This is a classical david versus goliath situation, with all our sympathy usually reserved to the little outsider. But in this case, i do believe the little one indeed deserves sympathy.
While Intel business was growing thanks to PC business, it benefited from its near-monopoly position to become a dominant player in the field of micro-electronics at large. Its processors were fast enough to quickly displace RISC ones from anything the size of a laptop or more. It then entered the server market were it made small wood of specialists such as Alpha or Sun. Its domination seemed irresistible, and even large strategic failures such as Rambus one did nothing to really alter this situation.
During all this time, there is one area which remained free of Intel x86 domination, it is the world of small hand-held terminals and equivalents, such as smartphones. In this world, power consumption is key, and the huge requirement of x86 processors (60W!) were not meant to fit the bill.
ARM strived, proposing better value for the money, and more importantly inventing a new business model. Since ARM was (and still is) a small company, it does not manufacture nor does sell processors.
Being fabless is nothing new. In the CPU business, Cyrix showed great promises during its era. Nvidia and ATI are two gigantic fabless companies. The model is so compelling that even AMD converted itself to the fabless model recently.
However, not even selling processors was a bold move. ARM only sell licenses, for other to build processors based on its technology. As an analogy, they sell the plans for a house, not the house itself. Consequently, the cost of the plans is much lower than the house. So low in fact, that any entrepreneur can buy them and make a little fortune by selling houses. Hence an attractive model.
The decision, however, was not only about cost. It was also meant to support customizations. In the world of embedded equipment, such customizations are commonplace, and it was necessary to find a model to accommodate them.
ARM found a very important customer when Nokia decided to switch its CPU line to this architecture. With volumes reaching incredible levels, and many industrial customers of all sizes eager to produce their own ARM processors, it quickly became the de facto standard for handheld devices, overshadowing all other competitors.
Today, ARM processors are sold in much larger volume than x86 does, and the difference only grows. ARM as a company, though, is still a (relatively) small one, and the strength of this architecture does come from its ecosystem, not from the design company alone.
What changed recently is that both world collided, with the advent of new Tablet terminals, such as to Apple iPad. Now, for the first time, ARM-based terminals are investing an area traditionally reserved to PC siblings, such as small laptops or netbooks. And this is not just a small attempt by strange technological company, massive involvement from Apple ensures that this new market is here to stay, with many new players entering the fray this coming year.
Now, we'll witness a fight to settle where the frontier between the PC (x86) world and the Smartphone (ARM) will be.
Just the border? Or is it more complex ? Indeed it is.
Intel has been preparing its counter-offensive, and is now ready to propose ultra-low power x86 CPU able to be embedded into SmartPhones, such as the next iteration of Atom. On the other side, ARM has announced a new processor design for the Server market. Now that's sure, this is all out war, not just a border dispute.
It is my own guess that Intel attempt to enter the Smartphone market will fail, while ARM entry into the server market will ultimately be successful. There are several reasons for this belief :
- ARM processors consume much less power than Intel ones; for server CPU, look at something in the range of 10x difference. Intel will have to fight back with lower-consumption model (and they will).
- In a large server room, the main priority is power supply. The more CPU consumes watts, the more heat becomes a problem, with large cost and space penalty associated. A large consumption difference will have a tremendous effect on these installations.
- The server world is not really about Windows, but rather more about Linux. Linux derivatives and associated Open Source programs already work well with ARM (they can be compiled anytime to any target since the source code is available). The transition is therefore not as tragic as it look like.
Anyway, even Windows has announced that they will provide a Windows version for ARM soon.
So here it is, ARM processors are investing more and more area, and are likely to become a dominant platform within this decade. Therefore, being able to program for them will become an expected skill from any programmer.
In the next post, we'll see which differences have to be considered for your code to be ARM friendly.
