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ARM & NVIDIA

ARM + nVidia would be an interesting move on many fronts... none the least ARM is very sucessful at making super efficent, super scalable GPUs.
 
Hauser: ARM will 'obliterate' Intel

ARM has declared its intentions to dominate the future of computing, declaring industry giant Intel a dead duck due to a misunderstanding of what customers want.

The comments came from ARM co-founder Hermann Hauser during an interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he declares that 'ARM is going to kill the microprocessor.'

Hauser goes on to clarify his remarks: 'the reason why ARM is going to kill the microprocessor is not because Intel will not eventually produce an Atom that might be as good as an ARM, but because Intel has the wrong business model. People in the mobile phone architecture do not buy microprocessors. So if you sell microprocessors you have the wrong model. They license them.'

That distinction between Intel, which designs and manufacturers its processors, and ARM, which designs the processors for other companies such as Texas Instruments, Marvell, and Samsung to licence, refine, and build themselves, redefines the battle, says Hauser: 'it’s not Intel versus ARM, it is Intel versus every single semiconductor company in the world.'

Hauser is clearly betting heavily on ARM to take over the PC industry, claiming that 'there is no case in the history of computing where a company that has dominated one wave has dominated the next wave and there is no case where a new wave did not kill the previous wave - as in obliterate them,' declaring the era of Microsoft and Intel to be drawing to a close.

It's hard to argue with ARM's corporate performance: this year the company has collected more revenue from its licensed designs than Intel has on its microprocessor sales, while still allowing its customers to make a profit of their own from the chips they manufacture. Increasing interest in the low-power chips from netbook, ultra-portable, and even server manufacturers shows that ARM's long absence from the desktop and server markets could be drawing to a close.

Intel, for its part, unsurprisingly disagrees with Hauser's comments, claiming that 'there's room for many [different architectures] to be successful,' but it's clear that the company is rattled by the potential of ARM's designs - and this is the first time in many years that Intel, the giant of the server world, has entered a battle as the underdog.
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http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/11/22/arm-will-obliterate-intel/1

Arm readies processing cores for 64-bit computing
Originally Posted by InfoWorld
Arm Holdings will unveil new plans for processing cores that support 64-bit computing within the next few weeks, and has already shown samples at private viewings, sources close to the company said at an Arm technology conference in Taipei.

The company's move into 64-bit computing shows it's serious about putting out powerful processors to meet the needs of businesses and consumers. Most personal computers today are based on 32-bit computing, while supercomputers, servers, and other bigger systems use 64-bit computing, which can address more memory.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Windows 7 brings big gains for 64-bit computing. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]

More memory can significantly improve performance for people running a lot of applications at once in just about any device.

Intel, the world's largest chip maker, already offers a number of processors for 64-bit computing,, including for servers, desktops and mobile computers, as does its rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Intel and AMD both make processors based on the x86 architecture, while Arm's chips are based on an entirely different architecture, meaning that x86 software needs to be rewritten before it will run on Arm processor cores. Arm's processor designs, though, are more often found in mobile devices or embedded systems than in desktop PCs today.

Arm's move to put out a 64-bit processing core will give its partners more options to design products for more markets, including servers, the source said. Arm only designs the processor cores: its customers and partners take those designs and turn them into chips.

Currently, companies such as Marvell Technology use 32-bit Arm processing cores in chips designed for servers.

Arm recently announced its latest processor, the Cortex A15, which is its highest-performance product yet, according to the company. It's also a 32-bit processor.

Sources said the next Arm Cortex processor to be unveiled will support 64-bit computing. An announcement of the processor could come as early as next week.

Officially, Arm is keeping mum about its plans for upcoming processors.

Arm has not talked publicly about its processor roadmap beyond the A15, said Tudor Brown, president of Arm, when asked about 64-bit processors at a news conference.

The idea for 64-bit computing in PCs has become more popular in recent years for a few reasons. Most processors used in PCs can already handle a 64-bit operating system, and more memory is available cheaply because the price of memory has dropped significantly due to stiff competition among memory chip makers.
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http://infoworld.com/d/hardware/arm-readies-processing-cores-64-bit-computing-649

Well there could be something in all this.
 
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I'm surprised ARM hasn't had a poke at the desktop performance GPU market before now, tho its not really their business style, as their GPU designs on paper own both AMD on efficency and nVidia on performance when scaled up - tho always possible theres a roadblock to scaling to that level.
 
Rroff said:
I'm surprised ARM hasn't had a poke at the desktop performance GPU market before now, tho its not really their business style, as their GPU designs on paper own both AMD on efficency and nVidia on performance when scaled up - tho always possible theres a roadblock to scaling to that level.
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Does ARM even have proper GPUs? I thought they just used PowerVR tech?
 
Monkeynut said:
Does ARM even have proper GPUs? I thought they just used PowerVR tech?
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Apple use PowerVR GPUs for some reason paired with ARM chips, however ARM do indeed design some GPUs which they released under the Mali brand. In fact their latest design is touted to support OpenCL 1.1.
 
Yeah as above they have the Mali line of GPUs - its pretty low end stuff - but incredibly potent for the low complexity/size of the logic. In theory if you scaled the design to the complexity of the GTX480 it would utterly annihilate it in both performance and power/heat. Obviously theres a big difference between theory and practise.
 
In theory, transistors and process's designed for a 1W chip aren't remotely useable in a 150W + 3 billion transistor design.

You design large, or tiny efficiency chips and in totally different ways, ARM's gpu's/cpu's will lose a HUGE amount of efficiency as they scale up in design.

Their CPU's less so, but in a way that won't help them. AMD/Intel control x86, and windows and general computer supplies are based around the architecture, it would take decades to get in on the act for ARM. But efficiency wise, not being constrained by x86 would help them, legacy support of so much rubbish is slowing PC's moving forwards and has done for years, but its also what makes them so established.

ARM, without having to stick to the x86 bandwagon, and without having to design mobo's to still support, PCI slots, ps2 this, 3dnow that, etc, etc, they'd save a lot of time and effort on a design.

But theres the counter problem and the reason AMD/Intel are stuck in the muck with legacy support, the industry is SO slow to change that stupid companies still need support for old rubbish.

Gpu's are slightly less restrained, more so as DX10 essentially started from scratch and as dx9 can be ignored in the near future GPU's can start with a fresh slate pretty soon and because they simply slot into an expansion slot, which is updated, fast enough, and because things like Direct X moves forwards fast enough, can get on with being pretty efficient at what they do.

Then you've got where the performance is used, a tiny part of a 580gtx/6970 will be the video decoding, and thats a pretty simple part to get right, the shaders, the high speed difficult to balance stuff is where ARM have little experience, making a tiny core with a few accelerated decoders and this and that would be very easy, not having to deal with high clock speeds, leakage, bandwidth.


At the moment ARM are a huge threat to new and future markets, but aren't even a small threat on proper laptops and desktops, servers because the markets are just so massively entrenched.

The ARM buying out of Nvidia is an interesting idea, but based on the markets ARM is in, and will be in for the next 4-5 years, Nvidia's very non efficient design philosphy won't bring a whole heck of a lot with its price tag, seems very unlikely.
 
drunkenmaster said:
In theory, transistors and process's designed for a 1W chip aren't remotely useable in a 150W + 3 billion transistor design.

You design large, or tiny efficiency chips and in totally different ways, ARM's gpu's/cpu's will lose a HUGE amount of efficiency as they scale up in design.
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Mali was designed to be modularly scalable as well as a tiny efficent chip, so thats less of an issue tho I'm bettiing amongest other issues you'd have hideous pipeline latency to deal with if you directly scaled it up to GTX480 level.

EDIT: Delving a little deeper the design is still very much based around fixed functions with very little scalability in the vertex setup so you'd never actually get into the same league in practise.
 
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if the takeover does work, then maybe nVidia will have more reasonable prices in future for ALL their cards. Maybe they'll even merge with ATI!
 
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