Friday, March 20, 2015

Android may be based on Linux, but it’s not based on the type of Linux system you may have used on your PC. You can’t run Android apps on typical Linux distributions and you can’t run the Linux programs you’re familiar with on Android.

Linux makes up the core part of Android, but Google hasn’t added all the typical software and libraries you’d find on a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. This makes all the difference. <continues at link>

Monday, March 16, 2015

How the 8080 Changed and Dominated Computing with x86

from wikipedia

Industry change[edit]

The 8080 also changed how computers were created. When the 8080 was introduced, computer systems were usually created by computer manufacturers such asDigital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard, or IBM. A manufacturer would produce the entire computer, including processor, terminals, and system software such as compilers and operating system. The 8080 was actually designed for just about any application except a complete computer system. Hewlett Packard developed the HP 2640 series of smart terminals around the 8080. The HP 2647 was a terminal which ran BASIC on the 8080. Microsoft would market as its founding product the first popular programming language for the 8080, and would later acquire DOS for the IBM-PC.

The 8080 and 8085 gave rise to the 8086, which was designed as a source compatible (although not binary compatible) extension of the 8085. This design, in turn, later spawned the x86 family of chips, the basis for most CPUs in use today. Many of the 8080's core machine instructions and concepts, for example, registers namedA, B, C and D, as well as many of the flags used to control conditional jumps, are still in use in the widespread x86 platform. 8080 Assembler code can still be directly translated into x86 instructions; all of its core elements are still present.

PCs based upon the 8086 design and its successors evolved into workstations and servers of 16, 32 and 64 bits, with advanced memory protection, segmentation, and multiprocessing features, blurring the difference between small and large computers (the 80286 and 80386's protected mode were important in doing so). The size of chips has grown so that the size and power of large x86 chips is not much different from high end architecture chips, and a common strategy to produce a very large computer is to network many x86 processors.

The basic architecture of the 8080 and its successors has replaced many proprietary midrange and mainframe computers, and withstood challenges of technologies such as RISC. Most computer manufacturers have abandoned producing their own processors below the highest performance points. Though x86 may not be the most elegant, or theoretically most efficient design, the sheer market force of so many dollars going into refining a design has made the x86 family today, and will remain for some time, the dominant processor architecture, even bypassing Intel's attempts to replace it with incompatible architectures such as the iAPX 432 andItanium.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

ARM First Challenge to x86 Processor Dominance

ARM First Challenge to x86 Processor Dominance

x86 has beat off every attempt to replace it - except the ARM in phones and tablets

Failed replacements:

8086 - 1M 20 bit memory address 8086 contains 14 16-bit registers, four of which can also be used as two eight-bit registers.
286 - 16 bits, 16 bit offset
386 - 32 bits
Motorola 68000 - Wikipedia 1979 16/32 bit with no segmentation hack, dominant CPU for Unix-based workstations successful on Apple Mac by IBM power PC and then Intel x86 acclaimed general ease of use. 24-bit 16 Mb memory address limit comparEd to 8086 68000 contains 18 32-bit registers and one 16-bit register, including eight 32-bit “data” registers, named D0 through D7.
Intel iAPX 432 16/32-bit introduced in 1981, failed by 1986 Intel's first 32-bit processor design on two separate integrated circuits. Started in 1975 as the 8800 as Intel's major design for the 1980s. commercial failure for Intel discontinued in 1986. stack machine with no visible general-purpose registers. It supported object-oriented programming, garbage collection and multitasking, o/s written in Ada. Linear addressing of data could still only use 16-bit offsets. Plans to replace x86 failed when benchmarks at roughly 1/4 the speed of the new 80286 chip at the same clock frequency. The chip's complexity limited the clock speed and lengthened the design schedule, and was seen as costly overhead rather than performance enhancing simplification. Bit-aligned variable-length instructions were costly. New York Times, "the i432 ran 5 to 10 times more slowly than its competitor, the Motorola 68000. The enter_environment set up the memory protection. The compiler ran this for every single variable in the system, segmented memory 2^24 segments of up to 64 KB each, 2^24 total address (16 MB).

Apple is moving on from Intel because Intel isn't moving anywhere ...

Apple’s abandonment of Intel chips is inevitable
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/3/.../apple-intel-cpu-processor-design-competition
Apr 3, 2018 - And without the power efficiency gains that come from building smaller chips, Intel just can't compete with ARM processors designed for ...

Apple is planning to replace Intel processors in Mac computers with its own chips starting sometime around 2020.

But the infamous Moore’s Law sputtered to an end back in 2015. Intel is approaching the limits of what’s possible to achieve with silicon, and it hasn’t yet figured out its next step

without the power efficiency gains that come from building smaller chips, Intel just can’t compete with ARM processors designed for efficiency first.

macOS feels like it’s in maintenance mode, awaiting a widely anticipated change that will produce a unified iOS and macOS operating system, with iOS taking precedence.

Apple’s primary software focus is rightly fixed on iOS, which happens to run on ARM instructions,

Are ARM CPU Cores Finally Ready to Fight Intel for the Laptop Market ...
https://www.extremetech.com › Computing
Jun 4, 2018 - ARM vs. Intel: A Referendum on Intel CPU Designs. The reason these types of comparison spark so much interest, I suspect, is because ...

ARM vs X86 - Key differences explained! - Android Authority
https://www.androidauthority.com/arm-vs-x86-key-differences-explained-568718/
Nov 25, 2014 - Android supports 3 different processor architectures: ARM, Intel and MIPS. The most popular and ubiquitous of these three is, without a doubt, ...

The Differences Between ARM and Intel - Make Tech Easier
https://www.maketecheasier.com/differences-between-arm-and-intel/
Nov 14, 2016 - MTE Explains: The Differences Between ARM and Intel. ... Intel processors found in desktop and laptop computers are sometimes referred to as “x86” processors. ... The core difference between ARM and x86 chips is their instruction set.

average Intel i7 processor produces around 45W of heat. The average ARM based smartphone SoC (including the GPU) has a maximum instantaneous peak power of around 3W, some 15 times less than an Intel i7. Now Intel is a big company and they have lots of smart people working there. Its latest Atom processors have similar thermal designs as ARM based processors, however to do that it has had to use the latest 22m fabrication process. Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 uses a 28nm process.

IA64 project was never a big success and today is effectively dead. Intel eventually adopted AMD64.

ne is for running 32-bit code and one for 64-bit. The beauty of the ARM design is the processor can seamlessly swap from one mode to the other during its normal execution. The means that the decoder for the 64-bit instructions is a new design that doesn’t need to maintain compatibility with the 32-bit era, yet the processor as a whole remains backwardly compatible.

big.LITTLE ARM has introduced heterogeneous computing for mobile devices. This means that the cores can be different in terms of performance and power. When the mobile device is not busy, a low-energy core can be used, but when you start a complex game, the high performance cores are used.

“native” apps are generally compiled for ARM processors and not always for Intel or MIPS. To get around this Intel and MIPS need to use special translation software which converts the ARM instructions into code for their processors. This of course impacts performance. At the moment MIPS and Intel can claim about a 90% compatibility with all the apps available in the Play Store.

ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/.../arm-says-chips-will-outperform-intel-laptop-cp...
Aug 16, 2018 - While ARM already believes that its recently unveiled Cortex-A76 is competitive withIntel's 2.6GHz Core i5-7300U, it expects its 2019 "Deimos" ...There's already talk of Qualcomm making a truly laptop-worthy Snapdragon in the near future -- Deimos and Hercules could be fast enough that you might choose an ARM-based PC for a speed advantage, not just longer battery life. And that could give Intel a good reason to panic. It's still struggling to make 10-nanometer chips at the same time as ARM is talking about 7nm and 5nm parts. If Intel can't find a way to stay ahead, it may see big PC makers switching to ARM as they look for more powerful options.

Intel vs. ARM: Two titans' tangled fate
ARM vs. Atom: The battle for the next digital frontier
Intel has barely made a dent in the mobile market, while ARM has been wildly successful. Does that spell doom for Intel -- or is ARM's triumph overblown?
In the last 12 months, ARM pulled in a little over $1.1 billion in revenue, while Intel netted nearly $53 billion.
By Jim Turley
InfoWorld | Feb 27, 2014

ARM-based chips have dominated the designs for mobile processors in much the same way that Intel's x86 family of processors locked up the Windows PC market a few decades ago.

A big part of ARM's success, however, has little to do with better technology. It's the company's business model. Whereas Intel builds chips, ARM only designs them What sealed the deal, however, was that mobile device makers needed to design their own ASICs intended to power specific devices -- and realized it worked better to integrate a CPU into those ASICs rather than soldering a CPU alongside. Enter ARM and its CPU-for-hire business model. Want to mix a CPU in with the other ingredients of your new ASIC or SoC? ARM has your recipe. Like few other companies at that time, ARM was willing to let customers bake its CPU into their own devices.

roughly speaking, an ARM design has about one-third the number of transistors of an x86 design. That's leaving out the likes of cache and bus interfaces, which can easily consume more transistors than the CPU "core" itself. Indeed, most processors today -- RISC or CISC -- are about three-quarters cache, with a little CPU core lurking in one corner of the chip.... ARM can get away with slashing its transistor budget because it doesn't support as many architectural features as x86.

May 5, 2014 http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/05/05/amd-unify-x86-arm-systems-skybridge/

AMD is ramping up ARM designs and fleshing out future X86 designs in a two-pronged approach to capturing market share, explained Lisa Su, general manager of AMD’s Global Business Units. Here is the market as AMD sees it for processors:

The chart above shows the total addressable market for processors across embedded, mobile, PC, console, and server segments by architecture. The gray bars in the middle of the chart lump together Power, Sparc, MIPS, various mainframe, and other proprietary chips. Interestingly, you can see that the percentage of the market supported by X86 processors has fallen in recent years, but is expected to stabilize by AMD’s estimates, while ARM chips will see their share of the chip pie grow.

November 5, 2013

VDC Research Finds ARM Holdings Gaining Market Share In High Growth Processor Applications

Adoption of ARM on the rise in many fast-growing embedded processing and M2M markets; x86 adoption unchanged while MIPS and Power architectures cede share to ARM.

ARM Taking Share from Other Architectures

'Unless Intel can make big inroads in the smartphone, tablet or wearables market, ARM stands to extend its reign within the high-growth and high-volume embedded processor markets.' - Dan Mandell, Analyst

Boston, MA (PRWEB) November 06, 2013

A recently completed study by VDC Research shows that ARM is gaining share in many high growth applications for CPUs and microcontrollers (MCUs), while other architectures are fighting to maintain share or minimize the ground they are losing to ARM. In the study of the global engineering community, VDC noted a sharp rise over the last twelve months in the number of engineers indicating the use of ARM-based technology in their current design. At the same time, x86's share of the market slipped slightly, while MIPS and Power lost significant share to ARM. ARM's ability to take share from established vendors and architectures will not be uniform across all processor classes and industries, but overall VDC forecasts meaningful share growth for ARM in the coming years. Dan Mandell, Analyst at VDC Research said, "ARMs success in mobile devices has given them technology and expertise in areas that matter a great deal to engineers in many high growth embedded and M2M applications. These include automotive, medical devices, and energy. Low power, small footprint, robust tools, and support across a variety of operating systems puts ARM in an enviable position. Intel and others are certainly not sitting still, but ARM was first off the line, and continues to innovate at a furious pace. The energy and enthusiasm in the ARM ecosystem cannot be discounted either."

Online Resources:
ARM Gaining Share - Download The Research Note

April 2013

http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Intel_Nightmare_Worsens_with_Wearable_Devices_and_64-Bit_ARM_Processors

Shows half phone / half PC in 2012 but nearly all ARM by 2022 if apple and microsoft shift to ARM PCs and mac

Wikibon believes that both Apple and later Microsoft will migrate their PC operating systems to ARM, leaving behind specialized very high-end devices on Intel. The revised timescale and projection of these events are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 –Smart Device Projected Shipments by Device Type, 2012-2022
Source: Wikibon February 2013, based on IDC and Gartner 2012 shipment estimates projected by Wikibon to 2022
Assumptions: successful shipment of 64-bit ARM processors and migration to ARM by Apple and Microsoft

January 2010

http://www.geek.com/mobile/abi-arm-to-dominate-ultra-mobile-market-by-2013-1067071/

Ultra-mobile devices (UMD), including netbooks and smartbooks, are predominantly shipped with x86-based processors. In fact, they made up 90% of UMD devices shipped in 2009. Even with that incredible amount of market share ABI Research is predicting thatARM-based processors will overtake x86-based UMD device shipments by 2013.

The research firm believes that part of the momentum behind ARM-based processors is that they are perceived to be best for devices with an “always connected” mode. It also helps that a number of form factors are appearing with ARM-based processors including smartphones and tablets.

No doubt helping the ARM cause is the fact that the new Apple tablet, expected to launch this quarter, will be powered by an ARM-based processor

ARM vs. Atom: The battle for the next digital frontier Infoworld

Small, inexpensive, power-efficient new chips from Intel and ARM are enabling the new wave of mobile devices -- and setting the two companies on a collision course

By Neil McAllister InfoWorld | Oct 28, 2009

Consider: Intel sold its 1 billionth x86 chip in 2003. Its closest rival, AMD, broke the 500 million mark just this year. ARM, on the other hand, expects to ship 2.8 billion processors in 2009 alone -- or around 90 chips per second. That's in addition to the more than 10 billion ARM processors already powering devices today.

ARM may hardly be a household name, but to insiders it's one of the most recognized brands in the semiconductor industry. By volume, it's the most successful 32-bit processor architecture in the world, accounting for more CPUs in more devices than any other -- without so much as a single ad on TV.

ARM's novel history. A unique, RISC-based processor design, ARM grew out of the quirky British computer industry of the 1980s. It was compact and efficient mainly because it had to be -- its British backers lacked access to the kind of capital that propelled Intel to the top of Silicon Valley. But when it became clear that x86 would dominate the PC market in the United Kingdom as it had in America, ARM's efficient design quickly earned it a place of favor among digital device manufacturers.

Atom, on the other hand, is a full-blooded x86 CPU

Itanium, HP-Intel Failed Heir as x86 moves to top

Itanium, HP-Intel Failed Heir to x86

By 2014, x86 was becoming Intel's top end processor, all but replacing Itanium in capability

IBM Slumps, Cisco Gains In 2014 Server Sales InformationWeek-Mar 3, 2015
HP's biggest declines were in the RISC/Itanium market, with unit shipments off 18.8% and revenues down 21.8% HP remains the server market leader, but it suffered a 9.4% decline in unit shipments for the year. Revenues held steady at $13.3 billion, up 0.4%. HP's biggest declines were in the RISC/Itanium market, with unit shipments off 18.8% and revenues down 21.8%.

"The growth of integrated systems, while still relatively small as an overall percentage of the hardware infrastructure market, provided some growth contribution to the x86 server space for the year," wrote Jeffrey Hewitt, a research VP, in the Gartner report. Hewitt described 2014 as a "moderate growth year" with overall increases of 2.2% in shipments and 0.8% in revenue.

"x86 servers continue to be the predominant platform used for large-scale data center buildouts across the globe," Hewitt wrote.

That’s gotta hurt: HP to offer Xeon-based Superdome servers Barb Darrow Dec. 2, 2014 - 7:45 AM PDT Hewlett-Packard is bending on its pro-Itanium stance and will offer Intel Xeon-based versions of its high-end Superdome and NonStop servers, according to the Wall Street Journal and other reports. These servers are used by banks and other financial institutions and until now ran on more specialized Itanium processors developed by HP and Intel. The Itanium chips are, purportedly, very powerful but saw limited traction in the market. Oracle cited the slow growth when, two years ago, it said it would stop supporting Itanium with its database and other software. That caused a major kerfuffle between HP and Oracle, one of its erstwhile allies. In any case, HP positioned this as a move to retain key large customers as it breaks itself into two entities: HP Enterprise — for cloud, software, storage, etc. — and HP Inc., for printers and PCs. Antonio Neri, SVP of HP’s enterprise group, told the WSJ that the company will continue to develop Itanium-based machines, but that Intel’s Xeon technology is more mainstream and thus appeals to many customers

Itanium is still important – we have a roadmap that goes out to 2022 (which could possibly expand into 2025) and we will deliver what these customers need to achieve business results. The new servers announced today deliver on HP’s Project Odyssey (announced in 2011), which included bringing x86 into mission critical.

Still others say the writing is on the wall.

“This signifies the end of any big investments in Itanium,” Patrick Moorhead, founder of analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy, told me.

December 2014 Death knell - HP is replacing non-stop Itanium with X86
HP's Itanium Odyssey Ends With Superdome X Xeon Iron EnterpriseTech-Dec 2, 2014The prior generations of Superdome and NonStop machines were based on Itanium processors from Intel, and the launch of these new ...

In addition to the new Superdome X machine, HP is also previewing its Xeon-based Integrity NonStop X server line.

The NonStop systems are fault tolerant clusters that are currently based on Intel’s “Poulson” Itanium 9500 processors and that use a proprietary interconnect called ServerNet to lash machines together to run the NonStop kernel and a distributed database. NonStop machines are the backbone of many financial exchanges and banking networks where downtime is not permissible. Because most of the applications running on the NonStop platform are homegrown – unlike the case for the HP-UX variant of Unix – HP can port the NonStop environment to the X86 architecture and customers can recompile their own code, and given the price/performance benefits of shifting from Itanium to Xeon, many must be so inclined or HP would not have bothered.

Beginning in March next year, HP will be shipping a new lineup of NonStop X systems. Kyle says that the new NonStop X machines will replace Itaniums with the a future “Ivy Bridge” Xeon E5 processor and that it has ported the ServerNet fault tolerant clustering to run atop of an InfiniBand network running at 40 Gb/sec speeds (that’s called FDR in the InfiniBand lingo). The NonStop X will use the BladeSystem c7000 chassis and ProLiant BL460-class blade servers. HP tells EnterpriseTech that it will be able to put 64 cores and 3 TB of memory inside of a single NonStop node, which will be comprised of multiple motherboards.

Intel finally releases 9500-series Itanium, announces plans ... ExtremeTech.com Nov 12, 2012 - Intel has released its latest big-number crunching Itanium processors with the 9500 Poulson series as well as detailed its Modular ...

HP Adopts Intel Itanium 9500 and Updates HP-UX By Sean Michael Kerner Posted November 8, 2012 Intel is launching a new line of Itanium processors today that deliver increased performance. The new Intel Itanium 9500 processor series offers the promise of up to 21 percent less energy usage while delivering up to three times the performance of previous Itanium processors. he Itanium 9500 has been on Intel's roadmap since at least 2007. The Itanium 9500 is also at the core of a Mission Critical server refresh from HP that includes new Integrity and Superdome hardware. The HP update includes a new version of the company's HP-UX Unix operating system as well.
The Itanium 9500 series is one of the most robust processors that Intel has ever built with 3.1 billion transistors. The 9500 series delivers up to 54 MB of memory on the chip and up to 2 TB of DIMM memory.

HP-UX HP will be enabling the new Itanium processors with an update to the HP-UX Unix 11i v3 operating system. In addition to the new hardware support, the HP-UX update also provides new capabilities.

Intel's new Xeon E7 marks the end of Itanium There's really no reason to buy an Itanium any more now that the top of the Xeon line is pretty much the same chip. ITworld.com-Feb 20, 2014 One of the surest signs that an Intel product is doomed is its omission from the Intel Developer's Forum, and Intel has not talked about Itanium at ...One of the surest signs that an Intel product is doomed is its omission from the Intel Developer's Forum, and Intel has not talked about Itanium at that show for at least three or four years now. So while they will deny it, Intel has doomed the Itanium by omission.But while Itanium slowly slips below the waves, what would be its replacement? The answer to that came Tuesday when Intel introduced the Xeon E7 V2 processor, codenamed "Ivy Town." The 15-core processor is built for huge data sets and massive memory bandwidth, the one advantage that still remained for mainframes and high-end RISC servers.

last few generations, E7-based servers have closed the performance and reliability gap with Itanium, IBM's Power servers and mainframes, and what's left of Oracle's UltraSparc business. The fact is these servers have the uptime promise for mission critical systems of big iron, but they also offer the openness of an x86 platform... When you buy IBM Power servers, you do get a high-performance server with that coveted five 9s of uptime, no question. But you'll also get it from HP's ProLiants, Oracle Sun Servers and SGI Altix servers, and soon the eX5 servers from Lenovo now that IBM had ditched them, so you are free to shop around. That gives you some price competition and flexibility in buying....So, with the E7 V2, x86 may finally break down the top tier of computing and move into space previously held by RISC systems. I never thought I would see it happen.

HP to replace Itanium with x86 in its NonStop server ITworld.com-Nov 5, 2013 Hewlett-Packard has long been the last holdout on the Itanium processor, since Itanium has a lot of HP's PA-RISC processor as its pedigree

2011: Oracle-HP court battle over Itanium delayed indefinitely Stephen Lawson @sdlawsonmedia Apr 10, 2013 2:50 PMe-mailprint Oracle and Hewlett-Packard’s ongoing legal battle over software for Itanium has run into another delay, and this time there’s no telling how long it will last. HP sued Oracle in 2011 after the database company announced it would stop porting software to Itanium, the chip architecture at the heart of HP’s high-end “business critical” servers. HP won in the first phase of the case last year, when Judge James Kleinberg of the Santa Clara Superior Court ruled that Oracle had to resume porting.