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Koog

10/06/13 6:59 PM

#123437 RE: Dmcq #123436

MIPS is a better competitive design for the market ARM is in than Intel ...



How many times have I heard that over how many years? You argument failed for me with that single comment.
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mas

10/06/13 10:47 PM

#123448 RE: Dmcq #123436

Bay Trail is no competitive knockout and the situation with the 14nm successor will almost certainly be much worse.

Much worse ? A57 against 14nm Airmont and then 14nm Goldmont ? Unlikely. A15 already has a performance/power design/process mismatch that limits sustainable high clock-speeds well under its theoretical maximum and its fatter A57 derivation will suffer probably worse.


The big problem though is that far better ARMs will be around starting to compete in the server market now the software offerings are getting fairly complete. What's Intel going to do, offer a cut down Haswell for $20?

You are dreaming imaginary chips up. Even the AMD licensees are selling their server SoCs starting from 3 figure numbers and an A57 or X-Gene is barely in Avoton's class never mind Haswell Xeon's.


And about not paying a foundry margin - of course Intel pays for its foundries and has to do R&D and get profit from them. Costs and the need for profit don't suddenly disappear just because two functions are done within the same company.

The proof is in the pudding, none of these strictly ARM SoC only companies make enough profit to pay for a continuous FAB and silicon process treadmill like Intel has had for decades and the mobile Atoms can take advantage of this PC/Server bought process infrastructure as a free foundry.


As to foundries being clueless after 16nm - that is just wishful thinking given the published plans and talks about 10nm.

Talks, plans ? Morris Chang has not sounded confident in years and that guy has trouble with masking the truth when he should. If everything was hunky dory in foundry land they would not be thinking of introducing these hybrid FinFET transistors on larger back-ends which they are unable to scale further at the moment which is why it is going to remain 20nm over two generations. They are scrabbling to keep up already and it's only going to get worse with quadruple patterning which is their only concrete idea for getting under 20nm now. They are all hoping for Intel technical infrastructure crumbs to cascade down to them to help them advance further.

As for MIPS it is conspicuous by its huge absence in mobile application processors and there is no-one pushing hard for that to change. MIPS and its licensees seem happy enough to stay in their current niches. So whatever challenge they could provide is purely theoretical.
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This Causes an Error

10/06/13 10:59 PM

#123449 RE: Dmcq #123436

Dmcq,

You do realize that the guys like AMD and AMCC do not have the economies of scale to sell "$20 ARM server chips", right? Just because smartphone APs are cheap doesn't mean that the much lower volume/much higher barrier to entry server parts are going to be cheap, too.

AMCC is gunning for ~70% GMs on its 40nm X-Gene. This isn't low margin land.
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chipguy

10/06/13 11:17 PM

#123451 RE: Dmcq #123436

The ARM chips have plenty of room for easy improvement compared to Intel.

Your glib comment reminds me of Apple's ad when it first brought
out its Power Mac. It had a graph that showed RISC performance
taking off exponentially while x86 performance plateaued.

LOL, didn't quite work out that way did it?
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wbmw

10/07/13 11:05 AM

#123456 RE: Dmcq #123436

Bay Trail is no competitive knockout and the situation with the 14nm successor will almost certainly be much worse


Bay Trail CPU performance is absolutely a knockout. It beats Krait 400 and Cortex-A15 hands down, on nearly every benchmark. And you think a 14nm shrink will somehow make the situation (much) worse? I really don't understand your point, unless you meant much worse for Qualcomm, or nVidia.

If you're worried about graphics performance, note that Intel has another new architecture for 14nm parts. Bay Trail is hardly noncompetitive, but I'll grant you that it's not leadership, either. The 14nm shrink with Gen8 graphics should bring with it a significant performance CAGR.