Quad-core ARM and 2010 predictions

More than 1GHz per core, and now ARM has two and four core options. This is tracking my predictions from a few years ago quite well. The google Nexus One has a 1GHz ARM CPU with 512MB RAM. I expect that the rumored Apple tablet or iSlate is more likely to be a big iPhone than a small MacBook, so it would make sense for it to use a multi-core ARM and a Gigabyte or so of memory. This gives vendors a nice way to stratify their product, for example, Apple could support multi-core and background/multiple running apps in iPhone OS 4, release a two-core tablet now, then upgrade the iPhone to have a two core high end option in the summer, and push the tablet to have a four core high end option. If Apple doesn't, then the Android vendors will.

My other prediction for 2010 (that I made in early 2008) was that as ARM goes up market, Intel will come down-market to lower power consumption. So later in 2010 we may see Android based tablets and phones that use Intel Atom variants going head to head with ARM, as well as running more generic laptop derived operating systems.

http://www.marvell.com/armada/quadruple_core_arm_instruction_set/release/1363/

My millicomputing update ignite talk wasn't showing any text on the slides on slideshare, so I just re-loaded it.

ARM CPUs for power efficient Web Servers - James agrees...

James Hamilton highlights the power efficiency of ARM for general purpose web servers. It's almost two years since I gave the first talk on Millicomputing at the HPTS Workshop (which is where I met James for the first time) so its great to see him talking up the principles. He also makes the important point that ARM uses error correcting (ECC) memory, while the Intel Atom doesn't, and thus the Atom is actually less suitable for configuring large numbers in low power enterprise server applications.

The systems at http://www.linux-arm.org/Main/LinuxArmOrg are relatively inefficient blades, they have archaic spinning rust storage attached which must dominate the power consumption. A flash based storage subsystem would make much more sense to me. Web content delivery workloads are very well suited to low cost read-mostly flash storage. They do have a 1.2GHz ARM CPU and 1.5GB of RAM per blade, which is the biggest and fastest ARM configuration I've seen so far.

TI Sees multi-core phones in 2011

Like I said at Ignite #velocityconf yesterday - see ARM Cortex A9 - which is 4x the iPhone 3GS http://gigaom.com/2009/06/23/ti-sees-multicore-phones-coming-in-2011/

TI OMAP4 is based on ARM Cortex A9

Nice summary on GigaOM about the new chip just launched by TI.

This continues along the direction I outlined two years ago, high def video and graphics processing, very long battery life, high speed networking and lots of CPU capacity in a multicore chip, sampling soon, and in products in 2010.

Arm vs. Intel

An article in Infoworld confirms the things I've been talking about for the last year or so.

Arm are responding to the threat from Intel, and talking about low power enterprise servers.

More on the Cortex A9

Another update from Ashlee Vance at The Register gives more details on the Cortex A9. They say its a four issue superscalar (the Cortex A8 is dual issue), 8 times the performance of the iPhone CPU, runs at 250mW and should be in devices in around 2010. The A8 was announced in 2005 and three years is a typical lead time for CPU architectures to get into production, so I expect A8 based devices sometime next year, perhaps even a faster iPhone...

There is also some discussion of Intel moving down into this space over the next few years. Excellent! Competition will drive the market to develop faster and I don't personally care what the instruction set is any more (I used to...)

Multicore ARM Chips - Cortex A9

Performance is cranking up, now we have four core ARM chips on the horizon...

Infoworld article on the announcement.

Each of these cores seems to be based on the dual issue 1GHz Cortex A8 design that was announced a few years ago, and which isn't quite shipping yet in products.

So to put this in perspective, the CPU in the Gumstix Verdex and the iPhone is around 600MHz single issue, the Cortex A8 is around three times the raw performance and the new announcement is about twelve times the raw performance. These all seem to be around the same levels of power consumption, in the few hundred milliwatt range.

I would not expect to have the multicore ARM Cortex A9 in actual products in my pocket for a few years, but its good to have a roadmap into the future of millicomputing.

Qualcomm Scorpion - ARM Cortex based CPU

The first devices based on the new ARM Cortex generation are announced from Qualcomm, their Scorpion design runs at 1GHz, 250-500mW, and the Cortex based pipeline is dual issue, so the raw instruction issue rate is twice per MHz that of older ARM designs such as the PXA320.

The Future of Millicomputing

There is a gap between the performance and memory capacity of Millicomputers and mainstream CPUs, that gap is shrinking but how fast, and what are the next steps?

The base technology from ARM can be seen in their Cortex designs. These were disclosed in late 2005, but have yet to appear in actual products. The overall performance is around 3-4 times the performance of the current generation of ARM based devices.

Since Intel sold off their ARM based CPU business to Marvell, it leaves them clear to move their core 32bit x86 platform architecture down into the millicomputing space.

So in the next few years, I expect to see x86 and ARM based system on a chip architectures with overlapping performance and power consumption characteristics in the millicomputing space.