Pocket Wars and Cores 159
An anonymous reader writes "If I were to ask you what is the most popular processor used in phones and pads, and you said, 'ARM,' you would be correct. Now comes the trick question, 'Who make ARM processors?' Not the ARM Holdings company. They design processors and license their designs to manufacturers. They also have a reputation for creating very low power designs. Interestingly, while almost everyone else was out ramping clocks and power consumption (until they hit a wall), ARM was chugging along addressing the low power end of the market. Now that low-power is all the rage, due to phones and pads, ARM has become quite a bit more popular."
whats the news here? (Score:3, Insightful)
ok, so?
(qualcomm, intel, samsung, marvell, etc.)
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Intel doesn't make ARM processors anymore.
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RISC has become synonymous with load/store register processing, and CISC with read-modify-write capability.
Wrong logo (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the Intel logo for this story? They're ones who do *not* make ARM processors, ever since they sold that business to Marvell (oops). I guess the TI logo isn't as cool.
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Why the Intel logo for this story?
Because it's about processors, and processors means Intel. Duh.
(I've always rooted for ARM against Intel since the early '90s. The Risc PC, the StrongARM, etc.)
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ARM [arm.com] does have a logo. It's just rather plain. typing it out is close enough. Maybe they're going with elegance in simplicity, even in their logo. :)
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Technically, Intel does still own some XScale stuff, for their IOP line of SoCs meant for storage arrays.
(Oh, and as for StrongARM being incompatible... ARM9 made the same changes. The only other thing I can think that XScale did to break compatibility, relative to contemporary ARMs, was WMMX support in later versions, which used the same coprocessor ID as ARM's original FPA floating point unit, which meant that code that called the FPA would crash and burn, rather than throw an invalid instruction exceptio
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Where's the news for nerds in this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had always loved Slashdot, but is there any alternative community run site without the Slashvertisements?
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And yet, this story is also on alterslash :p
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(not that I think this is a Slashvertisement, but it is something that all of us should know already)
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I've almost completely given up on it. I've stopped reading the articles, not because of lack of interest but because they never point towards the original source anymore. In fact what they link to also rarely even link to the original source. I've taken to just reading the comments waiting to see if some inquisitive poster has tracked it down.
The editors purposefully manipulate whats posted usually to increase the hyperbole but often are outright lies. In some case the posts are so warped that they say the
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That is why ArsTechnica is on my daily list.
If you come to /. you should realise that many stories summaries seem to be designed as flames. Once you realise that you know to do you own research on the side, if the story matters at all.
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I, too, would like to find a place where the editors edit. Maybe even research a little. And where they don't comment in the stories. Where non-stories don't get posted. I mean - this is /. You would think that an editor could pick up the phone and actually call the subject of a story on rare occasion and maybe get a little insight into what is really going on.
Oh, and a site that doesn't end up slashdotting the subject without warning.
I use
* http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/ [foresight.org] for nano tech news
* http:// [macrumors.com]
Re:Where's the news for nerds in this? (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's rather the constant shouting of "slashvertisement" that's getting old.
Take a second look at this story:
-It links to some Linux site or other which is certainly not ARM.
-The article actually explains something quite insightful about the way ARM is advancing. Sure, some might have known this, but those who want to complain about that should realize that the discussion would be pretty shitty here if everyone was completely ignorant in advance. Do you ask the world what's wrong every time you hear something you already know?
-There's the interesting point that you can't get a Windows desktop on ARM, and in the future when you can most probably won't want it either.
-It's a story about a successful Intel competitor being even more successful (because face it, Intel wants to make every processor on Earth).
Hell, there's no end to interesting things in connection with this. It's a story about something that's changing which could change a lot of things, possibly for the better. I'd ask what's wrong with you rather than what's wrong with Slashdot.
It's a bit more complex than this article... (Score:5, Interesting)
...makes out
There are many, many makers of ARM based 'application processors' and the like: Texas Instruments, Samsung, Apple, ST Microelectronics, nVidia to name but a few. In addition, some people - like Qualcomm with their Snapdragon processor - have licensed the instruction set from ARM, but then have basically built their own core around that.
The nice thing about ARM is that - if you are looking to embed processing power - you can license a core (or two), design them into your own chip and then make it. Said chip can also include a USB controller, or a wireless baseband, or whatever. Intel will not sell you an x86 core for you to design into your own chip; ARM will.
Now: before this thread descends into meaningless ARM versus Intel rivalry, can I point out that the two architectures are optimized for entirely different situations. To say ARM is better than Intel, is like saying a bicycle is better than a ship - it's not a meaningful comparison. If you want to embed processing functionality, or you want low-power (particularly low standby power), then you need ARM. If you need raw processing power, optimised to run desktop or server operating systems, then you'll be wanting x86.
And the reason why x86 is so power hungry? It's because it's on big bits of silicon. And why's it on big bits of silicon? Because it support hyper-threading, out-of-order executon, has hardware virtualisation extensions, has extensive branch prediction, and tonnes of on chip cache.
There is no reason why ARM cannot offer all of these things too (and their Eagle design goes some way to do this). But if you want to do this, then your chip is going to get bigger, and more expensive, and more power hungry.
Over the next five years, we are going to continue to see mobility become more important: and that means more and more ARM cores, and a diminution of the importance of the traditional PC market. ARM has a very bright future - but, I suspect, it will probably have a great deal of trouble getting into the traditional PC space.
Re:It's a bit more complex than this article... (Score:5, Insightful)
A single amd64 core can emulate an arm core from about the same market segment via qemu. A cross-compile which on my lousy $400 6 core desktop takes 44 seconds needs 132 minutes natively on 1 core n900. For any activity that actually needs CPU power, x86 chips are not going away. If something replaces them, it'd be something designed for speed -- rather than 8086 compatibility or low power.
Yet, for most daily uses, you don't need much CPU power. We got so used to "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" that most people forget they ran software with about the same functionality ten years ago on machines a hundred times slower. Dropping some of worst software bloat can get us a really long way.
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most people forget they ran software with about the same functionality ten years ago on machines a hundred times slower. Dropping some of worst software bloat can get us a really long way.
Indeed. My phone actually kicks my netbook in the teeth when it comes to video playback, as well as power consumption. A modest processor with decent graphics hardware is all you need for basic multimedia, web browsing and such.
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For a fair comparison you should also include the screen sizes of the two devices, particularly the resolution.
An average smart phone is doing something like 320x480 pixels; an average netbook (say a 1000-series EEEPC) is more like 1024x600 pixels: four times as many.
Also a smart phone is likely to be more specialised, and it could well be that they have built-in video decoding hardware. Also I don't know much about code paths but it seems to me that video is a quite linear and highly predictable code pat
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My smartphone runs at 800x480, netbook is 1024x600. Still more pixels, but the phone easily plays fullscreen 720p videos at a nice smooth framerate, while if I try to watch HD video on my netbook I get something crazy like 1fps.
I think the video decoding hardware is the important part yes, as my netbook is pre-ION. But it shows how the processor isn't always the most important factor, and like I said "a modest processor with decent graphics hardware is all you need" for average home use.
The PC is become a blowtorch when we need a lamp. (Score:2)
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Sure you can run DSL or TinyCore and the like, but try to install a modern Ubuntu on an old laptop(that will happily run XP) and you'll be pulling your hair out.
The only way in which this is true is when you have little memory. XP will run in 64MB (swap!) but recent Ubuntu will fall all over itself with less than about 256MB, and if you want to run Firefox, you're going to need at least 512MB or have fun swapping. If you use a lightweight desktop like Matchbox and a lightweight Firefox like Seamonkey then you can do okay in 256. Since you really have to copy the CABs to disk to make Windows XP administration not a complete nightmare, the storage footprint is simila
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Wait, so you expect one distro to make good use of modern hardware and be installable on something ten years old and you have trouble?
Colour me surprised.
FWIW I've had debian squeeze running happily enough on a 266MHz machine with 32MB RAM. But then that's headless and running on ARM.
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I ran Linux on my last Apple TV. I don't see why I couldn't run it on my current AppleTV or any other modern ARM.
ARM machines aren't THAT pathetic.
A suitable GPU might even make them good enough for video-centric stuff.
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If intel is right and the future includes boatloads of cores then you'll just make -j128 or something and you'll get it done in approximately the same time... if you have SSD and a big fat block cache.
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Not really since in this example link itself takes more than 10 minutes and can't be parallelized.
Most of current software is woefully single-threated too. I can't really think of any thing other than compilation (with makefiles that allow -j6) which uses more than one core. At most, it's decompression (a small portion of a core) feeding a thread that uses 100% of another, or something in this vein.
"Nine women can't make a baby in one month" -- Fred Brooks
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I can't really think of any thing other than compilation (with makefiles that allow -j6) which uses more than one core.
Basically everything that really needs to be multithreaded is (or at least it's multiprocess.) Video encoding, 3d rendering, games, even apache runs multiple processes (on Unix, thread creation is [relatively] expensive and process creation is cheap; on Windows the reverse is true.) Everything except for your program with a single source file, which you should break up so that it will parallelize. If the program is so big and complex that it takes that long to compile surely there must be logical ways to pa
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Are you sure we are talking about the same Windows 7?
XP runs barely on 64MB, adequately for small tasks on 256MB, ok on 512MB.
7 runs barely on 512MB, adequately for small tasks on 2GB, ok on 4GB.
Let's not even mention Vista...
There are reasons for running 7: some hardware, especially shitty laptops, doesn't get drivers for XP. Also, XP 64 is a bad joke, meaning you can't use more than ~3GB due to sketchy PAE support. None of these matter for old boxes, though.
There's no excuse to skimp on memory on new sy
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my 7yro desktop has a gig of ram so for light tasks would be sifficient.. I'd expect it to be faster for 2 reasons (1) MS has had nearly a decade of research in tweaking the OS kernel. (2) Aggressive optimizations on low-end hardware to support Atom. Vosta was laughed at for being sluggish in netbooks. W7 addresses this. Strip out the bloat, tune windows services and yes old hardware should fly with sufficient ram.
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[blockquote]7 runs barely on 512MB, adequately for small tasks on 2GB, ok on 4GB.[blockquote]
Ok, thats not 64mb of RAM, but...
http://phoenixmatrix.com/devblog/post/2009/07/05/A-story-of-Windows-7-and-memory-usage.aspx [phoenixmatrix.com]
It works perfectly well for "small" tasks like this too. My netbook that i use everyday, with Aero on, to do everything except gaming and software development is on 1 GB. You do NOT need 2 GB for small tasks.
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In fact, it would be very simple: he'd say "hmmmm... I wonder if there's any other way to get lower power consumption PCs, that continue to run all the existing software, and don't require new skills, and which run on proven technology. hang on! there's this Atom chip, x86 compatible with a TDP of c. 10Watts! I can achieve 95% of the savings without betting my career on unproven technology that might be ditched by Microsoft down the line. (As they did with Windows support for DEC Alpha, for example)"
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I was reading that the ARM chips support Big and Little endian. Is this selected by the OS or by the firmware? Also does this make a difference for compiled software, such as a binary for a Linux application?
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As apps start making the move to the "cloud", there's little need for beefy processing at the end nodes. If you actually worked in a clinical or other setting you'd realize that most end points are really just glorified data-entry portals any more. And all you need for that is a web browser, and you certainly don't need a touchy wintel power-guzzler for that.
ARM CPU's won't replace every PC in a hospital or office. But I would be very surprised if they couldn't replace 50% or more of them. Today.
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There's a reason I said 50%. Not all applications are thin-client amenable. But every single terminal you see in hospital rooms is a perfect candidate for an ARM wall-wart. Any place where the primary/only task is data entry. POS, maybe 25% of office data jobs... there are a ton of places where people's primary or only task is with a web-based application.
Why do people insist that "everything must go to the cloud!" or "everything must be a thick client!" or anything so silly? Use the right tool for the task
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There's more to it (Score:1)
I'm guessing (Score:2)
Fallacy (Score:3)
ARM has also hit a wall with how much lower power consumption is needed.
This is a line of reasoning I've been fighting most of my career.
Lower power consumption is always needed. In a battery-powered, portable device, energy use is use of a limited resource and, therefore, is never low enough. Even if "most of us don't need the mobile device to continue functioning after heavy usage for more than maybe 48 hours" -- a statement of dubious validity -- the energy saved in performing feature set X can be used to perform additional features, features that may be used to competitiv
Revenge of ARM (Score:3)
ARM derived from the ideas of MOS and WDC (the 6502 and descendents) to make a low-power, efficient processor without fancy overheads.
Remember the rumors when the Apple II flirted with using ARM cpus toward the end of the line when Jobs was herding the company heavily toward Motorola and the 68K? Well the II line died with that, and so went any disruptive chances. Then strangely, it sorta came back again in the Newton, but Jobs killed that when he got the chance again while flirting with the PowerPC.
Then suddenly, Jobs embraced the ARM the next time around in the iPod and then later the iPhone (one-upping Sony in CE), and things have been going swimmingly for them.
Meanwhile, others picked up ARM for portable game devices, PDAs, and WinMob phones. It evolved slowly and not very well -- poor graphics drivers, poor OS/hardware implementations, hardware cycles focused on selling hardware, not the experience, etc.
Then the Jobs and iPhone said, "only the best combination of ARM cpu and graphics hardware for us. No more cheaping out to hardware designers for years like you guys have been doing", and boom explodes the market.
Companies are falling over themselves to make the best ARM hardware they can, although some are still missing the forest for the trees like Samsung. Others dumped the market because they thought it had no money like Intel's (formerly DEC's) Xscale(StrongARM) and ATI's Imageon graphics division (now Qualcomm's) and got caught with the pants down and what are now important toe-holds.
Nvidia whom only abortively were in the market and missed a cycle with the Tegra and half of it with Tegra 2, but seems to be holding their own. Imagination as PowerVR was pushed out of the PC market by Nvidia and ATI but flips it and now dominates as the best and reference hardware for mobile graphics over "newcomers" Nvidia/ATI. Funny enough, ATI's Adreno (from the former Bitboys) got recycled by Qualcomm into something that still viable after a stretch of horrible MSM720x hardware. Apple knowing they need to one-up these old-school houses, got PA-Semi and Intrinsity, fabbed by Samsung to own their own supply line for this critical hardware.
Ya this story just wonders what could've happened if Jobs wasn't so obstinate and denied using the ARM long ago.
Re:Revenge of ARM (Score:5, Informative)
ARM-based CPUs owned the cell phone market long before Apple. Even back when Palm owned the PDA market, everything was shifting to ARM away from the mixed market that included MIPS and Super-H.
Now, while your claim that Apple's embrace of the "experience" instead of just raw features might have some merit in changing the consumer landscape, I don't think they had any affect on ARM's presence in that market. They already had it.
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ARM development had stagnated; Hardware Manufacturers wanted cheap chips and were hesitant about pumping any more funds into R&D.
The original iPhone had a 1176JZ underclocked to 412 MHz and still blew away other handsets. The 3GS had a Cortex A8 and once again set the pace for the rest of the industry to catch up.
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ARM already had it thanks to Apple: when Apple chose the ARM for the Newton, other companies started taking ARM seriously and began to use it too.
This comes directly from Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, the designers of the ARM (both of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting).
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Remember the rumors when the Apple II flirted with using ARM cpus toward the end of the line when Jobs was herding the company heavily toward Motorola and the 68K?
Eh? The ARM might have been a contender for the last, education-only, gasps of the Apple II line, but Apple had committed to the 68K (with Lisa and then the Mac) back in the early 80s when the ARM was still a twinkle in Wilson & Furbers eyes.
It might have been a viable alternative to the PPC, though - that would have been interesting, but I fear it would have eventually hit the same problem: the chipmakers not keeping up with the brute-force Intel megahertz wars on the desktop because their main inter
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I'm pretty sure a powerpc would spank an ARM on every benchmark so was never a consideration for PowerMacs.
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I'm pretty sure a powerpc would spank an ARM on every benchmark
If you're talking about a G5 vs. your cellphone, of course - but an early-1990s desktop ARM chip vs. a early-1990s PPC would be a more interesting contest. Remember, ARM started out as a desktop chip - the first Acorn ARM systems in the late 80s smoked the competition (but, no DOS, no deal). Later they made the smart decision to focus on the mobile/low power market and leave the desktop to Intel space-heaters.
It would partly have been up to Apple to take the ARM core and team up with a chipmaker to specif
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no, i meant even back then. Riscos had a scientific niche - a friend bought one for math computation but as a general cpu apple needed more. Powerpc was desigmed explicitly for the AIM alliance to deliver a high performance desktop chip for running photoshop. I'm sure Apple would've evaluated arm back then as a replacement for 68k.
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I doubt it would win on performance per watt. Freescale and IBM didn't seem to care about that. IBM made it clear they just wanted to concrete or sheer processing capability. I suspect that was one if the reasons Apple moved to Intel - well that and cost.
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ok, maybe not *every* benchmark. :)Still, ibm's g3 boasted fair battery life compared to moto and intel offerings at the time eg ibook g3 had better battery life than powerbook g4. It was when they married altivec onto a server chip for the g5 that mobility was sacrificed.
Early netbooks had a performance perhaps comparable to a g3? I suspect if someone released today a multicore powerpc soc it would spank atom in meego performance.
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Then strangely, it sorta came back again in the Newton, but Jobs killed that when he got the chance again while flirting with the PowerPC.
Then suddenly, Jobs embraced the ARM the next time around in the iPod and then later the iPhone (one-upping Sony in CE), and things have been going swimmingly for them.
That's quite a carnival mirror you're peering into. Apple was a founding partner in setting up ARM in 1990 [ot1.com].
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I appreciate your correction.
However, the Apple II line ended in the '90s and I think Apple had a chance to dig into CE outside of the PC wars with the Apple II and ARM at the time. They had a huge mindshare in schools at the time and could've leveraged it into something. But Jobs was against the perception of Apple products being fun, "toys" or for gaming.
Maybe it was a proper Darwinian death.
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Think about it, are there more microwaves in the world, or more PCs? I don't know the answer, but every one of those microwaves have a microprocessor. There are lots of uses for microprocessors. The Apple Newton was only ever a small sliver of the microproce
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Be careful to not confuse 'apple' and 'pc' with the entire processor market. There is a huge market for microprocessors and ARM is just the most successful, mainly because of their excellent lineup of developer tools. The power efficiency came second. Think about it, are there more microwaves in the world, or more PCs? I don't know the answer, but every one of those microwaves have a microprocessor.
Yes, but is it a big fancy high-end super-powered sophisticated !!!!!!32-BIT!!!111ONE!!!!! ARM, or is it some lower-end 16-bit or 8-bit microcontroller? I suspect there's a huge market for microprocessors that make ARMs look like mainframe processors.
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ARM works best when your power supply has no LEGS (Score:2)
Back in 2004 ... (Score:3)
No Windows 7 Mobile on ARM (Score:4, Interesting)
I read through the article and found it very informative. One thing I didn't realize was that Microsoft will not do Windows 7 mobile on ARM.
That was a surprising statement. I googled on it and found this:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20090603123741_Microsoft_Windows_7_Will_Not_Support_ARM_Microprocessors.html [xbitlabs.com]
This article says "Micrsoft does not believe ARM can deliver the performance needed." To that I wonder "why is everyone else able to make amazing performance happen with ARM???"
Every time I hear another Microsoft shill claim "but this is not Windows, it is entirely new from the ground up" I have to chuckle a little. If that were true, then they wouldn't have any problem getting performance out of low-power hardware if they designed their OS with that in mind "from the ground up." The truth of the matter is that Microsoft simply can't get away from its legacy code and rebuild from scratch. I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling. Apple did it when they went with OSX. A completely new OS and while the transition was painful for users and developers, it was the right choice. I have been saying for nearly a decade that Microsoft should do the same... others have too... but they simply choose not to at every opportunity.
This whole scenario gives me a better understanding of why Windows Mobile isn't catching on even with hard core MS fans. The "desktop experience" doesn't fit in your hand and they simply don't know how to do it any other way.... (Or maybe they are afraid to since MS Bob...)
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I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling.
I totally agree with the MS problem but I think they can't. Ten years ago they should have got away from everything that Windows had become and start again but they were too scared they would lose their base customers on the way. It shows they were insecure about their product and thought that it was a success they couldn't repeat again - too dependent on a naive market. Instead they came up with the compromise way forward (fix it - let's make Vi
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- Windows Mobile - has long supported ARM, but has no version 7.
- Windows Phone 7 - only supports ARM.
- Windows CE - supports ARM.
The only thing that doesn't support ARM is "big" Windows 7, and this is changing:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jan11/01-05socsupport.mspx [microsoft.com]
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Yeah, I realized my mistake only after I read that article again. That said, I also found this:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/215779/windows_8_on_arm_expands_microsofts_mobile_horizons.html [pcworld.com]
And while it is a nice attempt (so far) what I expect to see is the same things we have seen from Microsoft for decades -- they will support Alpha or some other processor for a while and realize "we can save money by dropping support for this minority thing" and then kill it. And according to the review a
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Because it'd have to run Windows?
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Well, it seemed like a simple exercise for them to port back and forth to PPC when they maintained an nt kernel and migrated xbox to xbox 360. But by then, PPC had changed from a pure RISC architecture to a completely different animal anyway. (ironic how Apple migrated the opposite direction at about the same time, pretty much with similar ease, based on maintenance of legacy NeXT x86 code they had in their back pocket. . . I'll say that my 8 year old dual G5 may be slow compared to a brand new Power Mac,
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Apple did it when they went with OSX. A completely new OS
Completely new ... in the mid-80s when it was called NextStep. (Program a NeXT and then transition to OS X -- you'll see what I mean.) It might have been completely new to the Macintosh user/dev communities, but it was actually a pretty old OS (~15 years or so) by the time OS X shipped as the default OS on Macs (2002). And, it still had the "blue box," the Classic layer, and the Carbon APIs. (The NextStep/Sun APIs are Cocoa.)
Old news is fun! (Score:2)
Seriously, Slashdot? This is news?
And now ARM is going after high clock rates with deep pipelines. They'll end up with microarchitectures that are are more or less equivalent to x86 ones. Oh, and they're well behind the game when it comes to important architecture features like 64 bit. A 32 bit "server" architecture is a laughable concept.
The real thing that ARM has that x86 doesn't? You can license their core and put it
Why can't I buy an ARM desktop? (Score:2)
I have a number of applications where I want a low powered "desktop" form factor. That probably means Mini-ITX or something like that. The canonical example? A home file server. It's not in use 90% of the time, and I'd like my power bill to go down and the heat load to go down. A chip with a super low power standby mode would be nice.
Unfortunately Intel chips don't get that power sippy even when speed-stepped down. VIA makes some semi-interesting chips, but they seem to be integrated with a bunch of f
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I have a number of applications where I want a low powered "desktop" form factor. That probably means Mini-ITX or something like that. The canonical example? A home file server. It's not in use 90% of the time, and I'd like my power bill to go down and the heat load to go down. A chip with a super low power standby mode would be nice.
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HP t5325 costs over 200 USD. OP asked about 50 USD machines.
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There's no mass market yet. Plug computers are around $100-150, with 256-512MB of RAM and are somewhat taking off. Some might also have video-out, most have USB where you can hang a hub, storage, & keyboard/mouse off it.
The thing is, even with a cheap core and an inexpensive power supply, you're still going to have to pay to include usable amounts of memory. I'd think $100 is a reasonable place for inexpensive compu-bricks with a good selection of ports, until there's a killer app that ramps up the v
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But you don't have to go with the wall wart form factor. I was working with an ARM on an industrial micro-ATX board, and that worked great. I was actually impressed with the speed, even though it was a 1Ghz machine. It was a tremendous step forward over another board they had chosen to use, where the only OS you could run was their own hacked up version of Linux, that required dozens of dodgy patches to rebuild the kernel.
If you really pay attention, ARM processors show up a
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The idea here is something like the AppleTV but without it being locked down so it's more like an ION nettop.
Plug in your install media and fire it up...
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Yup. :) Well, kinda. We can watch streaming media on it (like Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube), put DVDs in an USB DVD player, or create original content on my regular workstation, and play it over the network. If we want streaming music, I can start it, and then turn the projector off, or put on the visualization of my choice playing in the application of my choice.
I had considered doing MythBox, or a whole variety of others, but opted to just go with a regular OS, and the huge
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So you are saying you are running an arm HTPC and you can stream netflix? How does that work exactly?
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Comes with open source OpenGL ES drivers?
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It uses the Freescale i.MX515 soc. The gpu is some sort of Imageon. I think Freescale licensed the gpu design before AMD sold it to Qualcomm who renamed it Adreno. The i.MX515 uses an Open Source kernel shim for the gpu and a closed source user space library for doing OpenGL. At least this was the situation last December. The library is entirely in user space, which means it should be easier to reverse engineer than a driver that is partly in kernel space. Dave
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I.E. the answer is no.
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Cheap product from some company that only has rendered product pics and is recommended by an Anonymous Coward who is posting about it multiple times.
Spam much?
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Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
Economies of scale, I'd think. IIRC most factory production is geared around (and indeed isn't economical unless) the idea of churning out tens of thousands of an item minimum. Preferably tens of thousands per month.
Something like that - unless it's being heavily pushed by someone who can give people something useful to do with it - isn't going to sell many. What are the likes of HP or Dell going to push? "Here, it's just like a desktop PC except you can't run any current software you're likely to want
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People would buy a cheap-ass "Internet" system though.
See, that's the problem. If it can't run decent-res, full-speed Flash and Java so that the casual games work just like their other machines, and can't run a full memory-hungry web browser so that all the modern JS-heavy dynamic sites interact well, it's not a usable "Internet" system. Plunking a 700MHz single-core ARM and 256MB of RAM into a $50 box isn't going to cut it for the general web-browsing consumer. Try it with a cutting-edge full-featured ARM SoC, and you'll start approaching $30-40 for just t
Re:Too bad! (Score:5, Interesting)
Trouble is, in most cases, these will either be running some dubiously-legit(and sometimes questionably well-localized) version of WinCE, or a mildly elderly version of Android. Actual cryptographic lockdowns, in the Apple or Motorola vein, are way outside the budget; but total lack of usable documentation, a confusing proliferation of part numbers, or rampant hardware switching between similar looking models has somewhat retarded the growth of decent sized 3rd-party release groups.
Curiously, the hardware built into these $80-$100, with (lousy) screen, keyboard, and battery doesn't generally seem to show up in $40-$50 versions with DC-in, VGA-out, and USB for peripherals. There are some machines with those specs, like HP's t5325; but the fact that that is a "thin client" and thus "enterprise" instantly doubles the price you'd expect for the specs.
You can also get quite capable hardware in Marvell's *plug line; but those are generally network appliances only, with your only display option being a USB-based Displaylink or similar. That certainly works; but nearly doubles the price and makes for a rather ugly donglefest.
The newer Marvell SoCs do support at least one lane of PCIe, in addition to a raft of other onboard peripherals, so it wouldn't be rocket surgery for an OEM to put out a *plug-esque design with an actual PCIe graphics chip(only a low-end one would really make sense; but even the cheapest PCIe graphics chips available can drive pretty much any monitor that doesn't require dual-link DVI) hanging off that lane. However, that is a bit hardcore to just hack onto an existing *plug board, and, as noted, nobody seems to have done that in commercial quantity.
You can get the cheap-and-nasty "PocketPC of yesteryear shoved into a clone of the EEE701" from any number of mystery OEMs on ebay; but the software will blow and 3rd party firmware support is kind of a gamble.
You can get a *plug-based design, which will have a much peppier ARM core (1.2GHz) and beween 128-512mb of RAM, depending on the exact model, for about the same money(Seagate Dockstars were going crazy cheap for a while, like $10-$20; but that was a firesale of sorts); but those are network-only unless you buy a Displaylink adapter, which pushes you up toward $150-$200, at which point Atom boxes that will run normal x86 OSes with zero hassle and take 1GB+ of RAM start to beckon...
The t5325 is pretty much exactly what you are asking for, except that it is an "enterprise" product, and has a price tag to match. If one could hunt down whatever OEM produces the board inside, and buy 10,000 of the same thing in generic black boxes, those would probably be precisely what you want; but I've never seen any hints on how to do that...
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Too bad nobody's making ultra-cheap machines yet.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
There are. They even include built-in cell phones. Keyboards are kind of lousy, tho.
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plug computers are going for US$ 99.
some chinese tablets are going for about that, and some of them already have 800 MHz CPUs with HDMI and full USB hosts. ad a cheap USB keyboard and a stand to keep it upright and you're set.
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Mine was a BBC Micro back in the 1980's. Pretty much stuck with Acorn Computers until 2000/2001. Acorn was owned by ARM, hence the older acronym "Acorn RISC Machines", they now use "Advanced".
Re:I think my first ARM device was a Gameboy Advan (Score:5, Interesting)
Acorn machines were incredible for their time. Their GUI had concepts that have only been realised in mass market GUIs just recently, the flexibility of their OS and their advanced typographical features were many years ahead of their time. Things like the save dialog for a new file having an icon of the file that you could give a name to and then drag that icon to a folder to save it there (rather than having to navigate to the folder in the dialog). Built in BASIC in ROM (most of the OS in ROM, so boot times were on the order of seconds). I could go on...
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I hated that 'save dialog'. finding a folder in the filesystem and having to drag just seemed slow and clunky in the days of mice with balls that got clogged and before the days of accelerated graphics. The Mac System 6 file chooser was primitive by comparison but did its job.
Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory (Score:2)
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Anyone interested in the history of acorn (and sinclair) and how their efforts to one-up each other effectively killed the British computer industry might like to watch Micro Men; it's not much of a documentary and has a few details that are less than accurate, but it gives a nice overview of the time.
http://thetvdb.com/?tab=series&id=118061 [thetvdb.com]
I also remember the first time I used one of those Acorn Archimedes computers at school - an A300 I think. Fullscreen video and 3D graphics were jaw-dropping for the
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Indeed Acorn existed long before the advent of the Archimedes and the ARM chip it powered. It was the first time I had ever heard about a RISC chip. It sounds like ARM was one of the first RISC chips, and has managed to stay around while others just fell back into the unknown.
The BBC Micro before it was based on the 6502 chip.
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Re:I think my first ARM device was a Gameboy Advan (Score:4, Informative)
BBC Micro ran a 6502, the Archimedes was the original ARM-based line.
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We need to way instain Intel processors who consume more power!