M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote on 3/09/12 12:38 PM:
> Intel are looking over their shoulder at becoming dinosaurs. Maybe I
> won't live to see it, but ARM servers could very well do in the
> x86_64.
Ed,
And so they should for most general purpose computing.
I remember seeing John Mashey of MIPS talk in 1988 where he plotted CPU
speed for each of ECL, bipolar and CMOS technologies. ECL had been
overtaken by then, bipolar was due to lose the lead within a few years.
The 486 in 1991 was a complete system-on-a-chip and changed the landscape.
It answers the question "Where did all the supercomputers go?"
A: Inside Intel. [and Power and SPARC. possibly Z series]
The Intel chips seek "maximum performance" - they pull all the tricks
that super-computer designs used, and its is that technology that is
approaching Pattersons' "Brick Wall" [heat, memory, ILP]
And as an aside, GPU's are filling the "vector processor" niche of CDC
and Cray.
ARM has pursued a very different strategy, more based around
'efficiency': MIPS/Watt
So, while I agree with you, I think the situation is nuanced.
ARM processors are obvious choices for low-power and mobile/battery devices.
Because of design simplicity (small PSU, no CPU-fan) and smaller size,
they'll become more interesting for low-end PC's.
There is a company, Calxeda, now producing high-density ARM boards for
servers.
They are hoping to leverage MIPS/Watt for highly-parallelisable loads,
like web-servers.
But I can't see anyone taking on Intel soon in the
supercomputer-on-a-chip market.
It's not just servers, esp for large DB's, but workstations and
'performance' laptops.
The problem with that evolution of the market for Intel is ARM taking
sales from multiple market segments. Seeing that Winders-8 will run on
ARM, we might see the end of WinTel for low-end & mid-tier laptops.
As a company, can Intel survive such a radical change in demand for its
major product line?
Will its work on MLC flash fill the financial void?
I've no idea how that will go.
But like you said, ARM is going to shake up even the Intel server market.
The "secret sauce" that the ARM architecture has is that it's a
*licensed* design.
Although chip design companies might not own or be able to access chip
FABs within 2 or 3 design cycles of Intel, they can produce highly
optimised and use-case targetted chips.
Which Intel can't do. They are focussed on the bleeding edge of CPU
performance and FAB design.
Manufacturers like Apple/A5 and Calxeda can produced ARM-based designs
that can outperform Intel-based systems by an order-of-magnitude on
non-MIPs metrics.
As Apple has shown, there are very big markets where raw MIPs isn't the
"figure of merit" in designs.
cheers
steve