Arm Wants to Power Your Next Laptop

DooKey

DooKey

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 25, 2001
Messages
12,693
According to Ian Smythe, Senior Director of Marketing, Intel better watch out because Arm processors are on a steady curve to out-compute their competitor at the i5 level. He claims next gen Arm processors based on 7nm and 5nm processes will exceed the performance of Intel chips. Of course this is all marketing speak at this point, but they have detailed their roadmap and performance projections so they at least appear to have a plan. If Arm can make a dent in the mid-tier laptop market it's going to bite big blue in the pocketbook. This definitely bears watching over the next few years.

Can Arm-based processors really make a dent in the laptop market, though? Smythe surely thinks so. ‘I think with every disruption we created an opportunity,” he said. “That toehold [in the laptop market] can grow when you can demonstrate the benefits. I think that with the first Windows on Arm devices we’re sharing that capability and as we move towards Cortex A76-based devices and beyond, I think that capability and disruption offers opportunity beyond where we are today.”
 
ARM is a good instruction set that just never really got much love in the high performance area before now

i see Apple moving to ARM before we see windows do it
 
For web browsing sure but if it can't run Photoshop or battlefield 5 then its not for me :(
 
They already have arm chips that are roughly equivalent to an i3. That battery life though... lol
 
Raw metrics on one benchmark are one thing, true performance is another.

Anybody remember the switch over from Motorola 68000 series to PowerPC and from PowerPC to Intel. Apps compiled for the older architectures were horribly slow as they had to go through compatibility layers. And not everything worked as desired. It was always a painful transition and why Apple was so hesitant to finally admit defeat to Intel. It was even worse if you used a feature that was only available on the previous architecture and now has to be emulated. How many of the core extensions does ARM support?
 
Elios said:
ARM is a good instruction set that just never really got much love in the high performance area before now

i see Apple moving to ARM before we see windows do it
Click to expand...

It's an okay instruction set. You need a simpler node to run faster & to get it out the door quicker without licensing issues. That means you have to give up stuff that CISC x86 instruction sets cover
 
If your laptop is to be used as a glorified smart phone, sure. But where are the application support that will be required to run "good?" ARM is good at what ARM does, and x86/AMD64 is good at what it does. It's just that what ARM is good at is what the majority of people use their computers for, so it has a place.
 
jardows said:
If your laptop is to be used as a glorified smart phone, sure. But where are the application support that will be required to run "good?" ARM is good at what ARM does, and x86/AMD64 is good at what it does. It's just that what ARM is good at is what the majority of people use their computers for, so it has a place.
Click to expand...

It has a share, and it's incredibly small. Why do you think it took forever for microsoft to write a universal platform compiler (UWP) based on .NET. And look at it's adoption rate. (Have you seen the windows store?)

Everything else will suck performance wise.

Platforms live and die by their app availability. I'll just leave this here: Windows Phone
 
jardows said:
If your laptop is to be used as a glorified smart phone, sure. But where are the application support that will be required to run "good?" ARM is good at what ARM does, and x86/AMD64 is good at what it does. It's just that what ARM is good at is what the majority of people use their computers for, so it has a place.
Click to expand...


Arm could be very competitive performance wise with x86 IF you just open up the power envelope.

This is why Apple is moving in that direction. They have very good ARM designs.

I think in the not too distant future many peoples biases about ARM being only for low cost low power solutions is about to be seriously challenged.
 
I want an ARM processor in my next laptop, if they can produce one that doesn't crawl. I don't do much more than surf the web, get email, or work on a basic document on a laptop. I don't do gaming on a laptop. So, ARM would be nice, both to save on power and to thumb my nose at Intel.
 
dgingeri said:
I want an ARM processor in my next laptop, if they can produce one that doesn't crawl. I don't do much more than surf the web, get email, or work on a basic document on a laptop. I don't do gaming on a laptop. So, ARM would be nice, both to save on power and to thumb my nose at Intel.
Click to expand...


The web browsing experience on a Rasberry PI doesn't suck so i would think it would be possible.
 
I'll believe it when I see it live encoding x264 at 1080p60 with OBS at a decent preset.
 
Elios said:
ARM is a good instruction set that just never really got much love in the high performance area before now

i see Apple moving to ARM before we see windows do it
Click to expand...

Really? Have you not seen all the articles throughout 2017 about Windows 10 running on Snapdragon 835 processors?

You can even go out and BUY your very own Windows 10 "Always Connected PC" running on an ARM processor.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/Always-Connected-PCs?icid=PC_cat_linknav_ACPC_06242018-en-us

Technically, the windows 10 phones were the first to run the mainline windows 10 code and have universal apps built for multi-platforms to run on them. But these laptops are marketed as full fledged windows machines.
 
Last edited:
Wow, 7nm process based unreleased ARM processors faster than 14nm process based released Intel processors. Who da thunk?

Technically, the simpler and more modern ARM instruction set based processors can scale to faster speeds than the more complex and saddled with 1980's backwards compatibility, x86 instruction set processors, but the point is really moot.

If there's demand for it, somebody will build a complex ARM instruction set based processor that rivals the fastest x86 instruction set processors.

But on the same process node, the performance will most probably be close enough that the difference is moot except for the most demanding of customers.
 
bbf said:
Technically, the simpler and more modern ARM instruction set based processors can scale to faster speeds than the more complex and saddled with 1980's backwards compatibility, x86 instruction set processors, but the point is really moot.
Click to expand...

Questionable, actually. That was the claim of the original RISC design, back when it really was reduced (meaning very few instructions, and instructions that only did one simple task) but it has never panned out in reality. CISC processors were able to adapt and scale to very high speeds, x86 and z/Architecture (IBM mainframes) both run at 5GHz or more. Likewise RISC based designs started getting more complex with the addition of things like vector units and such. It just doesn't seem like the basic design of the ISA matters as much as people originally thought it would.

I'm not saying it is impossible that ARM can make a faster processor than Intel, and maybe the ISA will play a part in it, but so far there's no indication that ISA really is that important, design is more important.

As for this particular announcement, well ARM is talking a lot of smack but so far not backing it up. Something that tech vendors seem to be very good at :p. As with any announcement, I'll believe it when I see the numbers.
 
viper1152012 said:
Yeah but those filters and batch operations are gonna slay the pad
Click to expand...
I don't know about slay, but they will lay down a serious layer or hurt. Assuming they do the whole thing from the ground up using the Metal 2 API they should be able to squeeze everything the A11X and A12X has got and if the reports are accurate the A12 might be able to handle it like a champ.
 
I will be very interested in seeing who puts these chips out and how they directly compare against the Intel Celeron 3205U, 3215U and i3 5005U and what they cost compared to those models.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top