Arm CPU flexes its muscle

[tinman]

Arm flexes its muscle

This year will see ARM processor-based devices take over the mobile market.

 

[dabbler]

ARM seems to have a bright future
My next phone will no doubt have an ARM (and a leg ?).

 

[Mouse]

Samsung too has put the Snapdragon to work, basing its forthcoming Galaxy S2 on the processor.

A quick Google search says its a 1GHz dual-core Samsung Orion processor

In the tablet PC market Samsung's Galaxy Tab tablet PC uses the ARM Coretex A8 processor, while Apple's ARM A4 processor is based on the Coretex A8 chip.

At first I thought this is a typo, but then it appeared again. The correct word is "Cortex"

On the open source side of the fence, the next release of Ubuntu Linux will include support for ARM devices.

This sentence gives that the impression that Ubuntu doesn't already support ARM, however, another quick Google search reveals that Ubuntu already supports ARM

 

[eug]

The article incorrectly states that only android and iOs run on ARM. Windows mobile has been running on ARM based processors for ages. Wy new windows phone 7 device has a snapdragon processor which is ARM based. Also, Windows Embedded Compact runs on ARM as well as x86.

 

[Vis1/0N]

The article incorrectly states...

This article is full of disputable facts or false impressions.
Lets see -"ARM processor-based devices take over the mobile market" - depends on how you define the mobile market - Intel leader in notebooks and netbooks, while ARM owns the smartphone market, the GPS,camera, Ipod,mp3 and portable media device market.

"become a major, if not the pre-eminent chip maker in the world." Correction - ARM do not manufacture CPU's or MPU's. They design and license the core out to Samsung, Freescale(Motorola), NXP (Philips), TI, etc who use the core and design their chips around them. For Example the Apple A4 used in the IPAD is a ARM Cortex-A8 CPU designed with Samsung.

... disputable facts... & ... false impressions ...etc for most of the article.

 

[Polymathic]

Actually I think there is a huge potential market for ARM based Smartbooks, to date the only smartbook I have seen recently is Vodacom's Linkbook, I seen on the net ARM based smartbook at around $60 -$100

 

[Ancalagon]

Good God, who wrote this?

Please can we have some proofreading before publishing.

 

[drukkie]

Think the author has babelaas....

 

[Necksy]

Its high time intel gets some competition.

 

[Tns]

sounds all good, can it make coffee too?

 

[ponder]

A quick Google search says its a 1GHz dual-core Samsung Orion processor

Which is based on the 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9.

ARM does not actually make that many CPUs, they design them and license the technology to other companies to manufacture them. These companies usually use their own naming conventions for their products.

Some of the companies are:
Alcatel-Lucent, Apple Inc., Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Digital Equipment Corporation, Freescale, Intel (through DEC), LG, Marvell Technology Group, Microsoft, NEC, Nuvoton, Nvidia, NXP (previously Philips), Oki, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp, STMicroelectronics, Symbios Logic, Texas Instruments, VLSI Technology, Yamaha and ZiiLABS.

DEC StrongARM, Freescale i.MX, Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale, Nintendo, Nvidia Tegra, ST-Ericsson Nomadik, Qualcomm Snapdragon, the Texas Instruments OMAP product line, the Samsung Hummingbird and the Apple A4 are some of the names used by these companies.

 

[ponder]

Its high time intel gets some competition.

These processors are not aimed at the desktop market. They were designed with a totally different market in mind and they have literally dominated those markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

The relative simplicity of ARM processors made them suitable for low power applications. This has made them dominant in the mobile and embedded electronics market, as relatively low cost, and small microprocessors and microcontrollers.

As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor.[3] As of 2009, ARM processors account for approximately 90% of all embedded 32-bit RISC processors. ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics, including PDAs, mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Licensing_growth

ARM licensed about 1.6 billion cores in 2005. In 2005, about 1 billion ARM cores went into mobile phones.[7] As of January 2008, over 10 billion ARM cores have been built, and in 2008 iSuppli predicted that by 2011, 5 billion ARM cores will be shipping per year.[8] As of January 2011, ARM states that over 15 billion ARM processors have shipped.[9]

Intel can only dream of shipping that many CPUs

 

[KalMaverick]

Arm flexes its muscle

I see what you did there...

 

[Mouse]

Which is based on the 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9.

Which is like saying Intel and AMD chips are the same thing since they're both based on x86.

Hummingbird != Snapdragon
Samsung != Qualcomm

just like

Core i7 != Phenom II
Intel !=AMD

 

[ponder]

Which is like saying Intel and AMD chips are the same thing since they're both based on x86.

/facepalm

No. In the case of Intel & AMD the instruction set is mostly (they each have their own few special instructions) the same although the underlying architecture differs.

With ARM the core is licensed to other vendors and they fabricate their own dies from ARMs reference designs. So the core architecture & instruction set is the same between different vendors. Vendors will then tack on peripheral components to the die to handle specific I/O & controller functions etc but at the core it's the same thing.

http://book.opensourceproject.org.c...embed/opensource/belinuxsys-chp-3-sect-1.html

The ARM, which stands for Advanced RISC Machine, is a family of processors maintained and promoted by ARM Holdings Ltd. Contrary to other chip manufacturers such as IBM, Motorola, and Intel, ARM Holdings does not manufacture its own processors. Instead, ARM designs the CPU cores for its customers based on the ARM core, charges customers licensing fees on the design, and lets them manufacture the chip wherever they see fit. This offers various advantages to the parties involved, but it does create a certain confusion to the developer approaching this architecture for the first time, as there does not seem to be a central producer of ARM chips on the market. There is, though, one unifying characteristic that is important to remember: all ARM processors share the same ARM instruction set, which makes all variants fully software compatible. This doesn't mean that all ARM CPUs and boards can be programmed and set up in the same way, only that the assembly language and resulting binary codes are identical for all ARM processors. Currently, ARM CPUs are manufactured by Intel, Toshiba, Samsung, and many others. The ARM architecture is very popular in many fields of application and there are hundreds of vendors providing products and services around it.

The differences they mention above deals mostly with the peripheral components each manufacturer tags onto the core, stuff like USB controllers, Ethernet controllers, Video controllers, SATA controllers etc. The core & instruction set between different manufacturers for the Cortex A8 for example is identical.

This is one of the qualities of the ARM system as it makes life so much easier, hence the market penetration as well.