Is ARM Hungry Enough to Eat Intel's Favorite Pie? | Hacker News Reader

Is ARM Hungry Enough to Eat Intel's Favorite Pie?

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23 pointssigna1113 comments

I remember when Microsoft announced Windows on Arm 2 years ago. Now in 2019 they still haven't delivered. I couldn't care less about performance because there are no ARM products on the market that are actually interesting to early adopters. Even if we take alternative routes that weren't intended for mainstream customers, for example arm SBCs. After 2 years literally only the RK3399 SoC which was basically intended for chromebooks anyway, so ARM contributed 0% to it's success, has actually offered extremely basic features like PCIe. But thanks to the raspberry pi monoculture nobody is working on things like GPU drivers or better software support for SBCs anyway. Your crappy A11X or whatever with nice artifcal benchmark scores doesn't interest me. It's a shut in that can't communicate with the outside world and barely competes with an obsolete i5 3540 from 2012.

There is a reason nothing happens and it's because most companies don't care about ARM in the server space at all (including ARM themselves), they only want to use it to negotiate better discounts with intel. So far Google is the only company that has ARM based computers.

Microsoft have arm based server as part of Azure also

AWS just launched ARM-based servers

> A11X or whatever with nice artifcal benchmark scores doesn't interest me. It's a shut in that can't communicate with the outside world and barely competes with an obsolete i5 3540 from 2012.

A12X (there is no A11X) is only "shut in" because it runs iOS. Other than that, it's similar in power to the chips in MacBooks.

That's a pretty big shut-in. Unless you're going to run a server farm full of iPads, it's useless to anyone outside of Apple.

The chips in iPads are thermally constrained, so they would not do well in continuous loads. But if Apple were to ship an ARM Mac with a good TDP, this might change.

i.MX6 has had PCIe, SATA for a pretty long time now, as had Layerscape. And there are others like Socionext (datasheet under NDA though). Etnaviv is a very successful open source driver for Vivante GPUs found in a bunch of SoCs.

> because most companies don't care about ARM in the server space at all

It's starting. Cloudflare just announced this, and AWS is adding ARM-based server options. https://blog.cloudflare.com/porting-our-software-to-arm64/

Technically Windows on ARM was announced a bit over 8 years ago, before Windows 8's name was even known (it was still Windows vNext and had the Windows 7 shell when it was first shown publically running on Snapdragon boards)

Keep in mind these benchmarks are against a 4 watt CPU (Huawei's Kirin 980) with no air cooling inside a phone. Doesn't seem particularly fair to compare against a 28 watt core i5 with active cooling.

The more interesting comparison would be to the Huawei 7nm server CPU with 8 memory channels, 2x10G, and 64 cores.

Regarding that benchmark... so blosc2 and lz4 compression? Both can benefit from SIMD.

I wonder how well optimized those ARM versions are they're using. Do they even use NEON? Pretty likely x86 versions use SSE2 or AVX2.

So is that really a CPU performance benchmark or blosc2 and LZ4 library implementation quality benchmark?

As soon as AWS offers ARM Lambda instances I'll probably use them. Once commodity it's price for integer compute. Floating point may take longer to port everything.

A informative report. Would be better if there were some comparisons based on energy consumption.

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