ARM Aims To Deliver Core i5 Like Performance At Less Than 5 Watts

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  • name99
    replied
    Originally posted by johnc View Post
    Yeah, yeah... They've been saying this for years and have been getting nowhere close. Not to mention that nobody wants Windows ARM laptops and ARM can't see beyond Windows laptops.
    They have NOT been "saying this for years".
    What they have been saying for years is that they hope to be competitive in servers starting in 2020. Repeating that every quarter (it's a standard part of their quarterly investor shpiel) just means they're confident in the date, not that they keep delaying...

    This is the first time they've indicated, in any sort of serious way, that they think it's worth competing in desktops.
    Hell, if you actually READ THE DAMN PRESS RELEASE it is there on the first line
    "Arm unveils its first-ever public CPU forward-looking roadmap and performance numbers"

    So why are they doing this?
    As usual Americans, especially WIntel users, think the world revolves around them, and that this announcement is relevant to them. This has NOTHING TO DO with Wintel. If MS wants to keep pushing Windows on ARM, ARM won't stop them, but they don't care. This is about enabling computing for everyone who is NOT on WIntel; it's about enabling ruggedized cheap (really cheap) laptops for India, and rural China, and Africa. The comparison to Intel performance is to allow the Chinese vendors (and anyone else who wants to plan non-ISA-dependent boxes for the 2019..2021 timeframe) to calibrate their expectations and plan accordingly.
    Do you sell a NAS? A Microtik style box? An Asterix box? Maybe it's time to reconsider either using ARM64 (start experimenting with the SW) or thinking what you could do if you had much more CPU.

    As for why they are doing this, that's as obvious as why they are announcing it. Apple has shown what is possible if you're willing to pay a slightly higher area and energy cost. ARM has always concentrated on absolutely minimalist area and energy requirements, and that served them well. But there is clearly a huge pool of potential customers (ie all those flagship phone vendors) who would be quite willing to pay a lot more for a core that was a lot closer to Apple. So time to augment the business plan. And once you have a core that kicks ass, why limit yourself to selling it only in phones?

    Leave a comment:


  • RussianNeuroMancer
    replied
    Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
    That's cool but not game-changing imho.
    Since they currently sell (license) implementations of their GPU driver to vendors (for example OGL X11 driver is sold separately from GLES Android driver) open sourcing it would be game-changing enough, in my opinion.

    Leave a comment:


  • coder
    replied
    Originally posted by gukin View Post
    When I saw i5 like performance I thought: "wow if they can match the i5 8250u that would be pretty impressive" However they specified the 7300U which is a two core non SMT processor.
    No, it has 2 cores / 4 threads:


    Leave a comment:


  • coder
    replied
    Originally posted by EarthMind View Post
    I'd rather see them compete with the desktop CPUs rather then the poor performing U variants
    The laptop market is stronger than desktops, and one in which ARM at least has a foothold. Also, it plays on their power-efficiency advantage.

    Desktops will surely come later, as they become more established in the laptop and server markets.

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  • coder
    replied
    Originally posted by Weasel View Post
    Not to mention they compare their "future 5nm" node with 10nm or 14nm processors. Because that makes sense, not.
    Intel's 14 nm CPUs are a known quantity, and therefore a useful point of reference. We don't know exactly what Intel will deliver on 10 nm or beyond, so it makes less sense to speculate about that.

    Yes, you're supposed to use your brain and account for the fact that Intel will certainly have something faster on the market, by then.

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  • coder
    replied
    Originally posted by microcode View Post
    Are we really supposed to believe that two thirds of the power budget of the i5-7300U is "things intel hasn't figured out" and "x86 overhead"?
    Intel's TDP includes their GPU. AVX2 also consumes quite a bit of power, and I don't know how that factors into Intel's TDP estimates.

    Leave a comment:


  • coder
    replied
    Originally posted by johnc View Post
    and ARM can't see beyond Windows laptops.
    Ever heard of chromebooks?

    Also, ARM is very interested in server chips.

    Leave a comment:


  • Apokalypz
    replied
    Marketing BS at its best. They only released this "news" to show they are dedicated to staying relevant in the near future. It helps with things like investors and entices SoC makers to buy their latest IP (or to plan to buy their future IP). If this "news" was really important, it would be about a product IP that's already out and have benchmarks to show their claims.

    Any news on their roadmap (even for them) is all speculation. And we all know how speculation is these days...(pun intended)

    Leave a comment:


  • Wilfred
    replied
    Originally posted by c117152 View Post
    It's a 2017 chip. By 2020 it will be 3 years old and that's the current gap ARM already has with Intel's mobile chips. This is just ARM observing the trend line. The reason it's more relevant now it because Intel isn't expected to come out with better chips until Q3-Q4/19 since they're reengineering the whole x86 family to counter the speculative execution vulnerabilities. But that is left unsaid.
    arm64 also has the speculative execution vulnerabilities, so ARM has to do that too.

    Leave a comment:


  • c117152
    replied
    Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
    I'd like to point out that until they make decently powerful processors, none will even remotely care about making "games, CAD and graphic design software" that run on it.
    If it was an issue of performance we would all be using linux instead of windows by now. Fact of the matter is, the mid-high end is an Intel backwards comparability entrenched market. Even now, it's easier to use a linux dom0 and gpu pass-through windows vm to run games, CAD and graphics design software than to actually port software to linux. So, thinking ARM can just produce high-performance cores and have developers rushing over porting their existing software is purely wishful thinking. Best ARM can do is slowly chip away at the market lower-end while making sure their emulation is rock solid so by the time they get good enough clocks, they'll be able to emulate the x86 one way or another.

    Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
    I don't need a toy processor for internet browsing, regardless of how "free" it might be.
    My current setup is a cheap, silent and cool i3 client and an 32cores AMD compile server. Sure, not an option for low-latency applications. But that's exactly why I repeated "games, CAD and graphics design software" in my posts....

    Leave a comment:

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