
Can ARM Kill Intel? - ssp
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semiconductor-blog/2010/11/can-arm-kill-intel.html
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InclinedPlane
Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics.

Intel has so much FAB capacity that they can't easily be killed even by
superior competing products.

~~~
grogers
They also usually have the smallest process technology of the time. If
necessary, Intel could fab ARM chips and dominate the ARM market from the
inside.

~~~
mjschultz
Precisely what I was thinking. Does anyone know if there is a reason Intel
hasn't just acquired ARM? I assume Intel believes that they might still be
able to compete and win in the market, but that seems to be less true every
day.

(I assume the answer is that it would raise a bunch of anti-trust flags
everywhere, but I'm not positive about that.)

~~~
anamax
> Does anyone know if there is a reason Intel hasn't just acquired ARM?

Intel had an ARM license and got rid of it, which suggests that Intel doesn't
think that ARM is worth the trouble.

~~~
gonzo
If Intel got rid of its ARM license, how do they build all these?

[http://www.intel.com/design/iio/index.htm?iid=ipp_embed+proc...](http://www.intel.com/design/iio/index.htm?iid=ipp_embed+proc_io)

Intel makes several 'families' of ARM (Xscale) based parts: IXP, IXC, IOP, PXA
and CE. Intel sold the PXA family to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006.

The simple fact is that Intel still holds an ARM license even after the sale
of the PXA family to Marvell.

~~~
anamax
> If Intel got rid of its ARM license, how do they build all these?

You're right - I misread what happened with StrongArm.

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vimes656
In the last 2 years we have seen many ARM netbooks prototypes showing better
battery performance and cheaper price than Intel netbooks. But I still can't
buy an ARM netbook. Where are they? What is holding them back?

~~~
msbarnett
Lack of an operating system with mass-market appeal in the netbook space, as
far as I can tell.

~~~
rbanffy
I assume the Windows OEM prices have been tuned so that it's more expensive to
develop and manufacture ARM-based netbooks that run Linux than it is to stick
with x86 for the current generation.

Also, the processor is not responsible for a huge part of the power consumed
on a netbook. Disk, screen and memory seem to be a big part. If you make a
netbook that can run Gnome and Firefox decently, it will have a hard-drive (or
SSD) and a couple gigabytes of memory. The LCD is the same.

~~~
dfghjkhgbfd
If you sell an ARM powered netbook that means no windows. So you can wave
goodbye to being able to use OEM copies of windows on any other products that
you make.

So anyone like Asus or Acer that have a PC business and launch a non-windows
netbook soon learn the error of their ways.

~~~
rbanffy
They can sell one line of Windows-proof highly capable, futuristic computers
while keeping and developing their legacy-ish, kludgy, virus-infested,
Windows-bundled, 8080-descendant-based inefficient lines.

Of course, Microsoft will probably find a way to increase their OEM pricing,
specially if the Windows-proof line ends up making a dent on the Windows-
bundled lines. And they don't even need to increase, say, Asus's licensing
prices. All they have to do is to lower Acer's.

~~~
dfghjkhgbfd
MSFT tend not to increase pricing they tend to say - ship even one computer
without Windows and you wont be buying OEM Windows for any of your other
machines.

~~~
wtallis
They've gotten in rather a lot of trouble for doing that in the past. Do you
have any evidence that they have been doing it since the emergence of the
netbook market?

~~~
rbanffy
> Do you have any evidence that they have been doing it since the emergence of
> the netbook market?

The Windows-based netbook market?

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crander
I prefer to think of this in a Christiansen disruptive technology context.
Technologies grow upmarket beyond the needs of its user base and create a
disruptive opportunity for downmarket technologies.

I recently made a comment about this on an Intel blog article (SC10: Jeff’s
Notebook - Innovation and Disruption: How a Successful Company can be gone in
10 Years): <http://intel.ly/dZAxKk>

------
lyime
"People in the mobile phone architecture do not buy microprocessors," says
Hauser, "so, if you sell microprocessors you have the wrong model. They
license them."

Someone is building them. In iPhone's case its Samsung. The phone's Apple-
designed A4 processor, which was built by Samsung, costs $10.75 each. Most of
that is going to Samsung, part of that goes to ARM. The ASP of ARM 10-20x
lower than that of Intel.

~~~
gonzo
Someone seems to have forgotten that ARM means "Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd"
and that Acorn, Apple and VLSI were partners in A(dvanced) R(isc) M(achines).

Of the three (Acorn, Apple and VLSI), only Apple is really still around. Apple
must already have significant equity position in ARM being a founder.

VLSI was bought by Philips Semi, which was later spun out as NXT. NXT is a
user/licensee of the ARM architecture but not even the biggest one by a long
shot.

Intel's revenue from ARM (and yes, they still make some Xscale parts) is
probably bigger than all of NXT's revenue.

Acorn went belly-up as a going concern in 2000 with the remains bought by
Morgan Stanley.

The ARM "JV" IPOed (as ARM Holdings).

In any case, I doubt that Apple pays much, if anything for its ARM license.

And I doubt we really know what Apple pays for A4 parts.

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jaen
In the server markets, you look at performance per watt and performance per
rack unit and ease of setup - for general purpose computation, Intel still
dominates those metrics. (with some exceptions [1]). Being ahead in fab
technology, it can take the performance hits due to the legacy x86
architecture.

You can replace 1 beefy server with 8 small nodes, but you can not replace the
convenience of administering that one server.

Also, retargeting performance-sensitive JITs/compilers/maths libraries such as
GCC, LLVM, Java, V8, *BLAS is no small feat either - x86 gets support first,
because it is the market leader, and also gets tuned the most, since it's the
oldest backend. A feedback loop that's hard to break, so don't expect Intel to
go out of business any time soon.

[1] <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/>

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Nelson69
I don't see how intel is even a target. PowerPC owns gaming. There are still
tons of MIPS chips in networking applications as well as some other verticals.
ARM owns phones, largely because every phone has a custom chip in it. It's not
clear if it will grow beyond that.

Why not suggest ARM will defeat PowerPC or MIPS? That sort of seems plausible,
Intel is so insanely good at what they do and they backed out of ARM a few
years ago. I can't imagine they did that without understanding how they'd
compete.

~~~
epynonymous
i think you're talking about console gaming perhaps, xbox and wii use powerpc
variants, but ps3 uses the cell processor and nds uses an arm processor. in
terms of mobile gaming, powerpc is nowhere to be found, this is owned by arm.
in terms of pc gaming, intel and their we're-not-totally-a-monopoly division,
amd, own that realm. though arm is starting to make inroads into low powered
servers so it'd be interesting to see where this goes in the long run.

~~~
krakensden
Cell is a PowerPC variant.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)>

------
adulau
ARM is not really friendly with competitors especially those not paying the
high license fee. Do you remember the nnARM project at OpenCores? this has
been removed on request by ARM limited. If ARM wants to "own the market", they
should allow in some ways competitors to build compatible CPUs.

~~~
rbanffy
> they should allow in some ways competitors to build compatible CPUs.

They allow you, or anyone, to build compatible CPUs. You just have to pay for
the privilege.

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lovamova
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple will make Mac OS 11 run on ARM only.

~~~
mooism2
Not while anyone wants to run Windows in a VM, they won't.

~~~
nextparadigms
You can bet Microsoft will make Windows 8 ARM compatible. They don't want to
lose the tablet market and since Intel is having such a hard time getting into
that market, they can't simply rely on them.

And if you're going to suggest WP7 for tablets, don't. Microsoft will only do
that in worst case scenario if Windows 8 will prove to not be good enough for
tablets. They don't want to get $10 per license when they could get $50, and
that's especially true if touch/mobile computing will replace desktop
computing.

~~~
wtallis
The way Microsoft has handled the mobile market for the past 15 years, it
seems likely that they'll go through at least two or three more mobile
operating systems before the market can decide whether x86 belongs in handheld
devices.

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epynonymous
from the article, "stifled innovation", "monopoly", i wonder how true that is,
where would we be if any of this was true, would we have a more awesome chip
in our laptops today?

i'm pretty excited about gpu's, but they're only good for parallel instruction
processing, some tasks still require the usage of a highly spec'd cpu.

whatever happened to transmeta?

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meastham
Has ARM's design licensing model ever been demonstrated in the high end
(server/workstation) CPU market? It seems to me that the amount of engineering
expertise required to push that sort of high performance, fully custom design
through to fabrication would make it difficult.

~~~
andrewcooke
Isn't that how SPARC worked? Of course, you can argue it failed after a
while... <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SPARC>

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davidj
Intel builds ARM processors. This article sucks.

~~~
eru
Sources?

~~~
a-priori
More accurately, they _did_ build ARM chips -- the XScale line. But they sold
that division to Marvell in 2006, although they still retain an ARM license.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale>

~~~
gonzo
Even more accurately, they still DO build ARM chips. They only sold the PXA
processors to Marvell.

Could you maybe _read_ the Wikipedia article next time?

~~~
a-priori
I appreciate the correction... but there's no need to be nasty.

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hackermom
ARM could probably kill x86 given some time, if that was what the writer
implied - and let's just wait a few years and see how things currently brewing
will develop before we start shooting off our downvotes, shall we? I am
willing to bet that an often-blamed-for-being-fruity computer manufacturer
will shortly migrate from x86 to ARM. Just wait.

Killing Intel themselves, though, just won't happen. If anyone can dominate
the CPU market wielding ARM in their hand (haha!), it's Intel. The rest of the
world has a good few years to go before catching up to their level in terms of
manufacturing.

