
Exciting Days for ARM Processors - diehunde
https://smist08.wordpress.com/2020/06/24/exciting-days-for-arm-processors/
======
camillomiller
> I think Apple should be thanking the Raspberry Pi world for showing what you
> can do with SoCs, and for driving so much software to already be ported to
> the ARM processor.

With all due respect, I love my raspberry pi, but Apple just needs to thank
whoever was in charge of acquiring PA Semi’s know how in 2008, along with the
chip mastermind that is Johni Srouji. Or themselves from 1990, when they
actually founded ARM as a joint venture with Acorn computers to make chips for
the Newton.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Before the Pi ...

The first ARM-based device for Linux that I remember getting big was the
Sheevaplug. It was an ARM-based "plug computer" with an SD card slot, a USB
port IIRC, serial/JTAG port, Ethernet, Wifi, and no display.

I had its next generation, the Guruplug, which had 2 Ethernet ports,
Bluetooth, and a couple USB ports. Used it as a router for a few years.

I don't know how long Debian's arm distro was around before then but that was
my goto for the Guruplug. Worked great.

~~~
jay-anderson
I still have my sheevaplug. It was great to have a small self-contained
computer at the time. The raspberry pi definitely fills that spot today, but
it isn't a full self-contained package like the sheevaplug was (for the pi you
need to figure out the case and power).

~~~
holri
There is Olimex homer server: [https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-
Server/open-s...](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/open-
source-hardware) Fully contained package for a small home server, Free
Hardware Design, SATA

------
cromwellian
> The Intel world has stagnated in recent years, and I look forward to seeing
> the CPU market jump ahead again.

Really? AMD's recent moves with Zen/Zen2/Zen3/EPYC look like a big step
forward. Zen2 chiplets are the biggest change in years. Zen3 IPC is supposed
to be significantly better than Zen2 (17%). The previous gen Ryzen was like
15w TDP, where as the A12Z in the Mac Mini ARM is 15w TDP, but the Zen crushes
the A12Z Bionic on benchmarks.

It's difficult for people to remember, but ARM came from really terrible
performance to a spot where it is getting in the ballpark of x86, so the
advancements look impressive, but that's like saying if I go from $100 to
$200, the gains look impressive, whereas you only went from $10000 to $11000,
it looks like you are standing relatively still in comparison.

But x86 architectures are decades of maturity, so someone getting a 17% IPC
lift (Zen2->Zen3) or a massive reduction in TDP on such a complex chip, isn't
stagnation, it's actually MORE impressive IMHO.

ARM is going to reach marginal returns, and soon the yearly perf boosts won't
look as impressive anymore.

In the end, I think we'll see convergence of performance. ARM will still have
a power advantage on mobile, because they don't have so much backwards
compatibility legacy that x86 has to support. However, are Macbooks and Mac
Desktops going to be performance and price competitive with Linux x86? I doubt
it.

First of all, ARM vendors haven't even come close to the GPU performance of
NVidia or AMD's discrete GPUs. An ARM A13 or Mali is not going to compete with
a laptop with an RTX 2060, 3060, or RDNA1/2\. And secondly, just looking at
AMD, it's possible to lift performance / watt still in x86.

I think the laptop space in the x86 realm is still exciting, because of what
AMD and NVidia are doing.

~~~
saagarjha
You might find it interesting that Apple made some very suggestive statements
at WWDC regarding graphics performance, like “don’t assume discrete graphics
is better than integrated”. I think it might be interesting to wait a bit to
see what they come out with.

~~~
cromwellian
Right, so a device with 5000+ CUDA Cores, 312 TFlops of Tensor Cores, hundreds
of dedicated RT Cores, and 1+ Tb/s memory bandwidth to 8gb of dedicated VRAM,
and 54 billion transistors, is going to lose to a SoC? Not likely.

Apple's view of what "discrete" performance is, is probably 2-generation old
cut-down mobile variants. For example, their top-of-the-line uber-expensive
Mac Pro ships with Radeon Vega II architecture from 2017. Meanwhile, AMD
RDNA2/Navi and NVidia Ampere are about to ship.

From my view, they're at least 2-3 generations behind in performance, and
their focus on mobile means they're always going to be behind given thermals.
NVidia and AMD are focused on maximum performance, and they assume gaming
takes place plugged into a wall socket. And because they're focused on maximum
performance, especially for triple-A title games and DCC, they're putting in
features like DXR (DirectX Raytracing) with support for hardware accelerated
ray-intersection. How long until I can run Minecraft with ray-tracered shaders
at 2k or 4k on Apple's GPU?
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdTxrggo8e8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdTxrggo8e8))

I mean, Apple's engineers on ARM are good and they did a fantastic job
improving the PA Semi IP, but I don't think they're going to take what's
essentially a PowerVR architecture which was never competitive with discrete,
and leapfrog NVidia and AMD.

~~~
Veedrac
Apple's GPUs have exceptional render performance. Consider how close they get
to a GTX 1060 laptop already[1], and then consider that their upcoming chips
can comfortably double GPU core counts and will be 50% stronger per core with
even conservative generational improvements.

They do less well in compute, but even there they do well, and a 16 core A14
GPU is likely to bat with a 1060.

[1]
[https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph13661/103805.png](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph13661/103805.png)
(not a perfect benchmark because of CPU bottlenecking, but there are no good
benchmarks to choose)

~~~
fomine3
Not exceptional and impressing for comparing 14nm/7nm GPUs. (yes it's
fanless.)

~~~
Veedrac
A 1060 is 200mm² of pure GPU at ~100W, an A12X's GPU is ~26mm² (approximated)
running at ~10W.

Of course it's impressive. Even if that was somehow all down to the better
node, their next generation SoCs will _still_ use a newer node than NVIDIA's
next generation GPUs.

~~~
fomine3
You comparing 1060's entire die size including NVEnc, memory controller, PCIe
controller, and so on vs A12X's GPU core only die size. And I expect 1060 is
optimized for perf but A12X is optimized for power(temp).

There's no reason NVIDIA should use a process behind Apple forever because
both uses TSMC (and Samsung) and process improves slowing down.

~~~
Veedrac
Cropping to the inner part still gives ~140mm², or comfortably over 5x the
size of Apple's GPU.

I don't really get your argument. Apple customers buying Apple Silicon
Macs—which, again, will probably have a GPU over three times as fast as the
A12X—aren't going to let hypotheticals detract from their powerful and power-
efficient GPUs. ‘But NVIDIA didn't optimize for efficiency’ and ‘but NVIDIA
hypothetically could have used a newer node than they did’ don't count for
squat.

------
dstaley
I was a bit surprised the article didn't mention Windows on ARM at all.
Following the Apple announcement, I managed to snag a Windows laptop that uses
the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 ARM SoC for dramatically less than MSRP on eBay.
(To be fair, they were selling it for parts since they couldn't figure out how
to remove the password. Wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows was easy
enough.) For the most part, it feels just like Windows. Every app I've
downloaded has _just worked_. That being said, there's definitely at least one
app that won't (Wireguard since it requires an ARM64 driver to work). I've
actually been tracking which software provides an ARM64 version[1]. Sadly, it
looks like virtually every toolchain still needs to update to support ARM64 on
Windows. I'm tracking a handful of GitHub issues, and support is definitely in
the pipeline, but it's slow going. For example, .NET _still_ doesn't support
Windows on ARM, despite the fact it's the flagship way to build apps on
Windows, and ARM64 Windows devices have been available for almost two years.

[1]
[https://iswindowsonarmready.netlify.app/](https://iswindowsonarmready.netlify.app/)

~~~
justinfrankel
Is plain win32 API supported on arm64/Windows? Is there a version of MSVC? Or
does one use mingw?

~~~
my123
Hello,

Win32 is supported with MSVC just fine.

You can also use MinGW with LLVM (not MinGW with GCC), available at:
[https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw](https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-
mingw)

------
velox_io
I'm quite interested in what Nvidia is planning. Nvidia purchased Mellanox
last year (they make high-end network gear often used in compute clusters).
Nvidia is very involved in machine learning with their GPUs. The only missing
part of puzzle is CPUs which was either Intel or AMD (a direct competitor).
ARM changes things and means they're not dependant on those companies (and the
x86 licensing clusterfcuk preventing newcomers), and they have some room to
tailor it to fit their needs (like Amazon & Google recently).

These definitely are exciting times. Most Brits born in the 80's and 90's will
have used Acorn computers in school, no one predicted that what would grow out
of it (they weren't particularly fast).

~~~
russellbeattie
You seem to have overlooked the Tegra X1, which powers 55+ million Nintendo
Switches. Nvidia seems to already be invested in the ARM CPU market and doing
relatively well. Their X2 powers the new Shield devices and who knows what
else in the future.

Yes, that's a very tiny number compared to the billions of CPUs made by Intel,
Apple, AMD, Qualcomm and Samsung, but the point is, they are already doing ARM
CPU integration and have carved out a decent niche for themselves.

~~~
saagarjha
Video game CPUs aren’t generally where the puck is going, sadly. Cell was
interesting but other than that we’ve had a history of picking a semi-popular
architecture and usually some old chip (Nintendo) or just a normal x86.

~~~
russellbeattie
You are totally mistaken. Have you seen what the PS5 is doing with memory
bandwidth? It's amazing. The entire PC industry is going to end up emulating
their architecture.

~~~
fomine3
Memory bandwidth (by using GDDR6 for shared RAM/VRAM) is impressive compared
to PC but it's already done by PS4(GDDR5) and not special/difficult
architecture like Cell. Just a difference comparing general hardware vs gaming
hardware.

For normal PC workload, such bandwidth is not useful and GDDR increases
latency.

IMO Interesting thing like HBM is happening in Server/HPC world.

~~~
russellbeattie
I was talking about PS5's secondary storage being essentially as fast as RAM:
9GB/sec throughput with custom 12-channel controller to the new PCIe 4.0 SSD.

[https://screenrant.com/ps5-io-ssd-speed-tech-specs-
playstati...](https://screenrant.com/ps5-io-ssd-speed-tech-specs-
playstation-5/)

~~~
fomine3
It's impressively fast and adopting it as standard equipment is great but
similar SSD product should be available for PC soon. Not feel innovative like
Cell.

~~~
russellbeattie
Right, so you could say that "being available for PC soon" means that's "where
the puck is going", correct? Which was my original point. The PS5 is a video
game console, but isn't just commodity hardware, but is actually pushing the
limits of computing in a way that the PC industry will soon adopt.

Also. It might be much longer than "soon". Though Sony is targeting the next
gen SSD specs (unlike Microsoft), there will need to be a new generation of
motherboards and CPU upgrades before PCs will be able to come close to the PS5
bandwidth, even with the same exact next gen SSD.

~~~
fomine3
I don't think the PS5 will make SSD manufacturers to develop faster SSDs. It's
already on the roadmap.

But I want the PS4 to enforce a fast SSD as a requirement for PC game, like
you say. I think game consoles have a power to standardize great techs, but no
longer makes innovating techs for computing.

"a new generation of motherboards and CPU" was available in 2019.

------
saagarjha
> One possible downside of the new Macs, is that Apple keeps talking about the
> new secure boot feature only allowing Apple signed operating systems to boot
> as a security feature. Does this mean we won’t be able to run Linux on these
> new Macs, except using virtualization?

No, you can turn off secure boot.

~~~
kick
Was it just a gaffe when Federighi mentioned you couldn't install alternative
operating systems in his recent Daring Fireball interview, then? I admit I
could have misunderstood him, but it seemed like that was what he was saying.

~~~
derefr
An important thing to recognize is that every version of macOS (and iOS!) so
far has retained some official way to boot a custom/unsigned/"unclean" kernel,
specifically for kernel (or kernel extension) development.

When SIP (rootless v1) was introduced, macOS came with a way to disable it,
for the sake of kernel developers. When APFS was introduced by default, macOS
retained _two_ workarounds for kernel developers: both the ability to boot
from alternate APFS volumes within the APFS container; and _also_ the ability
to install to/boot from HFS+. And when the system volume became truly read-
only in Catalina (rootless v2)—that's right, even that restriction could be
overridden via csrutil, specifically to facilitate kernel development.

Apple is never going to lock themselves out of booting custom OSes that are
almost, but not quite, macOS; because that's how new macOS gets made.

And, of course, as long as you can boot something that's not literally macOS;
then that same mechanism can always be abused to boot something that is much
less macOS, or in fact not macOS at all (but may still _seem_ to be macOS,
from the bootloader's perspective.)

~~~
comex
Nitpick: SIP and rootless are the same thing.

~~~
saagarjha
Followup nit: the read only system partition is named as such and pronounced
as an acronym.

------
gorgoiler
I take delivery of a Raspberry Pi 4 tomorrow. I’m really hoping it will
replace my MBP for almost everything I do — namely clerical office work,
teaching high school CS, and web browsing. Exciting times.

~~~
Klinky
I would be prepared to be underwhelmed at using a rpi as a desktop. Graphics
drivers still need work.

This is where I think Apple can do it right. They can tune drivers and fully
optimize system performance, since they basically own the whole stack, and
won't be stuck with proprietary broken blobs or reverse engineering a 3rd
party design.

~~~
gorgoiler
I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos of, ironically, people using Raspberry
Pis to watch YouTube videos. The UI seems snappy, and I can live without full
screen 1080p — the only thing that seems poor is full screen full resolution
video.

Is there anything else I should be looking out for?

Raspberry Pi 4 is now OpenGL ES 3.0 certified, so I’m expecting it to only get
faster with time. My main concern is a Pi5 being released and my “old”
hardware becoming obsolete.

~~~
geerlingguy
Here was my experience a few weeks ago:
[https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-
macbook...](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook-pro-
raspberry-pi-4-8gb-day)

Just as a helpful data point.

~~~
gorgoiler
Followup: this was very helpful, thank you. As much for the technical content
as the inspiration that it _could be viable_.

No, it didn’t really work out for you.

Yes, it’s working out great for me!

Konsole with Terminus is an aesthetically pleasing environment in which to
work, 8 hours a day.

i3 in 4k, even at 30Hz, looks great. Vim renders fast (66-80ms keyboard
latency.)

eog, evince, and gimp let me fiddle with materials. gnome-screenshot copies to
the clipboard for rapidly sharing notes with others, based on what I have on
screen.

davmail transparently connects dumb IMAP clients to the corporate email,
address book, and calendaring systems. I have an XBiff alerting me to incoming
Outlook emails!

REPL.it is slow in Firefox but fast in Chromium. It’s going to work just fine
for managing pupils’ class work.

My home directory is encrypted and mounted on login. Mutt and offlineimap let
me handle last term’s mail in bulk.

Python and git and tmux let me prepare and mark work from the students, or at
least they should do come next term. I have all my little tools working to
give me an excellent markdown environment for note taking on classes and
pupils and meetings. Asciidoctor for the more typographically demanding class
materials.

Absolutely all of this was a breeze to set up because all of these
technologies _just work_ in Raspbian/Debian on armhf. It has, so far, been
unbelievably clean and pleasant.

I even have LXC working locally, for running Unix and IPv6 experiments with
multiple little Alpine “VMs”. χ!

------
lemoncucumber
Hindsight is 20/20, but Intel selling off their ARM division (XScale) almost
exactly a year before the first iPhone was announced looks like a pretty bad
call in retrospect.

~~~
jerrysievert
it gets worse. apple had apparently originally approached intel to build arm
chips for the iPhone, and intel said no due it thinking it would never be
successful: [https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/19/how-intel-lost-
th...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/19/how-intel-lost-the-mobile-
chip-business-to-apples-ax-arm-application-processors)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It's like Decca refusing to signup The Beatles.

------
tedk-42
Woah. Isn't apple only licencing the ARM instruction set? They're still very
much physically making their own chips riight?

The A13 bionic wouldn't physically share any components built by ARM?

If that's the case, it's like saying AMD use Intel chips, but really they just
licence the instruction set

~~~
mrpippy
They’re designing their own chips, including their own CPU core (which
implements the ARM instruction set). TSMC actually fabs them though. There may
be some ancillary cores or blocks licensed from ARM, but nothing major.

~~~
tedk-42
Ithought so. Full credit to apple then for pioneering this effort.

I appreciate some commenters saying the raspberry helped, but really it's
apple who are the taking a big step forward with popularising a third player
in the CPU space. Unless they are willing to sell their chipsets, I doubt it
will affect consumer products much outside of their own ecosystem.

Again nothing exciting for ARM, but more the future of apple chips

------
toastal
My fingers are crossed for Steam on ARM and distributing ARM binaries for
games that devs cross-compiled. Given Valve's support for Linux, if an ARM
client ran on Android too and could finally access my library on my phone, I'd
be a happy customer.

------
rwmj
Surprised he doesn't mention Nuvia, which could be a very exciting development
in Arm servers (if it lives up to the hype of course).

~~~
jabl
Isn't Nuvia "just" making a server chip with ARM Neoverse cores? Nothing to
sneeze at, sure, but if you want to kick the tires just launch a graviton2
instance on AWS?

~~~
floatboth
AWS won't sell you the physical hardware.

Ampere will, though — Altra's going to be good. Also there's Marvell (ex-
Cavium), but that's custom cores, and rather HPC-focused.

More choice is more better though, and since Jon Masters works for Nuvia, we
know Nuvia is going to have the most compliant and least quirky hardware,
especially in the PCIe area :) Though to be fair, Ampere's first generation is
already very decent in terms of this, and Ampere even promised to eventually
contribute support for their hardware to EDK2 TianoCore open firmware..

------
Rolcol
What size is a memory page on other ARM CPUs? I think Apple's processors use
16KiB pages. Doesn't x86 software assume a 4KiB page size, unless it deals
with huge pages?

~~~
opencl
They all support 4KiB, 16KiB, and 1MiB. It's required by the ARM spec,
obviously with the exception of CPUs that don't have an MMU. Support for 16MiB
pages is optional.

~~~
cesarb
And for 64-bit ARM, the base page sizes are 4KiB, 16KiB, and 64KiB, with IIRC
16KiB being optional. If you want 52-bit physical addresses, you need to use
64KiB base page size, otherwise the maximum is 48-bit physical addresses; this
is probably why RHEL uses 64KiB page size on 64-bit ARM.

~~~
monocasa
64kb is also a better match for today's working sets to avoid TLB pressure. I
imagine x86 would switch to it or something close if it weren't such a schlep.

~~~
cesarb
Another advantage of a 64KiB page size is that it allows for a bigger L1. The
L1 is usually VIPT (for good reasons), and to prevent confusing issues with
aliases, it means that its maximum size is a single page per cache way. For an
8-way cache, that means the L1 can be at most 32KiB with a 4KiB page size;
with a 64KiB page size, even a 2-way L1 cache could have up to 128KiB.

------
ekianjo
> Of course this computer runs Linux and currently is being used to solve
> protein folding problems around developing a cure for COVID-19, similar to
> folding@home. This is a truly impressive warehouse of technology and shows
> where you can go with the ARM CPU and the open source Linux operating
> system.

Extraordinary claim, but any evidence to support that Fugaku is super useful
apart from making headlines?

------
sameerds
I am not sure what to make of the fact that the article never says "X86", but
keeps mentioning "Intel" and occasionally "AMD". Was that tailored to the
expected audience, or the author is not confident enough about what "X86"
means?

------
giomasce
I would have preferred this to happens with RISC-V, though...

~~~
sitkack
It will and much sooner than you think. Everything that is making Arm
attractive right now is applicable to RISC-V but even more so, since it is so
much easier to add custom logic.

------
Ecco
Did Apple say they would move their entire line of Macs to Apple Silicon? I
thought Federighi said they had « amazing » Intel-powered new Macs in their
pipeline.

~~~
eyesee
Yes, they announced a transition to Apple Silicon over two years. There are a
few new Intel Macs left in the pipeline before everything switches over.

------
butz
Are Apple ARM chips the same as other ARM chips or are there any "magic" that
requires more work for developer to port software?

~~~
squarefoot
Pure speculation on my part, but I think Apple wouldn't want people installing
either other OSes on their machines or their OS on other hardware, so I would
expect some lock-in hardware/firmware/software to make impossible or really
difficult to build ARM hackintoshes and the other way around. Hoping to be
wrong, though.

~~~
doctor_eval
In his interview with Gruber, Federighi explicitly said that they wanted
hobbyists and hackers to be able to play with the Mac hardware, so it would be
possible to boot other OSen. Don’t have a link right now, but it was clear
that he was saying that the platform would be hackable.

Proof will be in the pudding of course.

------
ttul
Where can a developer buy one of these $500 ARM minis?

~~~
neallindsay
You can’t buy them - it’s more of a rental situation.

~~~
saagarjha
And you need approval and all, plus there's a bunch of terms and conditions…

~~~
richrichardsson
Like living in one of the EU countries that Apple have decided are part of the
EU rather than all of them. <grumbling from a Balkan EU country not on the
list>

------
treebornfrog
Read the first paragraph then wished that the font on mobile was a lot bigger.

~~~
dang
" _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and
similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the
author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
saagarjha
Is this a new addition to the guidelines? I could have sworn it wasn’t there
before…

~~~
grzm
Yup! Just 10 days new.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652373)

------
person_of_color
Apple should start investigating a transition to RISC-V IMHO

~~~
jabl
Given that Apple was one of the original founders of Arm, and has an ARM
architectural license (the most gold plated license Arm sells, basically
allowing the customer to create their own chips implementing the ARM ISA), I'd
guess Apple would be the last one to switch from Arm to RISC-V (assuming such
a switch would ever happen).

------
spullara
Apple Silicon are not ARM processors. They have ARM compatible instruction
sets. They are not based on 3rd party ARM cores.

~~~
als0
That's like saying AMD chips aren't x86 processors.

~~~
spullara
No, it is like saying AMD chips aren't Intel processors.

