Originally posted by johnc
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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?
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