My prediction: once this architecture is in the release channels, Intel is out of them.
In a matter of years, Intel will be the dinosaur of microprocessors. Unless Intel also (re-)embraces ARM. Its simply a matter of price and configurability. ARM is simply unbeatable when it comes to price. Let alone energy efficiency. Its time to short Intel shares..
ARM is unbeatable in terms of price right now, but that's because they have much smaller parts that are much cheaper to produce. What makes you think that will still be true if they want to approach the performance of mainstream Intel parts?
Historically, low-end parts have managed to kill high-end parts by selling in larger volumes and amortizing their fixed costs over a larger base. ARM sells in huge volumes, but how is selling $1 embedded chips going to help them amortize the cost of their high end stuff? Decades ago, doing that sort of thing would helped Intel fill up their idle fab time while competitors like DEC struggled to pay for their fabs, but ARM has never owned its own fabs, and selling completely different low-end parts doesn't really help amortize the cost of masks, post-silicon debug, etc. of their high end parts.
I'm also skeptical that ARM will retain its power:performance advantage if it tries to scale up performance to match low-end mainstream Intel parts (e.g., core i3). The main reason ARM has better performance:power is that there are diminishing returns to performance. Another is that Atom is a new product line, and Intel doesn't have much experience trying to optimize for low-end parts. That won't be true going forward. Yet another transient advantage ARM has is that Intel uses a high performance process, but they've said that they're going to have both a high performance and a power optimized process in the future. If anything, Intel's process wizardry should give them an advantage there, once they decide to push it. What other inherent advantages does ARM have over x86? It's a PITA to decode x86 instructions, but the ARM instruction set isn't very nice, either (e.g., look at how they ran out of opcode space, and overlayed some of their "new" NEON instructions on top of existing instructions by using unused condition codes for existing opcodes).
I wouldn't bet against ARM but, if they win, it will be because of the usual reasons: better marketing, better business practices, and better engineering, not because there's some inherent advantage that lets them be cheaper than Intel. And, by the way, the configurability advantage you mention actually hurts them in terms of cost, by increasing the fixed cost per part.
The flipside in terms of selling in large volumes to amortize fixed costs is simple: the iPad. Monumental volume tied to one single SKU of CPU.
If they needed to, Apple could afford to front someone the entire cost of building a leading-edge fab (or, I suppose, build one for themselves, except that I doubt they would want to operate a fab).
So if Apple wanted to make some super advanced ARM chip available at a consumer price, they could probably change the colume aspect of the equation radically.
However, all modern x86 cores (P2 and up, PPro, K7 and up, etc) are micro-op RISC-ey cores, and the only x86-ness in the entire CPU is in the instruction decoder and scheduler block.
Atom is interesting only in the sense that Intel stripped everything they could off the P6 core and then redesigned stuff purely to use less power. In the end, they produced a horridly slow waste of time, money, and power.
About 6 months later AMD came out with a cut down K8 (while the desktop chips were second generation K10s) that has the same power usage, runs several times faster, supports dual channel DDR3-1333 (vs the Atom's single channel DDR2-533), and comes with a GPU that can decode H264 off Blurays (Atom's paired GPU, a low end GMA, can't decode anything) and can do DX11 (vs DX9) and can do Aero (vs nada).
Intel is coming out with newer Atoms that suck less, but they're nothing compared to what the new Bulldozer-based mobile chips are rumored to be.
Unfortunately, it looks like it all was a fluke. I haven't heard of any notebooks with Atom Z6xx series, presumably because Windows won't run on them because they don't have a PCI bus. With the architecture consisting of a single model (Vaio P-Series) the possibility of running Linux is vanishing: there was a special build[sic!] of Ubuntu that should run on it, but that's it.
This is mostly mypoia, based on the technology you see every day and think is important. CPU cores aren't remotely all of Intel's business, just as ARM Ltd. gets no revenue from semiconductor manufacturing. Intel has hands-down the best process technology out there, and gets insane margins on their parts (average of $2/mm^2 or something like that). They aren't going anywhere. The PC market is stable, but not shrinking. The server world is booming.
Intel clearly wants to be a player in the consumer SoC market. And they've had... let's say rather mixed success there. But they'll keep trying. Similar challenges were seen in the early 90's vs. the RISC world and '99-02 years vs. AMD. They reworked, adapted, and clobbered the competition.
As someone else posted, their death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's almost a running gag in the industry.
Lynnfield is the 45nm Core 2 Duo, kind of old to make a comparison. Intel doesn't sell anything as big as 300mm^2 in their current line except for $2k monsters like Westmere EX.
I honestly don't know where I got that number from. I was thinking something like $200 average for the 2-core Sandy Bridge die, which is 90mm^2 I think. I'm obviously not privy to sales volume numbers nor to what their wholesale prices look like. So feel free to apply a factor of N to that intuition.
And obviously I meant revenue, not margin. Apologies.
But then you have things like the Core i7-980, which is also about 300 mm^2 but retails for up to $1200. I don't know what the average is, but $1-$2/mm^2 is in the right ballpark at least.
Proof that it is myopia: Those cell phones everyone loves, that are bringing the future? They depend on the cloud, the other darling herald of the future. What drives the cloud?
Yes, in exactly the same way that Intel is "making" SoC chips for consumer electronic devices. Having a part that boots and runs isn't the same thing as having a competitive product in the market.
Didn't we hear this with mips, sparc, ppc, transmeta and every other cpu architecture of the moment? Yes, ARM has a place, but it's not going to displace x86. What will slowly displace x86 is the transition to post-pc devices. But these will run whatever has the current sweet spot between cost and power.
The most important reason x86's are relevant today (and why we are stuck with them) is because they run Windows. ARM doesn't need that and, even if it did, Microsoft needs ARM enough they are promising Windows 8 and Office for it.
>The most important reason x86's are relevant today (and why we are stuck with them) is because
they had better price/performance at the start and just plain better performance a bit later. Alpha ran Windows and was a nice CPU. Unfortunately it did _cost_ .
Can ARM run Java for enterprise users? Nehalems with DDR3 have hard time doing it.
There is of course the market for energy efficiency coming with ARM's straight in-order execution, and if we multiply these simple cores, and with programmers and compilers doing better work on parallelization we even can get decent performance, yet i doubt it will beat out-of-order superscalars.
On the other side it isn't [directly] about price, performance or efficiency because it isn't direct competition. x86 run desktops which was explosively growing computing segment of yesterday. ARM runs mobile - explosively growing computing segment of today. The arguments of big iron CPUs vs. x86 back then were similar to the arguments of desktop/server x86 vs. ARM today. These arguments are technically valid, yet they just don't matter today like they didn't matter yesterday as they talk about different computing devices and task they do. The mobile device primary task isn't Excel. It is maps, photos and Facebook/Twitter. This mobile computing looks primitive the way Visicalc looked primitive to the computing of big iron. Yet it is the largest piece of tomorrow's computing and ARM is just more suitable for it than x86 the way x86 was more suitable than Alpha/Sparc/Cray/etc... for desktop.
ARM can run Java, in fact they used to have a (sadly undocumented) op extension called Jazelle which ran common Java techniques JVMs use (such as stuff involved in exceptions or stack management or bytecode decoding/execution).
When using a JVM that is based on ARM's JVM (which does NOT include Android's), a lot of bytecodes directly translated into existing ops and Java ran much faster.
Due to the lack of documentation, open source JVMs (or even non-Java VMs) could not take advantage of it.
However, Jazelle has been replaced with ThumbEE, which does the same thing, but generically so any language that could benefit from it can use it, and it is also documented and FOSS friendly.
Java (->Jazelle RCT, Java over ThumbEE), Perl, and Python have VMs that take advantage of ThumbEE now.
I don't think ARM can outdo Intel given Intel's tech and advanced fab capability, but I think business model wise Intel is in serious trouble with this announcement.
Intel has done its best to lock companies out of adding value to Intel's chips. Intel forced Nvidia into a more limited role and even limits the usage of Atoms. Intel also is failing at keeping the wattage of its chips down.
Companies are getting very good at adding their own custom designs to the ARM core (something Intel is kinda / sorta conflicted about). With a 64-bit core, some of Intel's safe space might got away as companies go with a solution that they can decide on fab partners and on chip design elements. Don't want this type of port, then don't put it on. Need more GPU, add it.
The game really isn't technology, it's business model.
