Intel Atom Z600

Apple is married to ARM for the iPhone OS based devices ... it's a binary platform, a switch would be painful. The only potential OS X Atom platform would be a Netbook, and I don't think Apple would make a 360 on that. Besides, as long as they don't push gaming what the hell do they care if a processor is faster and/or has a process advantage?

Apple doesn't need Atom ... but their competitors need some way to make Atom more relevant. I personally think the best way to do that is by pushing gaming (real gaming, PSP style gaming or at the very least DS style gaming ... not mobile phone style gaming).

 

I also don't see Apple going to throw away the $350 million in investments they did this last year on companies working on ARM designs (P.A. Semi and Intrinsity), even though it is pocket change for them.

Intel will become an option when the power management is better than what ARM designs can squeeze out at comparable performance.

 

ARM designs still seem to be getting quite a bit more CPU performance per cost, so Apple should continue to push the hardware envelope in performance and integration with ARM for the foreseeable future.

Intel's aggressive push in graphics and also Medfield's process advantage will give them strong selling points, though, to some other market players.

 

Apple is free to choose any ISA as long as it is ARM.

 

You mean the ISA they helped architect from the company they helped found!

 

What difference would it make?

 

Reading some articles on UMPCportal, and re-reading the anandtech article again, it appears that there maybe a yet unannounced variant of moorestown to come called moorestown-W. This *WILL* add the PCI support necessary to run full windows7 (i.e. not windows mobile). We heard some mutterings about moorestown-W quite a while back.

We also have heard about "oaktrail" which is apparently pinetrail replacement for netbooks.

It could well be that moorestown-W and oaktrail are one and the same. With a 400Mhz SGX535, it would give it twice the graphics performance of the existing Z series chipset being used in mids and some netbooks (and probably an increase on pinetrails graphics) AND give it full video decode capability without needing the seperate broadcom chip. And with the massive decrease in power useage, would give brilliant battery life.

Of course we've been here before with pinetrail, but it is a possibility.

 

Yeah, the same ISA on which 2e5 apps for their platform run.

 

Well they'd look silly ... which is not a big deal, but regardless I don't think they will do a 360 on the netbook issue.

 

In a family of languages famed for combining the power of an assembly with the portability of an assembly.

 

Apple's involvement may have spun off ARM Ltd, but the ISA itself far predates this. Apple certainly did not help architect it.

 

liolio, I admire you optimism about intel's next year foray into ARM territories ; )

Intel surely have the litho advantage, but that cannot be kept indefinitely. Intel may not be at the end of the x86 rope just yet, but they're steadily reaching it. Architectures that were designed for human friendliness (versus computational efficiency, etc) are a bit past their prime time, and Intel's effort to keep said architectures en vogue is costing them more and more (it already cost them the smartphone market).

So I'm not so sure which hypothetic scenario could occur sooner - Apple going Intel on the idevices, or Intel dropping x86 from the handheld segment.

 

But I thought 360 meant no change in direction, so what you are saying is, they ARE going to do it? Or is this one of those 'I turned 360 and walked away' jokes? Sorry for being thick.

 

Ugh, thanks for ruining my day ... nothing like feeling like a moron early in the morning :/ Yeah, I meant 180.

 

One possible benefit of the x86 ISA over the ARM (ignoring the Thumb ISA for the moment) is that it is probably a bit denser. The savings in bus bandwidth and cache efficiency might cancel out the increased decode complexity <shrug>

 

That overhead is not just transistor-related, it's present on various levels - from architecture licensing (yes, you can finally design your own atoms now, but who'd want to?), to compiler backends (the reason some x86 compilers generate good code is the enormous amount of human effort poured into catering to that architecture), to a meaningless organization of the opcode space (i.e. without much, if any, relation to opcodes' use statistics).

Well, as we already discussed, lithography is Intel's main weapon in this battle.

Intel spent those 2.5W for x86 binary compatibility - for the benefit or running code that has been once compiled for *that* SIMD and *that* FPU. And the result from that was as expected - Intel secured themselves the market for little windows machines (AKA netbooks) - nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately, that gave them nothing from handheld markets.

Btw, your logic goes either way. Do you believe that if ARM did not focus so much on power draw they could not have come up with a 2.5W core of equal-or-better performance to atom? Hint: check out the new A9's ; )

IMHO, until Intel start producing equally watt-efficient designs at the same litho nodes as ARM lincensees, ARM are safe and sound. And I can't see Intel achieving that while sticking to the venerable x86. I'm not saying that from the position of a CPU designer (I'm not), but from the position of somebody who's been closely following the history of the architecture (my first asm code was for 8080).

That would have likely been the case *if* x86 was a modern CISC ISA designed from scratch with op use satistics in mind. We know that was not the case - the ISA was made following the model of historical tarball. When your opspace has a munch of 1-byte BCD arithmetic instructions (as AAA), while a CMOV for somethig as rudimentarty as r32->r32 (for a measly 8-reg file!) is 3 bytes, the density benefits form the ISA become questionable. And this is before we consider things like the architecture's encoding expressivness, e.g. 2-operand vs 3-operand encoding, etc. At the end of the day, IA-32 yields just a tad higher density than your vanilla RISC of choice, and gets easily beaten by narrow RISCs like Thumb, compiler's stupidity nonwithstanding.