Intel is scared because ipad uses non intel chips and that product is kicking the tail of intel powered computers. 'What intel is saying is that they need to get on this tablet gravy train NOW!
...Other phone manufactures are also using ARM, however both Android and WP7 are designed in such a way that they could move between ARM and x86 as opposed to Apple\\iOS that totally cuts out x86 (even to the extent of Apple working on their own ARM SOC)
I don't think it's that drastic, as other posters have pointed out to me previously iOS is really just a version of OS X. So we have "AppleOS" freely moving between ARM and x86 now.
They've learnt their lessons from the PowerPC to Intel transition and I'm sure Apple is ready to go iOS on x86, Mac OS X on ARM all should the occasion arise. I'd be deadly surprised if Apple doesn't have a bunch of gear in Cupertino running OS X (10.7 particularly) on ARM hardware.
I don't get why Intel is so obsessed with the iPad and iPhone. Intel shouldn't be worried about Apple but ARM who's kicking their asses in mobile. Apple is not even in the chip business. They make their own chip for their own use.
Not true. Apple doesn't make any chips.
Apple has licensed an existing design and possibly made some modifications to it (although the modifications appear to be minor. The A4 chip is largely a stock design). In any event, Apple is not a chip maker, they are a chip purchaser.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleStud
The point is that intel vows to supply the majority of chips for mobile devices, not that they will make the actual devices.
Pretty brave boast considering that "Intel does not provide chips to any current smartphones or high-profile tablets."
Zero to dominant in a few years? Not bloody likely.
Quote:
Originally Posted by -AG-
What you are going o find is that over the next few years companies such as Apple will move all of their CPUs away from intel. and THAT is the real reason why they are scared.
Nonsense. There is no sign of companies moving all their CPUs away from Intel. AMD's share has been relatively steady for years and there's no major breakthrough on the horizon that's going to change the CPU market.
The mobile device market is different because ARM has been dominant for years and Intel doesn't even have a competitive product. But no one moved away from Intel because they weren't using Intel in the first place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by -AG-
And the reason why they don't go after ARM is because they don't make cpus themselves. they just design them.
That's foolish logic. ARM is a competitive chip design. The actual producer of the ARM chip doesn't matter. What does matter is that OEMs are buying ARM chips and Intel wants them to buy Intel chips. If Intel has to be in that market, they have to produce a chip that is competitive to ARM's designs in price, performance and energy usage.
I don't think it's that drastic, as other posters have pointed out to me previously iOS is really just a version of OS X. So we have "AppleOS" freely moving between ARM and x86 now.
They've learnt their lessons from the PowerPC to Intel transition and I'm sure Apple is ready to go iOS on x86, Mac OS X on ARM all should the occasion arise. I'd be deadly surprised if Apple doesn't have a bunch of gear in Cupertino running OS X (10.7 particularly) on ARM hardware.
I don't think it's an issue of the OS moving between the processors, but the huge wealth of applications that run on it. It's fine to switch up things like platforms, OSs, when market share was much lower, but now that macs have broken the 10% barrier, and is becoming more and more used by many, shaking things up like the powerPC, then intel shakeup again, makes users, developers a little fatigued with the changes.
I don't think it's that drastic, as other posters have pointed out to me previously iOS is really just a version of OS X. So we have "AppleOS" freely moving between ARM and x86 now.
They've learnt their lessons from the PowerPC to Intel transition and I'm sure Apple is ready to go iOS on x86, Mac OS X on ARM all should the occasion arise. I'd be deadly surprised if Apple doesn't have a bunch of gear in Cupertino running OS X (10.7 particularly) on ARM hardware.
As Groovetube mentions above, it's the 200,000+ iOS applications that would be an issue. They would all need to be rebuilt for the new architecture and resubmitted by the developers. Emulation is an option on the desktop but not really practical in a mobile device.
Apple could potentially use x86 in a new iOS based device that didn't support the existing application store, but the iPod\\iPhone\\iPad are most certainly locked to ARM.
It think that's one of the reasons Apple brought control of the A4 in house. They know they need to maintain quality of the ARM SOC because their entire mobile platform depends so heavily on it.
The Atom chips have proved to be too power-hungry for most mobile implementations smaller than a netbook.
It isn't necessarily about devices smaller than a netbook, it about specifically phones. A tablet being about the same size as a netbook, could use an Atom but for the sake of the ecosystem, if you are running the A4 in your phone, you will want to use the same architecture in your tablet.
When you get down to the basics of mobile devices, it is about heat and battery life compared to cpu processing power. A4 just has the right balance for current mobile hardware/software implementations.
I'd say this is more like a 'death march' for Intel. Ironically, Intel acquired an ARM foundry, but chose to go with their own design (Atom) instead. Intel ALWAYS wants to own both the IP and manufacturing capacity. Now they realize that Atom is late and power-hungry compared to other ARM-based designs. Of course, the key is software. They will not only have to convince others to port their software to a design that is more expensive and power hungry. Apple is pretty well set, with their own A4 design, and the rest really don't have a product which competes with iPad. Google is doing well, with Android, but the handsets are mainly ARM-based. Moore's Law doesn't hold up where the design point is watt-per-cycle, not total cycles...
Moore's observation has not been accurate at all about much anything.
I agree that Apple is safe in the mobile market with the A4 and I think they will only widen the gap with performance and battery life over the next 18 months. After that, it will be interesting to see what happens.
Intel will be in direct competition with Apple when they release Meego (a Intel\\Nokia mobile OS). From what I've heard relations between the two companies are icy at best.
Other phone manufactures are also using ARM, however both Android and WP7 are designed in such a way that they could move between ARM and x86 as opposed to Apple\\iOS that totally cuts out x86 (even to the extent of Apple working on their own ARM SOC)
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple continue to move toward AMD\\custom chips and away from Intel altogether.
As the world pushes toward mobile computing Intel are starting to lose their grip on the chip market and they know it. ARM is by far the biggest single threat to Intel's existence.
Atom so far hasn't delivered on the promise of low power mobile computing (or at least not compared to ARM). The belief is that Medfield (release 2011) will bring Atom in line with ARM and the next iteration (release 2012) could take Atom beyond ARM, however it's impossible to say where ARM (or Apple's custom ARM SOC) will be in 2 years time.
It has also been surmised that Microsoft's lack of presence in the tablet arena is at least partially due to their backing of Intel/Atom and that a custom Windows tablet UI is in development awaiting the release of a mobile SOC from Intel that is competitive with Apple's ARM offering.
So we have...
Apple with across the board backing of ARM to the total exclusion of x86 (mobile\\tablet\\living room)
Google with the capability to back both
Microsoft with WP7 (ARM or x86) and an x86 tablet
Intel\\Nokia with MeeGo (presumably to push x86 in both mobile and tablet)
RIM - Seems to be ARM across the board
HP\\Palm - probably ARM
So there isn't just a battle of the mobile OS's going on, there is a battle of mobile architectures as well!
We wish that Steve Jobs will leave forever. There are some in Microsoft who wish Bill Gates will come back, but he has moved on behind the simple pursuit of power and domination to more lofty goals to help improve the plight of humanity
In his own way, Steve Jobs is doing the same in his obsession with the role of technology and ease of use, to help consumers and companies. I hope Steve Jobs may have time to devote some of his contemplative time to go further.
But, even if he will not ever take the same course as Bill Gates did, his vision in technology, aesthetics and consumers will endure -- that the consumer is not a simple cash cow. One can profit without forgetting the user.
CGC
An excellent conclusion to your excellent essay, but the 'leave' tripped me up. You wanted 'live' but were autocorrected wrongly, I presume.
As Groovetube mentions above, it's the 200,000+ iOS applications that would be an issue. They would all need to be rebuilt for the new architecture and resubmitted by the developers.
....
All of those 200,000 apps are compiled to x86 code while in development. To test the code on an actual iOS device the same source code is compiled to run on an ARM chip. The x86 code is already being created, it just isn't distributed. It seems like it would be an easy "flip of a switch" to create x86 versions of apps that were created using Apple's development tools.
Nonsense. There is no sign of companies moving all their CPUs away from Intel. AMD's share has been relatively steady for years and there's no major breakthrough on the horizon that's going to change the CPU market.
The mobile device market is different because ARM has been dominant for years and Intel doesn't even have a competitive product. But no one moved away from Intel because they weren't using Intel in the first place.
A few years ago, all apple computers used intel. Now apple uses other CPUs for some of their product lines. And these happen to be the product lines that are having explossive sales growth, the product lines that have made apple the 2nd most valuable company on the planet.
Intel obviously wants a bigger piece of that new market.
What's really sad is that Intel had a pig in this race, the XScale processor line, which they divested in 2006, in order to focus on catching up and win back a lot of business that AMD that won earlier in the desktop PC and server CPU markets. In hindsight, that's probably the right thing for them to do for their survival, but it left them without an adequate mobile CPU. The XScale was in fact, an ARM design, and had Intel kept it going, they might today have one of the best ARM CPUs around.
All of those 200,000 apps are compiled to x86 code while in development. To test the code on an actual iOS device the same source code is compiled to run on an ARM chip. The x86 code is already being created, it just isn't distributed. It seems like it would be an easy "flip of a switch" to create x86 versions of apps that were created using Apple's development tools.
It's not impossible, just impractical. Apple would need to co-ordinate the recompilation and resubmission of every application in the store (apparently that has reached 300,000 now!).
Assuming Apple couldn't tell that the two different packages for the two different architectures came from the same code-base, they would also need to do at least some form of recertification for the application (essentially treat it like a version upgrade submission).
For better or worse Apple have locked in ARM for their mobile devices (and unless Intel can pull the proverbial rabbit out of their hat, at the moment it looks like "for better")
It's not impossible, just impractical. Apple would need to co-ordinate the recompilation and resubmission of every application in the store (apparently that has reached 300,000 now!).
Assuming Apple couldn't tell that the two different packages for the two different architectures came from the same code-base, they would also need to do at least some form of recertification for the application (essentially treat it like a version upgrade submission).
For better or worse Apple have locked in ARM for their mobile devices (and unless Intel can pull the proverbial rabbit out of their hat, at the moment it looks like "for better")
I could see Apple implementing a Rosetta (emulator) solution if they really, really had no other choice. There are a lot of emulators used on desktops to run arm based applications and some are quite impressive. Not the best way but definitely doable in a pinch.
I happen to agree with you though, they are "all in" on arm. To me on any mobile device, notebooks included, battery life is the biggest deal.
I could see Apple implementing a Rosetta (emulator) solution if they really, really had no other choice. There are a lot of emulators used on desktops to run arm based applications and some are quite impressive. Not the best way but definitely doable in a pinch.
I happen to agree with you though, they are "all in" on arm. To me on any mobile device, notebooks included, battery life is the biggest deal.
I think it's possible in theory but I don't think emulation would work on a mobile platform in practice. There is just too much efficiency lost in the emulation process.
Unless of course, Intel did pull a rabbit out of their hat and released something that was twice as quick, cheaper and used less power than Apple's ARM SOC of the day. Not likely I would think.
I think it's possible in theory but I don't think emulation would work on a mobile platform in practice. There is just too much efficiency lost in the emulation process.
Unless of course, Intel did pull a rabbit out of their hat and released something that was twice as quick, cheaper and used less power than Apple's ARM SOC of the day. Not likely I would think.
I would love to know Apple's answer to this, albeit hypothetical in most likelyhood.
Comments
...Other phone manufactures are also using ARM, however both Android and WP7 are designed in such a way that they could move between ARM and x86 as opposed to Apple\\iOS that totally cuts out x86 (even to the extent of Apple working on their own ARM SOC)
I don't think it's that drastic, as other posters have pointed out to me previously iOS is really just a version of OS X. So we have "AppleOS" freely moving between ARM and x86 now.
They've learnt their lessons from the PowerPC to Intel transition and I'm sure Apple is ready to go iOS on x86, Mac OS X on ARM all should the occasion arise. I'd be deadly surprised if Apple doesn't have a bunch of gear in Cupertino running OS X (10.7 particularly) on ARM hardware.
I don't get why Intel is so obsessed with the iPad and iPhone. Intel shouldn't be worried about Apple but ARM who's kicking their asses in mobile. Apple is not even in the chip business. They make their own chip for their own use.
Not true. Apple doesn't make any chips.
Apple has licensed an existing design and possibly made some modifications to it (although the modifications appear to be minor. The A4 chip is largely a stock design). In any event, Apple is not a chip maker, they are a chip purchaser.
The point is that intel vows to supply the majority of chips for mobile devices, not that they will make the actual devices.
Pretty brave boast considering that "Intel does not provide chips to any current smartphones or high-profile tablets."
Zero to dominant in a few years? Not bloody likely.
What you are going o find is that over the next few years companies such as Apple will move all of their CPUs away from intel. and THAT is the real reason why they are scared.
Nonsense. There is no sign of companies moving all their CPUs away from Intel. AMD's share has been relatively steady for years and there's no major breakthrough on the horizon that's going to change the CPU market.
The mobile device market is different because ARM has been dominant for years and Intel doesn't even have a competitive product. But no one moved away from Intel because they weren't using Intel in the first place.
And the reason why they don't go after ARM is because they don't make cpus themselves. they just design them.
That's foolish logic. ARM is a competitive chip design. The actual producer of the ARM chip doesn't matter. What does matter is that OEMs are buying ARM chips and Intel wants them to buy Intel chips. If Intel has to be in that market, they have to produce a chip that is competitive to ARM's designs in price, performance and energy usage.
I don't think it's that drastic, as other posters have pointed out to me previously iOS is really just a version of OS X. So we have "AppleOS" freely moving between ARM and x86 now.
They've learnt their lessons from the PowerPC to Intel transition and I'm sure Apple is ready to go iOS on x86, Mac OS X on ARM all should the occasion arise. I'd be deadly surprised if Apple doesn't have a bunch of gear in Cupertino running OS X (10.7 particularly) on ARM hardware.
I don't think it's an issue of the OS moving between the processors, but the huge wealth of applications that run on it. It's fine to switch up things like platforms, OSs, when market share was much lower, but now that macs have broken the 10% barrier, and is becoming more and more used by many, shaking things up like the powerPC, then intel shakeup again, makes users, developers a little fatigued with the changes.
I don't think it's that drastic, as other posters have pointed out to me previously iOS is really just a version of OS X. So we have "AppleOS" freely moving between ARM and x86 now.
They've learnt their lessons from the PowerPC to Intel transition and I'm sure Apple is ready to go iOS on x86, Mac OS X on ARM all should the occasion arise. I'd be deadly surprised if Apple doesn't have a bunch of gear in Cupertino running OS X (10.7 particularly) on ARM hardware.
As Groovetube mentions above, it's the 200,000+ iOS applications that would be an issue. They would all need to be rebuilt for the new architecture and resubmitted by the developers. Emulation is an option on the desktop but not really practical in a mobile device.
Apple could potentially use x86 in a new iOS based device that didn't support the existing application store, but the iPod\\iPhone\\iPad are most certainly locked to ARM.
It think that's one of the reasons Apple brought control of the A4 in house. They know they need to maintain quality of the ARM SOC because their entire mobile platform depends so heavily on it.
The Atom chips have proved to be too power-hungry for most mobile implementations smaller than a netbook.
It isn't necessarily about devices smaller than a netbook, it about specifically phones. A tablet being about the same size as a netbook, could use an Atom but for the sake of the ecosystem, if you are running the A4 in your phone, you will want to use the same architecture in your tablet.
When you get down to the basics of mobile devices, it is about heat and battery life compared to cpu processing power. A4 just has the right balance for current mobile hardware/software implementations.
I'd say this is more like a 'death march' for Intel. Ironically, Intel acquired an ARM foundry, but chose to go with their own design (Atom) instead. Intel ALWAYS wants to own both the IP and manufacturing capacity. Now they realize that Atom is late and power-hungry compared to other ARM-based designs. Of course, the key is software. They will not only have to convince others to port their software to a design that is more expensive and power hungry. Apple is pretty well set, with their own A4 design, and the rest really don't have a product which competes with iPad. Google is doing well, with Android, but the handsets are mainly ARM-based. Moore's Law doesn't hold up where the design point is watt-per-cycle, not total cycles...
Moore's observation has not been accurate at all about much anything.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/The...f-Moore--s-Law
I agree that Apple is safe in the mobile market with the A4 and I think they will only widen the gap with performance and battery life over the next 18 months. After that, it will be interesting to see what happens.
Intel will be in direct competition with Apple when they release Meego (a Intel\\Nokia mobile OS). From what I've heard relations between the two companies are icy at best.
Other phone manufactures are also using ARM, however both Android and WP7 are designed in such a way that they could move between ARM and x86 as opposed to Apple\\iOS that totally cuts out x86 (even to the extent of Apple working on their own ARM SOC)
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple continue to move toward AMD\\custom chips and away from Intel altogether.
As the world pushes toward mobile computing Intel are starting to lose their grip on the chip market and they know it. ARM is by far the biggest single threat to Intel's existence.
Atom so far hasn't delivered on the promise of low power mobile computing (or at least not compared to ARM). The belief is that Medfield (release 2011) will bring Atom in line with ARM and the next iteration (release 2012) could take Atom beyond ARM, however it's impossible to say where ARM (or Apple's custom ARM SOC) will be in 2 years time.
It has also been surmised that Microsoft's lack of presence in the tablet arena is at least partially due to their backing of Intel/Atom and that a custom Windows tablet UI is in development awaiting the release of a mobile SOC from Intel that is competitive with Apple's ARM offering.
So we have...
- Apple with across the board backing of ARM to the total exclusion of x86 (mobile\\tablet\\living room)
- Google with the capability to back both
- Microsoft with WP7 (ARM or x86) and an x86 tablet
- Intel\\Nokia with MeeGo (presumably to push x86 in both mobile and tablet)
- RIM - Seems to be ARM across the board
- HP\\Palm - probably ARM
So there isn't just a battle of the mobile OS's going on, there is a battle of mobile architectures as well!You forgot
1. Qualcomm
2. Nvidia
3. Marvell also I guess
We wish that Steve Jobs will leave forever. There are some in Microsoft who wish Bill Gates will come back, but he has moved on behind the simple pursuit of power and domination to more lofty goals to help improve the plight of humanity
In his own way, Steve Jobs is doing the same in his obsession with the role of technology and ease of use, to help consumers and companies. I hope Steve Jobs may have time to devote some of his contemplative time to go further.
But, even if he will not ever take the same course as Bill Gates did, his vision in technology, aesthetics and consumers will endure -- that the consumer is not a simple cash cow. One can profit without forgetting the user.
CGC
An excellent conclusion to your excellent essay, but the 'leave' tripped me up. You wanted 'live' but were autocorrected wrongly, I presume.
As Groovetube mentions above, it's the 200,000+ iOS applications that would be an issue. They would all need to be rebuilt for the new architecture and resubmitted by the developers.
....
All of those 200,000 apps are compiled to x86 code while in development. To test the code on an actual iOS device the same source code is compiled to run on an ARM chip. The x86 code is already being created, it just isn't distributed. It seems like it would be an easy "flip of a switch" to create x86 versions of apps that were created using Apple's development tools.
Nonsense. There is no sign of companies moving all their CPUs away from Intel. AMD's share has been relatively steady for years and there's no major breakthrough on the horizon that's going to change the CPU market.
The mobile device market is different because ARM has been dominant for years and Intel doesn't even have a competitive product. But no one moved away from Intel because they weren't using Intel in the first place.
A few years ago, all apple computers used intel. Now apple uses other CPUs for some of their product lines. And these happen to be the product lines that are having explossive sales growth, the product lines that have made apple the 2nd most valuable company on the planet.
Intel obviously wants a bigger piece of that new market.
All of those 200,000 apps are compiled to x86 code while in development. To test the code on an actual iOS device the same source code is compiled to run on an ARM chip. The x86 code is already being created, it just isn't distributed. It seems like it would be an easy "flip of a switch" to create x86 versions of apps that were created using Apple's development tools.
It's not impossible, just impractical. Apple would need to co-ordinate the recompilation and resubmission of every application in the store (apparently that has reached 300,000 now!).
Assuming Apple couldn't tell that the two different packages for the two different architectures came from the same code-base, they would also need to do at least some form of recertification for the application (essentially treat it like a version upgrade submission).
For better or worse Apple have locked in ARM for their mobile devices (and unless Intel can pull the proverbial rabbit out of their hat, at the moment it looks like "for better"
It's not impossible, just impractical. Apple would need to co-ordinate the recompilation and resubmission of every application in the store (apparently that has reached 300,000 now!).
Assuming Apple couldn't tell that the two different packages for the two different architectures came from the same code-base, they would also need to do at least some form of recertification for the application (essentially treat it like a version upgrade submission).
For better or worse Apple have locked in ARM for their mobile devices (and unless Intel can pull the proverbial rabbit out of their hat, at the moment it looks like "for better"
I could see Apple implementing a Rosetta (emulator) solution if they really, really had no other choice. There are a lot of emulators used on desktops to run arm based applications and some are quite impressive. Not the best way but definitely doable in a pinch.
I happen to agree with you though, they are "all in" on arm. To me on any mobile device, notebooks included, battery life is the biggest deal.
I could see Apple implementing a Rosetta (emulator) solution if they really, really had no other choice. There are a lot of emulators used on desktops to run arm based applications and some are quite impressive. Not the best way but definitely doable in a pinch.
I happen to agree with you though, they are "all in" on arm. To me on any mobile device, notebooks included, battery life is the biggest deal.
I think it's possible in theory but I don't think emulation would work on a mobile platform in practice. There is just too much efficiency lost in the emulation process.
Unless of course, Intel did pull a rabbit out of their hat and released something that was twice as quick, cheaper and used less power than Apple's ARM SOC of the day. Not likely I would think.
I think it's possible in theory but I don't think emulation would work on a mobile platform in practice. There is just too much efficiency lost in the emulation process.
Unless of course, Intel did pull a rabbit out of their hat and released something that was twice as quick, cheaper and used less power than Apple's ARM SOC of the day. Not likely I would think.
I would love to know Apple's answer to this, albeit hypothetical in most likelyhood.