
How Intel’s Medfield will dismantle ARM - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/113123-how-intels-medfield-will-dismantle-arm
======
SlipperySlope
The article overstates the case against ARM in the mobile marketplace.
Counterpoints not mentioned are: 1\. The single company Intel can never match
the wide variety of SoC (System on a Chip) components that the diverse ARM
fabricators will offer. 2\. The ARM fabricators will remain close behind Intel
with regard to lithography generations. 3\. Intel's Medfield has not been
independently benchmarked on shipping mobile devices. 4\. Industry
partnerships established for the previous Intel mobile part did not create any
notable results. 5\. In order to dismantle ARM, Intel would have to
significantly underprice commodity ARM fabricators - which would destroy
Intel's historical margins. Note that Intel sold off a former ARM-compatible
division - XScale - for this reason. 6\. Furthermore some ARM partners plan to
invade the x86 server market with low power, but capable alternatives to Intel
servers, thus enlarging the potential ARM market and possibly counter-
disrupting Intel's highest margin business.

~~~
mrsebastian
I think point 2 is the most important -- and I think you're wrong. Intel is
already way, way ahead of TSMC, GloFo, and Samsung -- and the gap, if
anything, shows signs of extending.

Price will definitely be important, but judging by how hard Intel is coming
into this segment, I can only assume that it's willing to match or get very
close to ARM component costs.

~~~
wolf550e
It looks like a worse ISA will win because it happens to be owned by the owner
of the better lithography process. In a really efficient market, those would
not be tied. Microsoft using Windows to push Office was bad for society. Why
is Intel good for society?

~~~
berkut
The old RISC vs CISC is completely dead now. Intel have now shown they can
match ARM's equivalent powered CPUs in terms of energy efficiency, and that
was the last argument the RISC proponents had in the argument.

Intel's chips are internally RISC, with the only overhead of decoding and
fusing the ops and the transistors to do this. And despite this overhead,
they're still miles ahead.

The only argument left then is the actual instruction sets at asm level, and
here, CISC has an advantage, because they can do so much more in one
instruction (take memory addressing modes for example), so they're more
compact from an executable point-of-view and instruction cache point-of-view.

~~~
jules
CISC isn't necessarily more compact. Since there are more instructions, each
instruction takes up more space. For example in ARM's thumb encoding, each
instruction takes up 16 bits. A typical x86 instruction takes much more space.

I wonder how much of an x86 chip is dedicated to handling legacy instructions
or largely unnecessary instructions. How much saving could be achieved by a
radically simpler instruction set (for example no neg/call/ret/push/pop/bcd
instructions). If you look at the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings> then most of the
instructions seem unnecessary. Does anybody have some information about this?

~~~
anamax
> I wonder how much of an x86 chip is dedicated to handling legacy
> instructions or largely unnecessary instructions. How much saving could be
> achieved by a radically simpler instruction set (for example no
> neg/call/ret/push/pop/bcd instructions).

It's been a long time since I was in a closely related biz, but back then, the
answer was "not much if you want to go fast".

Instruction decode isn't a huge deal. Micro-op sequencing isn't a big deal if
you're going out of order (and many risc instructions tend to get broken into
micro-ops).

The number of architectural registers used to be a big thing, but X86_64 is
good enough. (I don't know if anyone got around to renaming memory.)

------
dlevine
I'm guessing that Intel cut Motorola a really sweet deal to get them to sign
an exclusive contract. The decision probably had little to do with Intel being
a better platform, and more to do with cost per chip.

Let's face it - Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to
Intel. They knew that they had to have a major win, or risk getting disrupted
in the near future. So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was
going to take to get an exclusive contract.

When you look at it, Medfield is 3 year-old desktop chip technology, which
itself wasn't exactly new (the Atom had some improvements, but wasn't a
radical departure from what preceded it). Intel isn't bringing anything new to
the table - they just keep shrinking the same old chips, and reducing power
requirements. At the core, they are still a PC chip company - they just figure
out how to shoehorn those chips into smaller and smaller platforms.

The new ARM-based devices (such as Tegra 3) are actually much more innovative
and better-suited to mobile devices than Medfield. I think that we will see a
lot more innovation in chip design from ARM licensees going forward (such as
the low-power 5th core on the Tegra 3), and this will eventually disrupt Intel
from the bottom up.

~~~
np1782
"So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to
get an exclusive contract."

Not to take away from the overall point of your comment, but isn't Google in
the process of finalizing[1] their purchase of Motorola Mobility, so wouldn't
Google have been deeply involved in the decision. In essence a phone to Jha,
Rubin, and Page.

I think it's too early to tell weather Medfield is a hit or miss. Anandtech
seems to be impressed with the Medfield Platform[2], so far based on what they
have seen

"Intel finally did it. After almost five years of talking about getting into
mobile phone form factors, Intel went out and built a reference platform that
proved what they've been saying was possible all along. Furthermore, Intel
also finally landed a couple of partners who are willing to show their support
by incorporating Medfield into their product portfolio. The releases are still
a few months away at the earliest (possibly even longer for Motorola) but it's
much better news than Intel has ever reported before in this space.

The partnerships aren't out of pity either: Medfield is fast. I firmly believe
had it been released a year ago it would have dominated the Android smartphone
market from the very start. Even today it appears to deliver better CPU
performance than anything on the market, despite only having a single core.
GPU performance is still not as fast as what's in the A5 but it's competitive
with much of the competition today, and I fully expect the dual-core version
of Medfield to rectify this problem.

Based on the data Intel shared with us as well, the x86 power problem appears
to be a myth - at least when it comes to Medfield. I'm still not fully
convinced until we're able to test a Medfield based phone ourselves, but power
efficiency at the chip level doesn't seem to be a problem.

Medfield and the Atom Z2460 are a solid starting point. Intel finally has a
chip that they can deliver to the market and partners to carry it in. Intel
also built a very impressive reference platform that could lead to some very
interesting disruptions in the market.

While I'd like to say that Intel's Medfield team can now breathe a sigh of
relief, their work is far from over - especially with more competitive ARM
based SoCs showing up later this year. I'm really interested to see where this
goes in the next 12 months..."

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-
acquisiti...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-acquisition-
of-motorola-mobility-paused-by-eu-to-get-more)
[2][http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-
atom-z246...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-
atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/6)

~~~
wisty
> Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would
> have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start.

Unfortunately, ARM is fast enough. The iPad can run an internet browser, and
Angry Birds, which is all tablets are really good for. Gamers want better 3D,
and maybe a physics chip, where ARM may have the edge. Number crunchers SSH
into a real computer. The thin client may have had a few false starts, but it
seems to be finally emerging for real.

------
AndrewDucker
This feels rather overblown to me.

Intel is entering a market. Agreed.

This will mean that ARM has to compete with them. Agreed.

This will be good for the consumer. Agreed.

And Intel will completely wipe the floor with the current market monopolist.
Nope, sorry, you lost me there.

Sure, they _might_ be able to outflank ARM, but they haven't managed to do
that so far, and ARM are the experts in this space. Intel have tried to
outflank experts before, and their graphics processors don't seem to be the
market leaders.

~~~
ashayh
Intel has the largest share in the PC graphics market, over 50% of the total.

~~~
Raphael
They have the largest share in not providing decent graphics.

------
qdog
ARM produces a design people incorporate into their chips. I'm not entirely
certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you pay the right fees
(when I worked on them, I don't think we did, but we just need a core to do
management for our hardware-based video decoder).

Not sure if IBM fabricates any chips for people right now, but we used UMC and
TSMC, so it's really not about ARM for the manufacturing process, it's about
those two companies. I don't know what UMC and TSMC are advertising as their
current process, it might be a little behind Intel, but I'm sure they'll
continue to shrink processes.

The question is why would an x86 processor need to be put on your phone? I
guess because the history of Intel so far is all x86, their other processor
lines have all been phased out (I hesitate to say failed, but that might be
the right word). Intel really doesn't want to compete on low-power, low-margin
chips, they like making money on the desktop and server.

From my limited experience, ARM is vastly easier to work on than x86, as far
as assembly programming is concerned. I personally hope this chip fails,
because I'd prefer not to have x86 polluting the world anymore than it already
has.

~~~
rsynnott
> I'm not entirely certain you cannot take an ARM core and enhance it if you
> pay the right fees

You can. There are at least two licenses, a core license and an architecture
license. Qualcomm has an architecture license; the Scorpion (Snapdragon's ARM
core) is an ARMv7 core somewhat similar to an A8, but is not actually an A8.
Companies with core licenses have also modified them; the
Samsung/Apple/Intrinsity Hummingbird/A4 used an A8 core modified by Intrinsity
to work efficiently at 1GHz; TI later followed suit. Intrinsity's main
business model, in fact, was optimization of other peoples' core designs.

~~~
qdog
Ok, cool, I should have looked it up, but the sentence in the article was
"Except for Qualcomm, which makes its own ARM-compatible cores, every other
ARM chip on the market uses reference CPU cores", which I didn't think was
true (and I don't think 'compatible' is the right word for Qualcomm, probably
'extended' ?).

Also, he talks about this future 22nm process from intel for 2013, as though
the other fabs are going to sit at 28nm forever (even though Intel is also
currently at 28nm).

It just seems like a poorly written article, or someone who copied a little
too much from Intel's PR.

------
rfugger
_In short, if Motorola didn’t think that Medfield was competitive, it wouldn’t
have agreed to make a bunch of Medfield-powered phones and tablets._

Either that, or Intel paid it a bunch of money to make it worth their while.

~~~
vosper
Exactly, or they're just making a mistake - like Logitech did with their
Google TV boxes, which cost them $100m in operating profits.

------
bluesnowmonkey
> _Consumers, for the first time ever, will actually have a choice — just like
> AMD and Intel on the desktop, you will be able to pick a smartphone or
> tablet with a CPU that best suits your needs._

Consumers don't particularly care what CPU is in their smartphone or tablet.

------
Symmetry
I'm sort of biased towards ARM, but I'm still very impressed by how well Intel
is doing. The history of computers is littered with the corpses of the
companies that brought down by competitors with cheaper, not as good
solutions. Look at 3.5" hard drives, x86 vs the RISC machines, etc. And mostly
they failed to do anything because competing when they still could would have
eaten into their profit margins. But here Intel is devoting actual resources
to a smaller, cheaper, less powerful offering.

~~~
SlipperySlope
Intel's SoC Atom part will not, in my opinion, be priced below ARM parts
competing for a particular manufacturer's design. Intel is a high margin
company and I think will sell high-priced Medfield on the basis of higher
performance. Intel is the high-priced market incumbent in this case - and may
well be disrupted soon by certain ARM low-power servers.

------
pedalpete
The spec's I don't think tell the story here. It's going to come down to price
and marketing.

Intel still has some very strong brand recognition with their 'intel inside'
campaign, and though most people don't actively look for intel chips when
buying a computer, they do recognize when the computer they are buying has it,
and it makes them feel comforted (much like McAfee or Norton etc. etc)

The hardware manufacturers will build on a competitive price point. I suspect
Moto's dedication to Intel was driven more by price than by performance.

Not to say that I don't believe intel will perform, and I also disgree with
the article, and I think javascript performance is hugely important to the end
user.

------
ck2
14nm in two years? Whoa. That's going to be huge for the server market.

Imagine 24 cores per chip with the same power draw as they have today for six
cores.

~~~
SlipperySlope
Actually, I think the Moore's law benefits of continued chip feature shrinkage
will be felt most strongly in personal devices. For example, to perform voice
recognition, Siri must send the raw waveform to a cloud server for processing,
because the local CPU and RAM are insufficient for acoustic and language
modeling. With a couple more CPU generations, i.e. say four years, I expect
mobile devices to perform these sort of calculations locally. Beyond speech
recognition is machine vision - object/scene detection and recognition.
Currently, wireless bandwidth limitations preclude a realtime cloud-based
facility for machine vision, but more capable mobile device CPU/GPUs could
enable local processing.

In general, Moore's law progress enables less expensive cloud servers to
perform the same tasks, but that same progress enables mobile devices to
perform new categories of tasks!

~~~
Someone
_"Currently, wireless bandwidth limitations preclude a realtime cloud-based
facility for machine vision"_

I do not think that is all what stops it. Just as speech recognition, machine
vision is quite different from computer graphics. We _know_ how to make
graphics orders of magnitude better; just look at Pixar's latest movie. 'All'
we have to do to bring that to your phone is do it more efficiently.

For speech recognition and machine vision, I am less optimistic. Reason? I
never hear about, say, "almost perfect, but it takes a 1000 CPUs a day to
process a second of sound" for speech recognition or object recognition.

I wonder why that is? Is it because there are problems we haven't solved yet,
or because nobody approaches the problem from that side?

~~~
SlipperySlope
For clarity... I am an AI developer. Recently I added a feature to my dialog
system so that if I have not typed anything into the dialog web app in a
while, the system begins capturing frames from the webcam and performing face
detection using JavaCV. If a face is detected, then face recognition is
performed on the clipped greyscale face. If the face best matches mine from
the training examples, then the system uses Google speech-to-text synthesis to
say hello to me, "hello Stephen".

A smartphone cannot practically do this because JavaCV will not run fast
enough on an ARM CPU and wireless bandwidth limitations preclude sending whole
realtime captured phonecam frames to a server. But, when Moore's Law permits,
JavaCV will run on the mobile CPU/GPU combination - and my phone could say
hello to me when it recognizes me.

I know that Google is working on face-recognition phone-unlocks - but I wonder
if their implementation involves a cloud server and one-time sending of a
captured frame?

------
rsynnott
Hmm. Does Android have fat binaries for the NDK? I can see Motorola et al
getting a lot of complaints about games not working...

~~~
georgemcbay
Android doesn't use 'fat binaries' by the strict definition of the term, but
the APK format that apps are shipped in can include multiple individual builds
of both the main app and required libraries so you could pack x86 and ARM
builds in a single APK.

FWIW, there are already Android devices out there on x86 -- all of the
currently shipping Google TV devices are built around Atom. The NDK isn't
officially supported on those GTV platforms but it isn't difficult to get it
working in practice.

Also, any complaints for this would probably be directed at Google (though I
guess Google and Moto will be the same company soon anyway) because arch
filtering is generally handled by the Android Market, so for users with these
devices they just won't see the games showing up at all on their local install
of the Android Market (since the market will be filtering out anything NDK
based that doesn't have an included x86 build), so it looks like a market
issue (if they already know the game exists), not an app issue.

~~~
rsynnott
In my experience, the average user is only dimly aware, if at all, of Google's
involvement.

------
rbanffy
Exaggerated title and claims attract impressions. News at 11.

------
gringomorcego
lolololololol

To me, the articles main support for the rise of Intel as a mobile chip
competitor are: 1). Motorola made a deal 2). Intel can leverage their own
manufacturing process/plants

The first is stupid. Considering how much Motorola bent over for Microsoft,
this is probably more Microsoft doing Intel a solid to get into the market
rather than a purely "logical" financial long-term decision by Motorola.

The second I can't really argue about with any real knowledge. However,
upgrading plants is fucking expensive. By ARM separating themselves from that
portion of the chip business, they have basically enabled a secondary
competitive market of improving ARM designs. Intel has locked themselves into
the position of Overseer of all-best-designs, and whether or not this is true,
it will lead to comparative stagnation in innovation.

I'm might be wrong, but I honestly think that Intel will lose simply because
their mentality depends too much on an idea of limited competition. They are
too used to AMD and legacy slaves; the switch to open-source and web-based
systems will lead to insane competition and crunch their profit margins like a
nutcracker.

