server distro is available for arm. It has precompiled packages for apache, nginx, most scripting languages, and in fact just about any linux software, hence most websites can... run on ARM.

(Most websites are written in various scripting languages: php, python, ruby, perl -- so they are architecture independent.)

You probably won't get windows and IIS running on an ARM server anytime soon, but windows and IIS are not not the biggest players in the server market.

Even if you have custom C/C++ software: most of it should be easily recompilable for arm if you have followed good practices. If it can be built for x86 and x64, ARM isn't a huge step away. In fact trying to keep up with changing build environments is much trickier than architecture agnosticism (changing compilers, especially with newer versions of MSVS which like to break things, is in fact more of an issue than architectures).

I.e. it's a complete non-issue for most of the server market.

The desktop market on the other hand... Who knows. I'm quite happy with my ARM based desktop board (although I've used Linux since forever), others might want to stick with Windows, but MS seem to be shooting themselves in the foot with Windows 8, so maybe that'll change too.

 

Indeed they do, if we took a "its good enough" attitude to everything we would still be riding around on horses.

 

I'm still rocking a C2D E8500 Haven't felt the need to upgrade (or rather, haven't been able to justify the price/performance cost-benefit analysis )

 

As of september 2013 Intel held 90% of the server market with AMD at 5% and others the remaining. At best ARM has 5% of the server market. 1-2 companies aint gonna change that % to something massive.

If 1 of the big 3 companies in tech ( Apple / Google / Microsoft ) show that ARM is viable and use it in there servers then things might change. Intel and Apple are pretty well knit hence the Iris gpu been made in the first place as thats who it was made for. They even basically have it exclusive till broadwell from what i remember reading.

ARM as I mensioned in my first post needs to show a cpu that is 2-3 times the performance per watt for the market to take notice. Most people looking into ARM relise that as well. Its share price would be several times its current price if that was not the case also. Its actually dropped from its peak of 1100p ( £11) ( Currently its just below £10 Arm themselves get aprox 4.9 cents per cpu chip that is sold for the record ( its in its q3 financials ))

Intel also hold a 1 year process lead over Samsung there biggesat rival in that regard. Whos gonna make and sell these chips in the quantities that would really bother intel. Arm themselves do not have that level of resources.( Lets say google asked ARM Holdings for 100k of its chips tommorow could they really fullfill that order anytime soon?)

Samsung or qualcomm wanted to sell server chips they would surely of done so by now.

The question id put out there is how many really want to compete with Intel. A much bigger company in AMD already lost and ran away from that battle. Not like we will see a release of windows rt to the desktop space which would help ARM.

 

/facepalm.

performance per watt? you can stuff 3 times the amount of ARM chips on power, to 1 intel chip.... that's whats happening.


please stop the intel fanboisms - again.

intel are very aware the world is moving away from the huge limitations of x86 - intel don't want this and are doing everything, including bribing anything that moves (allegedly) to not buy into the new and cheaper to run tech.


and google are already trying an arm data centre and the results are very good.


edit:

IBM are the worlds largest supplier of servers:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2013/08/29/ibm-regains-1-server-market-share-position/

and guess who they recently got a licence from to make chips?

that's right - ARM..

 

Yup, I agree. As a student, I've never really seriously considered a career in chip design (or rather, considered and quickly dismissed) - but actually an end to "just make it smaller" could make it a more interesting career move.

Quite frankly, making things smaller is boring, IMO. If you can't make things smaller, you have to be more clever about the architecture, think of new ways to do things, and that's what's interesting. Don't get me wrong - of course Intel and ARM etc. continue to do 'clever things' as well as 'just making it smaller', but that's more to the tune of Haswell's power efficiency; the performance/price increase still coming from Moore's. At least as far as I understand.

 

So, everyone's gone off-topic on the whole ARM vs Intel thing...

The "Moore's law doesn't work any more" thing is old news. Cost/transistor has been rising since 45nm; it's only because a big semi person has admitted it that it's in the news now

 

Last time I worked I am a semiconductor fab and transistor design was during the 90nm node transition so I may be a little out of touch. Something will come along, a new idea, like copper interconnect and chemical mechanical polishing back then. Maybe a way of integrating graphene or optical clocking. Or maybe instead of PCs in future we'll hook up a collection of NUCs with different functions. In the mean time designers have to make their silicon do more for less power or size without a major node transition until the next step is sifted out of all the promising but mainly impractical bits of research out there. On the other hand maybe software needs to get smart rather than lazily assuming that next year's hardware will be that much faster.