Qualcomm enters server CPU market with 24-core ARM chip
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
This kind of announcements have been going on and on for years, but I can't still get a motherboard where I can plug 2 SATA drives, let alone anything resembling a low-end Intel board.
Currently none except Intel (and well AMD) can make chips for the Server/Datacenter business, and they get to keep the healthy margins. If ARM gets into the Datacenter, expect Chinese manufacturers to put out slightly less efficient, but perfectly capable CPUs for a fraction of the cost. The death of the x86 cartel is a good thing for customers.
As for the Chinese fabs, there aren't that many Chinese manufacturers that can produce an ARM SOC at this moment, the only one of note is MediaTek (And while they are cheap, they aren't that cheap to cause any major issues), you can't just copy a CPU easily, it's not like you can buy a full blown functional reference design from ARM that will be commercially viable you actually need to develop it yourself (especially considering that you need quite a bit of stuff in the SOC that ARM doesn't cover). If you look at the current ARM SOC's even if they are based on the same ARM architecture they are virtually nothing alike.
And it's not like Intel didn't had (Acer, SiS, NEC, UMC, IBM, National Semiconductors, NexGen, Transmeta, fuck the 90's to early/mid 2000's were filled with x86 knockoffs) or has competition in the x86 arena from Chinese (And non-Chinese) companies heck VIA is still making cheap X86 CPU's many of them are very low power (watt per watt until the new Core-M stuff some would actually out-perform intel in some cases) the problem is that all of them are kinda crap, and most importantly don't have a well established ecosystem (interconnect-buses, chipsets, memory controllers etc.) and outside of cheap embedded systems (or 20$ 7" "netbooks" from DealExtreme or Alibaba) you won't see them anywhere.
And i won't be surprised to learn quallcom will be also aiming at that market in some form.
And from that base ,competing with intel is a serious possibility.
While Quallcom may very well be setting it's sights on competing with Intel doing so because countries do not trust Intel anymore won't be much of an opportunity for them because they'll be painted with the same brush.
I'd say performance was the more important factor, as most of the early non-Intel x86 were physically compatible (drop-in replacements) - and many were actually faster than Intel's CPUs, but Intel (and to some extent AMD) quickly caught up and passed them. The P6 (Pentium Pro/II/III) is when Intel really started pulling away from the rest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compatibl...
Note: MediaTek is Taiwanese and also fabless. Their phone SoCs are nowhere near as performant as Qualcomm's or Samsung's, and largely viewed as the low-cost "value" option.
I remember having to get a non-Intel 486 CPU that would plug into a daughter board that would sit in the original socket and it was some what faster than the 486DX that it replaced.
And yes I am very well that MediaTek is fabless and they cannot compete with QC as far as it comes to performance but they aren't dirt cheap either, and some of their newer SOC's are actually quite decent. They are however pretty much the only example of an established "Chinese" (Lets not get political here because people don't really differentiate between Taiwan and China when it comes to manufacturing, and most Taiwanese companies these days will actually manufacture in China because it's cheaper) ARM manufacturer I haven't seen any other one that can design their own SOC's that would actually work well and be commercially viable even for global products.
I personally see ARM becoming a potential player through another vector.
We already have various "open-cloud" alliances that design their own reference servers, network equipment and storage.
As ARM being a relatively easy ISA to license it wouldn't surprise me if the likes of Google and Facebook would license it them selves and then come out with their open server architecture which will include an ARM based CPU.
Facebook has released their ethernet switches and server reference designs a while ago, HP has only recently released OpenSwitch which is opensource OS for networking devices, Intel is also getting into the game with their own echo system "Intel Open Network Platform".
To me this form of market penetration seems to be much likely than a slow attempt to creep into the market and in one form or another is pretty much mandatory current datacenter users to switch to ARM en masse. Especially considering just how fragmented the ARM market is, there are allot of different ARM ISA's and even more implementations of those ISA's which aren't necessarily directly compatible.
If we take Exynos as an example then the custom ARM cores that Samsung developed caused quite a bit of software compatibility issue which is one of the reasons why Exynos devices aren't that popular in the Android development community. Heck it was even an issue for 1st party Samsung software anything that didn't run in a VM had to be compiled/redeveloped for Exynos which meant that even software like Samsung GearVR didn't work on Exynos devices initially.
Which is precisely why i think that a uniform compatible ISA and design from an investment consortium is required for ARM to work out it's kinks and take on the server market. Anything that was compiled for x86 for the past what 30 years will work on Intel's current CPU lines. Yes newer CPU's with additional features, extended instruction sets and their respective supported compilers will enable you to run you software more efficiently if you want to invest additional development resources, but if we talk about low level programming the same cannot be said for ARM in all cases which is a big issue at least as I see it.
Then there is a significant amount of software using Intel SIMD, like ffmpeg and so forth.
C/C++ is probably the one toolchain that you can rely on to be equally good on ARM or x86 (?). Someone with more expertise might correct me.
A big advantage of server software over client software is that you don't have to pay the expense of making it portable. Companies generally don't want to have multiple architectures in the data center. The last mile of stuff takes a long time to change.
Low per-core performance is actually a good incentive to parallelize as much as possible.
Reason: with the future being a socket per user over which the HTML5 interface is streamed, the user experience can be speedy if that same socket has a dedicated core too. I really want 2Ghz per user, but let's not be greedy.
That is a future in which I want to open my virtual veins in a warm bathtub. If the future is mediocre and likely surveillance- and ad-supported software shoved through a standard originally designed for formatted text, we have a problem.
If all of the processing isn't done on your system (e.g. 3rd party could like Office 365, or in your own desktop e.g. Desktop Office) then why would you need it in the first place?