Tag: arm

Nvidia wrestles with ARM connections

Posted on September 23, 2014 by - News

arm-wrestlingARM Holdings Chief Executive Officer Simon Segars defended his smartphone graphics technology which Nvidia claims it invented.

Nvidia is currently taking Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm to court for using the technology in its phones and accusing both companies of infringing its property patents on graphics chip technology.

Nvidia said Samsung devices made with graphics technology from ARM, Qualcomm and Imagination Technologies illegally use its intellectual property, or IP.

Segars said that the company stood behind its IP and will work with its partners when something like this happened.

Nvidia is not suing ARM or Imagination yet but it did say it would ask the US International Trade Commission to prevent shipments of Samsung devices containing ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures, as well as Qualcomm’s graphics technology.

Nvidia has to play this carefully. Nvidia depends on ARM’s technology to make its Tegra chips for tablets and cars.

Segars said that it did “create a bit of a curious situation… But we do a lot of business with a lot of people.”

Data centres face revolution

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News

server-racksFour disruptive forces are set to change the face of the data centre by 2016.

That’s according to market research firm Gartner, which estimates that although the data centre market seems poised for growth, existing assumptions will be challenged.

Vendors like the 50 percent or more gross margins in storage and networking hardware and software but  one vendor might decide to slash its margins, so forcing a price war in the data centre industry.

Traditional data centre firms will also face disruption from cloud computing which will reduce the demand of for total amount of compute to total workload.  And Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Baidu are offering platform as a service, with the existing companies failing to offer something equally compelling.

Thirdly, economic warfare between the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will largely increase competition in the data centre infrastructure market.

Last, Gartner thinks that buyers will come to regard multinational providers as untrustworthy. Also there is an increase in small white box assemblers.

Gartner believes that while Intel, AMD, Western Digital and Seagate will sit pretty for the next fee years, the first two will see erosion from ARM and other architectures.  Storage will shift to flash.

Next year’s server wars may be cancelled

Posted on September 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

soldiers-2The major battle in the server space planned for next year may be only a minor skirmish with the usual suspects winning.

Intel needs to see off the expected competition from ARM and is going to chuck a lot more cash in the area to keep its position as market leader. What we are seeing from the Intel Developer Forum is that its answer will be a a new Xeon D family of chips.

Xeon D chips will be the first server chips based on the Broadwell architecture, and will go into dense servers starting next year. But these are not your normal server chips, they are effectively systems on a chip which means that they will be deliberately targeting anything “low level and power efficient” that ARM is expected to come up with.

It means that Intel does not think that its Xeon E3 and Atom chips code-named Avoton will be up to the task of taking on ARM. The Xeon D chip will be faster, but more power hungry than Avoton, which is based on an architecture called Silvermont used in mobile chips.

But Intel thinks that the Xeon D will provide more performance-per-watt, which punters will find attractive.

Intel does have some other advantages in any coming server war. Intel’s chips already go into more than 90 percent of servers, and server makers like Dell have said that the chances for success of ARM servers are diminishing due to product delays. Intel also has a head-start on software development over ARM.

ARM’s server chips are based on the ARMv8 architecture, and have integrated networking, storage and I/O controllers. Its key weapon against Intel is still lower power consumption, something Chipzilla is fast catching up on.

A variety of companies had indicated interest in making server processors based on blueprints from ARM,  but so far ARM 64-bit server processors have not been made available commercially.

Chip makers like Applied Micro and Advanced Micro Devices have delayed shipment of ARM-based chips.

Dell is offering prototype ARM servers for benchmarking and application development. Hewlett-Packard announced plans to use ARM processors in its Moonshot “dense” server, which uses x86 chips, but hasn’t announced a definitive release date for the ARM edition.

The other player in any coming war AMD is also expanding its low-power server processor lines,  which could also will hurt adoption of ARM servers.

The other big hurdle for ARM is the fact that most firms already have software and hardware based around x86. To adopt ARM-based servers, companies will not only have to invest in new servers and components, but also port applications to the architecture.

This could make a switch to ARM very expensive in terms of capital and final cost of ownership. Then there are some licensing issues surrounding the adoption of ARM servers, as companies will have to pay more for software per core used in them, Norrod said.

ARM is also finding its allies thin on the ground. ARM server pioneer Calxeda folded operations and earlier this year Nvidia scrapped server chip plans. Samsung has also abandoned ARM server chip development.

Nvidia sues Qualcomm and Samsung

Posted on September 5, 2014 by - News

nvidia-gangnam-style-330pxNvidia has sued Qualcomm and Samsung for infringing its patents on graphics processing technology.

Nvidia said Qualcomm and Samsung had used Nvidia’s patented technologies without a licence in Samsung’s mobile devices and the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note Edge.

Nvidia said Samsung devices made with graphics technology from Qualcomm, Britain’s ARM and Imagination Technologies infringed on its patents.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that the pair were using Nvidia technology free and were shipping an enormous number of devices.

Nvidia did not say it is suing Imagination – part owned by Apple –  or ARM  – started by Apple really, but it did say it is asking the US International Trade Commission to prevent shipments of Samsung devices containing ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures, as well as Qualcomm’s graphics technology.

However, since Imagination technology is also found under the bonnet of Apple’s iPhones, it could be that Nvidia plans to sue Apple.

It is clear that Apple was not a legal cage that Nvidia wanted to rattle yet. Huang said he was focused on Samsung and Qualcomm, and continues to have “productive conversations” with many other companies out there.

In other words the cunning plan is to take out Qualcomm and Samsung and the others will pay a lot of money to make Nvidia lawyers go away.

Samsung has said it will fight Nvidia, while the others have not made a comment.

Intel re-ARMing

Posted on September 4, 2014 by - News

rearm 2It seems that Intel has decided that in the long term its rival ARM has the right idea. We revealed that in the Eye a couple of weeks back.

Intel’s Brian Krzanich told the Citi Global Technology Conference that while ten years down the road the company will continue to get a bulk of its revenue from PCs and servers, a significant part of its revenue will come from mobile, Internet-of-Things and other emerging market segments.

To do that it will need to come up with some ultra-low-cost devices that will still need computing and communications capabilities.

That will mean working out a way to “take our silicon leadership and our architecture down into we talk about parts that may only cost $0.50 and have comms, CPU, everything down there and can run on small batteries.”

Although this is the normal “internet of things” style talk, it is the first time that Chipzilla has given the world its coming vision. In this case it is a super small chip which can run an entire computer’s services for less than 50 cents.

Intel has stayed out of the cheap chips market because the margins are incredibly small, but it is starting to look like it has realised that the Internet of Things will mean low-margin, micro-controllers and other low-cost chips. This will make it difficult for Intel to maintain its traditional 60 percent mark up.

Krzanich said that in a decade, Intel is definitely going to be a broader company across the much broader spectrum of computing. He is also not predicting the death of the PC or the server any time soon.

 

ARM ups 64-bit hype

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

arm_chipChip licensing company ARM said it has signed its 50th licensing agreement for the v8-A processing technology and said 27 firms have signed up for the show.

Although it did not specify the names of the 27 companies they include the usual suspects like Samsung and we know that Intel is now a big ARM customer too.

Noel Hurley, who runs the processor division of ARM claimed that tablets and smartphones are replacing PCs for many taks and the new 64-bit tech in the v8-A series is backwards compatible with 32-bit technology too.

That means the new tech will completely support the million plus 32-bit apps that already exist for the technology.

The number 50 is important for ARM in another way too, claimed Hurley, because the company said there are now 50 billion processors using its tech.

It won’t be long until there are 100 billion processors licensing its technology, according to ARM.

ARM and Intel are as bad as each other

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

tweddle dee and tweedle dumFor years, ARM and Intel have been snarling at each other that each other’s chips are more power efficient. ARM has claimed that the reason it was more power efficient thanks to fundamental differences in the ISA (instruction set architecture).

As we reported earlier this week, however, Intel is one of ARM’s biggest fans.

ARM uses RISC and Intel’s x86 uses CISC.  ARM says that makes a big difference. However a team from the University of Wisconsin has been looking at the two architectures RISC and CISC and thinks that ARM might be wrong and that ISA is less important.

Their new research paper, which was reviewed in detail by Extreme Tech examines these claims using a variety of ARM cores as well as a Loongson MIPS microprocessor, Intel’s Atom and Sandy Bridge microarchitectures, and AMD’s Bobcat.

The report suggests that ISA can matter in certain, extremely specific cases where die sizes must be 1-2mm2 or power consumption is specced to sub-milliwatt levels.  At those rare times, RISC microcontrollers can still have an advantage over their CISC brethren.

But the report suggests that those who claim RISC still has enormous benefits over x86 at higher performance levels are ignoring the fact that RISC and CISC describe design strategies and which fixed technological limitations of years ago and are not important today.

The report said that in the good old days RISC chips could run at significantly higher clocks than their CISC counterparts thanks to reduced complexity, but that’s no longer true.

Now it is process technology controls clock speed, not one’s choice of RISC vs. CISC. Today a Core i7 and Cortex-A57 have far more in common due to decades of experience have led designers to adopt strategies and structures that work, even if the underlying ISA is different.

They concluded that the RISC vs. CISC argument should be cast into the dustbin of history even if it still has some relevance in the microcontroller realm. Basically an x86 chip can be more power efficient than an ARM processor, or vice versa but it has nothing to do with the instruction set.

Intel falls into ARM’s arms

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - Moving People, News

Intel-logoIn one of those strange twists of fate that dog the semiconductor industry, it appears X86 giant Intel is now one of the biggest licensees of ARM tech on the planet, now it is a foundry business. ARM, of course, offers an advantage over X86 servers in terms of both functionality and heat. Intel is considerably boosting ARM revenues, according to well informed sources close to the facts.

Actually, INTC has always had a lot of foundry business. It was forced by American authorities to guarantee that production of DEC’s Alpha microprocessor continued until the end of the decade, as we reported earlier at the INQster and the Rogister years back. Intel also had and probably still has a StrongARM licence – an opportunity Chipzilla signally missed back in the days.

It also still makes HP chips. Perhaps that is because of the peculiar nature of the partnership between Intel and HP.

Intel reacted very badly to the news.

Anna Cheng, the UK spinner for Intel, sent a snottogram to the Eyes saying that the world+dog knew it made ARM chips. She said that she objected to the fact that the Eyes blank carbon copied other people at Intel – including Chuck Mulloy – asking for clarification. She scolded the Eyes for not going through proper channels.

We responded by saying that we had in our possession many Intel “confidential” emails describing me – in no uncertain terms – as an old buffer.

ARM refused to comment, but it is quids in because of Intel’s decision to fab up the unique British designs…

Intel replays marketing card

Posted on August 20, 2014 by - Moving People, News

Intel-logoBecause Intel has so few products to show at its expensive upcoming Intel Developer Forum in September in San Francisco, it will play its old three card trick and show off new logos and marketing plans instead. Ailing Intel, it seems, has run out of “innovation”.

That’s according to reliable sources within the corporation that told the Eyes that newly formed CEOs need marketing ideas because product ideas are few on the ground.

The source – based in Asia – told the Eyes that it had attempted to convince ex CEO Paul Otellini that the marketing needed changing to a retro kind of thing, but had come up against determined opposition from the then CEO.

But facing ruin because it was slow off the mark with chips for tablets and for smartphones, instead Intel will attempt to bamboozle the world with marketing. The newly born CEO – and the INTC board are  up for it.

The re-branding will re-position Intel as a 21st century company that doesn’t really invent technology any more. Just manufacture it.

Although we don’t have the new logos and that yet, expect a blast of marketing publicity that talks a lot about not very much at all, faced with the opposition. Oh, that’s not AMD, by the way.

Applied Micro Circuits frightens Intel

Posted on July 30, 2014 by - News

godApplied Micro Circuits has begun shipping a new kind of low-power server chip that might cause its rival Intel a headache in the data centre business.

Applied Micro Circuits announced it is shipping its new X-Gene “microserver” 64-bit chips, made with ARM designs. X-Gene is being touted as a Server-on-a-Chip which combines 10/40g mixed signal I/O with top-of-class, ARMv8 64-bit cores running at up to 2.4 Ghz, with an enterprise-class memory subsystem.

The company said that it has already made a million dollars from the chips and expects “meaningful” revenue from the chips in the quarters ending in December and March as shipments build.

Chief Executive Officer Paramesh Gopi told analysts on a conference call that there was a backlog for X-Gene, both in the September quarter and December quarter, as well as the March quarter.

Microservers have yet to be meaningfully adopted, but the belief is that data centres can be made more cost effective and energy efficient by using them.

Chipzilla will lose shedloads if the server market moves towards such technology and cannot lose even a few percentage points of market share.

Intel spokesman Bill Calder said that while Intel was not taking the competition lightly, he thought that the much-hyped threat of ARM servers getting any significant market segment share any time soon has been vastly overplayed.

Microservers will probably end up in data centres run by major Internet companies and for use in high-performance computing.

Intel executives in the past have said microserver chips being developed by Applied Micro Circuits, Advanced Micro Devices and other small rivals were unproven and not a serious threat to its server chip business.

In the past couple of years, Intel has launched its own low-power chips, designed with its own architecture, in anticipation of a potential move toward microservers.

Future HP servers will learn from smartphones

Posted on June 24, 2014 by - News

HPHere in sunny Barcelona @ the ETSS conference, Mark Potter – HP’s CTO for its Enterprise Group was expounding his company’s vision for how the future will look for file servers.

Basically, the IT industry appears to have woken up to a technology which smartphones have been using for ages – the SoC (System on a Chip). Not revolutionary concept for the fact that Potter suggested that HP would use ARM cores in addition to Intel based processors. Given that Intel and AMD were major sponsors of this show, we’re sure he couldn’t elaborate more. Anyway, Potter was keen to pump up what HP is calling The Machine as a new era in server technology.

HP seems a bit ambivalent in its approach to The Machine because Dr Tom Bradicich, vp for Moonshot Engineering with HP servers suggested that Moonshot was the first step towards The Machine model. Except it isn’t The Machine.

Curiously, HP appears to have announced the Moonshot last month at an event hosted by our old friends – Citrix.

Well, the Moonshot is now a reality and shipping but for some reason Bradicich revealed that initially this product would only be made available through his company’s “US partners”.

Which is a bit strange because most resellers that ChannelEye was speaking to here claimed to have a US presence. So they should all be able to source the product.

Besides SoCs, the other technology which Potter was bigging up was photonics.

We’ve all heard of it before but HP seems to be suggesting that you’ll see products actually utilising photonicsavailable from HP before Q1 2015.

Which will be great because photonics are a key part to HP’s dream of The Machine.

Thanks to photonics, a server won’t have to write information to anywhere – It will simply reside in shared memory.

Sounds impressive but the major advantage to photonics is the energy saving, Potter quoted somebody else as saying that “copper is an energy sucking devil”.

But he’s got a point. Potter revealed that if cloud computing was a country it would be the fifth largest electricity consumer above the UK and just below Japan.

If The Machine really can return such massive energy savings through the use of photonics which HP is suggesting, then the ROI for customers of its channel partners will be significant.

As Potter hinted, a great way of getting enteprises – which have recently been low spenders, to update their data centres.

ARM servers are on the rise

Posted on December 16, 2013 by - News

arm_chipThere’s more gloomy news for chip giant Intel.

A report by Digitimes Research estimates that a total of 20,000 units of ARM-based servers ship this year. And while that’s hardly made a dent in Chipzilla’s armour yet, only representing 0.2 percent of that market, that’s set to change.

By 2017 the volume will grow to 1.06 million with a CAGR of 170 percent.

ARM itself thinks that by 2016, chips based on its technology with account for five to 10 percent while that percentage will grow to 10 or 15 points by 2017.

A lot depends, according to Digitimes Research, on support from Microsoft on the Windows Server front.

Google to design its own chips

Posted on December 13, 2013 by - News

google-ICThe hegemony of Intel looks to be under further threat after a report that search giant Google is to design its own chips.

That’s according to the Wall Street Journal, which speculates that because it buys more servers than anyone else in the world, it could dictate prices to component makers.

The newspaper says that the chips it may design will be based on ARM technology.

Google has, apparently been recruiting a number of chip designers and it’s certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that it may well have a stab at chip design.

If it does, the question will be which fab company it chooses to create the microprocessors.  Although Intel is attempting to become yet another foundry, many vendors are reluctant to put their fate into the chip giant’s hands.

Intel seems to have lost its way

Posted on November 4, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Sean MaloneyThe news that Intel’s Galileo is on its way just underlines to me how the chip giant has lost its way.

The “open source” computer costs $70, and uses its Quark microprocessor. Intel clearly thinks it will compete against the highly successful Raspberry Pi but clearly it hasn’t got a chance to play catch up.

The launch mirrors Intel’s late attempt to climb on the tablet bandwagon by cutting the price of its Atom microprocessor to compete with ARM and Nvidia based chips.  But it hasn’t got an earthly here, either.  Manufacturers are very chary about using anything with the Intel name associated with the tin. Again, that’s underlined by vendors’ reluctance to be associated with Intel.

Cheap is everything in the tablet market now and even though Intel’s chips might be, er, cheap as chips, the economics of this don’t really make a lot of sense to anyone. Sure, Intel has heaps of capacity but that in itself is part of the problem. State of the art fabs are really expensive these days and the volume game just doesn’t fit Intel’s business model.

In reality, the chip giant really has very little new to say. The new broom in the shape of CEO  Brian Kzanic appears to be attempting the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean Stables not just of the dung but also of a heap of very good people who have let their legs do the walking.

Datacentre business no doubt is still healthy for Chipzilla, but on the other hand independent market research shows that the notebook market is on the wane.  Sure, enterprises will refresh their notebooks but with the arrival of BYOD, there’s a level of ambiguity which must leave Intel more than a little bemused.

In truth, Intel has had zilch to say in the last three years as smartphones and tablets transformed the “traditional” Wintel model.

As part of the antitrust agreement following the demise of DEC, Intel found itself with StrongARM devices. At the time, we asked top executives from the firm why it didn’t just cut the Gordian Knot and produce a highly portable ARM based device?  The answer, of course, was that Intel was on the Centrino notebook gravy train. Sean Maloney, now a non-executive director at Chinese foundry SMIC, realised that the Atom chip might well cannibalise the notebook market but nobody at Intel appeared to have looked further than the next three quarters and see its dominance becoming more and more eroded.

Of course, Intel has oodles of cash in the bank but oodles don’t last forever.  Re-engineering its business model is, for Intel, a far from trivial task. As an Intel watcher for the last 30 years, I will be most interested to see what happens in the next 12 to 18 months.

Cheap tablets start to make their mark

Posted on November 1, 2013 by - News

cheap-tabletsEver since Google launched its $199 Nexus 7 last year, tablet makers have been looking for ways to come up with even cheaper devices to undercut Google and other brands who targeted the sub-$200 space. Smaller form factors were popularised by Apple’s iPad mini, too. As a result the tablet underwent a massive transformation over the last 12 to 15 months in what can only be described as a race to the bottom. However, we’re not at the bottom just yet.

Big brands have started rolling out cheaper devices, first hitting the $149 mark and now going towards $99. The white-box gang is already there and cheap tablets are slowly making their presence felt. According to Bloomberg, sales of sub-$149 tablets will account for almost 35 percent of the US market next year, up from 25 percent in 2011.

However, cheap tablets have evolved. The average $199 or $149 tablet two years ago was absolutely horrible, but this is no longer the case. Here are a few examples proving that cheap tablets have come a long way.

The cheap white-box tablet, anno 2011, usually shipped with 512MB of memory, single-core A8 processor and low-res 1024×600 or 1024×768 TN panel. Some even featured outdated resistive touchscreens. However, 1GB of RAM is now the bare minimum, while many cheap tablets already pack 2GB. Practically all cheap tablets now sport IPS panels and it’s even possible to get a WUXGA (2048×1536) tablet for as little as $200, or ~€160 in Euroland. Dual-core A9 or quad-core A7 processors are standard, but there are even some A9 quads available for that sort of money.

Components are getting ridiculously cheap, allowing vendors to add more for less. This is especially true of processors and displays.

Several companies are churning out cheap ARM SoCs and it is estimated that Rockchip can sell a SoC for as little as $5. MediaTek is currently shipping one in five SoCs on the planet and most of them are cheap, A7-based parts. Prices of relatively high-quality IPS displays have tumbled as well and many cost less than $10. Prices or RAM and NAND have gone down as well, but the drop wasn’t as drastic. All in all, Bloomberg reckons the cost of components used in today’s cheap and cheerful tablets is $60, down from $175 in 2011.

It should be noted that cheap tablets, or the companies behind them, don’t get nearly as much press as they should. After all, cheap tablets will make up a third of all tablet shipments next year, but tech sites are focusing on clickbait, pricey high-end models churned out by brands who tend to advertise on the same sites.

It’s all somewhat reminiscent of the vanilla PC boom in the mid eighties, although we don’t believe cheap tablets can replicate the success of cheap PCs three decades ago.