Monday, September 5th 2016
SoftBank Completes Acquisition of ARM
SoftBank today announced that it has concluded the acquisition of British chipmaker ARM, in a USD $31 billion purchase. The acquisition was first announced in July 2016. Following this, ARM will be de-listed from the London Stock Exchange from the 6th of September 2016. Although ARM is a CPU architecture designer with a mere $1.5 billion in revenue last fiscal, and licenses the architecture to other SoC makers such as Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Huawei, etc., SoftBank is betting on ARM CPU architecture's emergence as the prime-mover of the IoT (Internet of things) revolution. This is SoftBank's largest tech acquisition following the $20 billion acquisition of American cellular network Sprint, and a $15 billion investment in Vodafone Japan.
Source:
The Verge
22 Comments on SoftBank Completes Acquisition of ARM
The only problem is Microsoft's abandonment of Windows for ARM platform, but otherwise I wouldn't mind having a mini-PC powered by a modern 64-bit ARM CPU.
There are tons of high-performance parts available already: just look at Tegra X1 or Exynos 8890, which in most cases outperform both Intel and AMD SoC (even some U-versions of mobile Core i3/i5 CPUs!!!).
Try linux atop a normal flagship android phone using linux deploy etc.
Or some odroid etc board...
You will see that it is already running very very powerful and does run well.
With Gentoo like approach it even more can squeeze performance and effiency.
And the party ends here... just ARM is not enough.
The problem again is a closed source block. Problems like the GPU and media engine and depending on manufacturer buggy binaries. So the dream ends here.
Most of the software runs in virtualized environment anyway, so the actual software developer for any modern platform should not even care what hardware he is coding for, as long as it supports the runtime environment he/she is using(e.g. Java, ART/dalvik, .NET whatever). All it takes is for MS to continue the development of Windows ecosystem for ARM platform(s) and, as evil as it sounds, keep promoting Windows Platform as the best way of developing software for Windows.
Take Linux/BSD, for example. I can easily run pretty much the same OS (Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Android etc.) on a wide variety of devices starting from Raspberry Pi or a $35 Android TV box, to Intel Atom - powered tablet/netbook/nettop, all the way to my hexacore Xeon workstation. There are some things that are going to be different, there is lots of software that is not available for either platform, but overall my basic tasks can be performed similarly on either one of them:
- All can run the same OS with the same desktop environment
- All are capable of running Chrome, Firefox, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Dropbox, PDF viewer and other productivity software
- All of them include capabilities of HD video playback, and in most cases do it very well with hardware acceleration (except older Allwinner chips when not running Android)
So, the only argument that is left - is games, but even in this aspect of computing we will soon catch up with the second wave of game streaming services. And don't forget Angry Birds!
The problem is software support or rather lack of support.
Snapdragon 820 is on par with Tegra X1. If we take into account potential benefits from OpenCL-accelerated applications, then there is even more advantages.
At the current stage both CPUs are capable of outperforming:
- majority of Bay Trail CPUs, which are widely used in netbooks, nettops and low-end office workstations.
- pretty much all Cherry Trail CPUs
- most AMD E-series APUs
- Low-power AM1 CPUs
Next year we get Helio X30 and Snapdragon 830, which are rumored to be almost twice as fast, and support 4K/2K @60Hz.
I am talking about low-power x86_64 chips, which do have a very significant market share on PC market. So, no need to throw into pile Zen , Skylake, or Skull Canyon, since there are no 35W+ equivalent ARM CPUs on the consumer market yet.
It's been done before. On PowerPC granted, but it has been done.
I personally think that ARM has the advantage here because it gives you control over how and when data is taken out of system memory, even more so if the data you need is stored sequentially in memory which would make for a very fast series of loads compared to purely random ones. This isn't to say that it's faster than most x86 CPUs but, it is to say that it's probably a more efficient CPU in terms of computational capability versus power consumption.
Then we switched to Cortex M0 for the rest of our projects.
8-bit AVR architecture is pretty much dead. I still occasionally use ATTiny85 and ATTiny13 for very small stuff, but it is only because I have a cheap MCU supply from local manufacturer's overstock (and I can buy small bundles of 5-10 chips). Otherwise I would choose something like NXP LPC800-series or Freescale Kinetis L-series for these tasks (at almost the same price).
The SD820 is a disappointing chip in general. I mean it's much better than SD810 but which 'modern' chip isn't? It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm will showcase any meaningful improvements with SD830 or if they'll be forced to throw in the towel and just go with A73 or its successor for the SD840.
Intel doomed their own Atom line by giving it the scraps of their resources. It was crippled from the start as to not compete with their Core offerings and by the time they really needed it to perform versus the rapidly growing ARM business it was too late and now it's slowly being phased out in favor of low TDP Core and Xeon products.
Skylake and Zen both scale down to 4W, so why is it not a fair comparison? You threw in a 15W ARM SoC vs a 2W x86 SoC and said "Look, it can beat it in some scenarios". It's a bottom of the barrel turd that Intel dug out versus the best of the best ARM-based SoCs have to offer.
If I recall correctly, ARM doesn't scale very well with high TDP although that's probably due to poor design. Will be interesting to see if AMD's K12 will bring ARM to servers in a meaningful way. The opposite could perhaps be said for x86 not scaling very well with low TDP but I do believe the newer Core M products do a decent job.
AMD's processors have generally been notoriously bad over the last six years, so I don't think the comparison is representative of anything.
With all that being said: if you want to highlight an ARM SoC why not go for Apple's A9 and the upcoming A10? Or Exynos 8890? Kirin 955 (awful GPU though)? These are better than the 820 in most cases. And would better support your claim. The Tegra X1 is also crippled by the process node and the A57 cores but is helped by the TDP to achieve and sustain a higher performance level than would be otherwise possible.
I'm throwing you a bone here.
Lastly: rumors are rumors and very unreliable. 4K/2K 60 Hz what?
As for the whole debate about RISC vs CISC. Modern chip design is coalescing. The differences aren't as clear as they used to be. x86 processors are leaner than they used to be and ARM processors are fatter - so to speak. Also, x86 processors translate code to RISC before executing so the discussion is moot.