I've been thinking that Win RT and Surface are the real future of Windows - ARM based, no more backwards compatibility. This pretty much seals it. Apple and MSFT were already moving to ARM, ChromeOS and Android are obviously already there. AMD is going there now too. Many/most machines we use in 3-5 years will be ARM powered, not x86 powered.
Intel of course is going to resist ARM and low power computing for one huge reason - profit. There are only so many machines sold each year and switching to ARM doesn't sell more processors for Intel. So, switching to lower perf and lower power processors like Atom means Intel can only sell them for $20-30 vs. $100-300 for a core i3/5/7. That is why Atom hasn't been pushed by Intel on mobile, it would destroy their whole business model. You can't drop billions into manufacturing if you don't have the revenue and profits to fund it.
AMD's future is going to look a lot more like nVidia's current plan than Intel's.
Even in an all ARM world, Intel would still be very much able to charge $100-300+ for desktop chips, and $1000+ for server chips.
With their fabs and engineering talent, they'd still be strong leaders in terms of IPC, core counts, computing density, performance per watt, etc.
The dynamics would be similar to AMD vs Intel today. Charge double for a 50% lead, 5x as much for a 100% lead, etc. When marginal performance is important, the premium is gladly paid.
While they'd have countless fabless design companies competing with them for the low end, few if any companies will be able to compete toe to toe at the cutting edge. Maybe IBM - who else?
While a shrinking percentage of the market is fitting in that high performance bucket, I would hazard a guess that the absolute numbers are still going up, if only because of server chips and gamers. Though I could not find any data on this and would be happy to be proven wrong.
That is an interesting assertion. While it is true that Intel has great fabrication chops, their biggest competitor in that space, Samsung, makes ARM chips. There is an outside possibility that AMD gets into the ARM space, gets some traction and Samsung brings their manufacturing muscle to bear and captures the 'high' end.
It is interesting to understand the 'Intel monopoly' [1] and how it came to be. I worked at Intel in the mid-80's and basically IBM 'created' a personal computer market by bringing their reputation to the market, Microsoft provided the software, and rigid compatibility was demanded by the market to maximize software re-use (software and training has always been the biggest 'cost' of switching instruction set architectures). Early on Intel was cross licensing that 8086 architecture with partners to get market share against the 68000 architecture but later they clawed back a lot of the licenses.
The requirement that is be 'windows compatible' created a giant moat around the x86 instruction set architecture. That moat wasn't officially breached until the early 2000's when AMD announced their Sledgehammer (aka Opeteron) AMD64 architecture. Here was an architecture that was not Windows compatible (windows didn't really support 64 bit chips until Windows 7) and yet AMD managed some big design wins in servers because of Linux and OEMs who could adapt quickly to the new extensions. Intel finally caved and shipped the AMD extensions in their own chips, even though they knew it was probably the end of the Itanium as a viable product.
Now AMD announces an ARM server chip, they have some expectation that it will gain some market share because they did it with Opteron. They are even calling it an Opteron perhaps as a nod to that history. They will be able to innovate in the peripheral chips because all off the 'bets' are off in terms of what has to be in the 'south bridge'. They can do more creative memory interconnects because they aren't constrained by folks expecting the Intel stuff.
And here is the interesting thing, there are easily 10x the ARM licensees than the x86 licensees. That pretty much guarantees a lot of competition and price pressure.
The strategic questions are these:
Can AMD establish a 'server' standard? Something like the PC spec but for ARM chips, a minimum set of things that will always be there and a way to find out what optional things are there. This enables shipping a generic kernel that boots on everything and customizes itself to the environment.
Can AMD survive the ingress of a number of other players earlier in the life cycle rather than later. If they are getting traction expect competitive chips in 12 months rather than 24 or 36 months.
What is Intel's "Thermonuclear war" strategy and would they be willing to pull that trigger. Unlike Apple's Android antagonists, AMD is not well positioned to survive a huge litigation punch.
We'll see of course, the game is afoot as Sherlock Holmes would say. I'm hopeful that we crack this thing open and start innovating again.
I don't think it's true that gamers will always drive an appetite for faster chips. At some point the real choke point will the content production which in turn will be choked by how much gamers will pay per game. Sure you can get intro procedural stuff, and faster chips allow lazier implementations and higher level programs... but at some point price, power and portability do win over speed.
I tend to think, that Intel will be able to leverage their process advantage also against ARM. For one thing, Atom based cell phones are at the moment rather unremarkable.[1] This means, that Intel can fully leverage the advantages of the 22 nm fin FET process. (Since the cell phones are unremarkable, one will get a good phone by just putting a better processor into the phone, as opposed to the risk of developing a viable platform for general use.) On slightly higher powered devices, Intel has a huge ecosystem and the marketing advantage of building stripped down versions of higher powered processors. For even higher performance, Desktops and Servers, Intel is already close to a monopoly and there is no one to change this. And in addition Knights Corner/ Xeon Phi seems to be a rather good competition for GPUs in HPC applications. ( They just don't have a good competition for IBMs Power processors.)
So in conclusion I think that Intel is in a good position to beat ARM in their home field (cellphones, tablets). Can easily shield the low power desktop/ netbook market from ARM and has of course the dominant position for high powered processors. So I simply do not see a bright future for ARM based (consumer) computing. ( That is not to say, that there are not niches for ARM, but Intel has the stronger position in everything the average consumer thinks of as computers.)
Comments
I've been thinking that Win RT and Surface are the real future of Windows - ARM based, no more backwards compatibility. This pretty much seals it. Apple and MSFT were already moving to ARM, ChromeOS and Android are obviously already there. AMD is going there now too. Many/most machines we use in 3-5 years will be ARM powered, not x86 powered.
Intel of course is going to resist ARM and low power computing for one huge reason - profit. There are only so many machines sold each year and switching to ARM doesn't sell more processors for Intel. So, switching to lower perf and lower power processors like Atom means Intel can only sell them for $20-30 vs. $100-300 for a core i3/5/7. That is why Atom hasn't been pushed by Intel on mobile, it would destroy their whole business model. You can't drop billions into manufacturing if you don't have the revenue and profits to fund it.
AMD's future is going to look a lot more like nVidia's current plan than Intel's.
Even in an all ARM world, Intel would still be very much able to charge $100-300+ for desktop chips, and $1000+ for server chips.
With their fabs and engineering talent, they'd still be strong leaders in terms of IPC, core counts, computing density, performance per watt, etc.
The dynamics would be similar to AMD vs Intel today. Charge double for a 50% lead, 5x as much for a 100% lead, etc. When marginal performance is important, the premium is gladly paid.
While they'd have countless fabless design companies competing with them for the low end, few if any companies will be able to compete toe to toe at the cutting edge. Maybe IBM - who else?
While a shrinking percentage of the market is fitting in that high performance bucket, I would hazard a guess that the absolute numbers are still going up, if only because of server chips and gamers. Though I could not find any data on this and would be happy to be proven wrong.
That is an interesting assertion. While it is true that Intel has great fabrication chops, their biggest competitor in that space, Samsung, makes ARM chips. There is an outside possibility that AMD gets into the ARM space, gets some traction and Samsung brings their manufacturing muscle to bear and captures the 'high' end.
It is interesting to understand the 'Intel monopoly' [1] and how it came to be. I worked at Intel in the mid-80's and basically IBM 'created' a personal computer market by bringing their reputation to the market, Microsoft provided the software, and rigid compatibility was demanded by the market to maximize software re-use (software and training has always been the biggest 'cost' of switching instruction set architectures). Early on Intel was cross licensing that 8086 architecture with partners to get market share against the 68000 architecture but later they clawed back a lot of the licenses.
The requirement that is be 'windows compatible' created a giant moat around the x86 instruction set architecture. That moat wasn't officially breached until the early 2000's when AMD announced their Sledgehammer (aka Opeteron) AMD64 architecture. Here was an architecture that was not Windows compatible (windows didn't really support 64 bit chips until Windows 7) and yet AMD managed some big design wins in servers because of Linux and OEMs who could adapt quickly to the new extensions. Intel finally caved and shipped the AMD extensions in their own chips, even though they knew it was probably the end of the Itanium as a viable product.
Now AMD announces an ARM server chip, they have some expectation that it will gain some market share because they did it with Opteron. They are even calling it an Opteron perhaps as a nod to that history. They will be able to innovate in the peripheral chips because all off the 'bets' are off in terms of what has to be in the 'south bridge'. They can do more creative memory interconnects because they aren't constrained by folks expecting the Intel stuff.
And here is the interesting thing, there are easily 10x the ARM licensees than the x86 licensees. That pretty much guarantees a lot of competition and price pressure.
The strategic questions are these:
Can AMD establish a 'server' standard? Something like the PC spec but for ARM chips, a minimum set of things that will always be there and a way to find out what optional things are there. This enables shipping a generic kernel that boots on everything and customizes itself to the environment.
Can AMD survive the ingress of a number of other players earlier in the life cycle rather than later. If they are getting traction expect competitive chips in 12 months rather than 24 or 36 months.
What is Intel's "Thermonuclear war" strategy and would they be willing to pull that trigger. Unlike Apple's Android antagonists, AMD is not well positioned to survive a huge litigation punch.
We'll see of course, the game is afoot as Sherlock Holmes would say. I'm hopeful that we crack this thing open and start innovating again.
I don't think it's true that gamers will always drive an appetite for faster chips. At some point the real choke point will the content production which in turn will be choked by how much gamers will pay per game. Sure you can get intro procedural stuff, and faster chips allow lazier implementations and higher level programs... but at some point price, power and portability do win over speed.
I tend to think, that Intel will be able to leverage their process advantage also against ARM. For one thing, Atom based cell phones are at the moment rather unremarkable.[1] This means, that Intel can fully leverage the advantages of the 22 nm fin FET process. (Since the cell phones are unremarkable, one will get a good phone by just putting a better processor into the phone, as opposed to the risk of developing a viable platform for general use.) On slightly higher powered devices, Intel has a huge ecosystem and the marketing advantage of building stripped down versions of higher powered processors. For even higher performance, Desktops and Servers, Intel is already close to a monopoly and there is no one to change this. And in addition Knights Corner/ Xeon Phi seems to be a rather good competition for GPUs in HPC applications. ( They just don't have a good competition for IBMs Power processors.)
So in conclusion I think that Intel is in a good position to beat ARM in their home field (cellphones, tablets). Can easily shield the low power desktop/ netbook market from ARM and has of course the dominant position for high powered processors. So I simply do not see a bright future for ARM based (consumer) computing. ( That is not to say, that there are not niches for ARM, but Intel has the stronger position in everything the average consumer thinks of as computers.)
[1]http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the...
> I've been thinking that Win RT and Surface are the real future of Windows - ARM based, no more backwards compatibility.
If that's true, then I don't see any reason to be using ARM Windows. iOS and Android are better in every aspect that counts, except for MS office.