Nothingness
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- Jul 3, 2013
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Aaron, you've been away from the ARM world for too long. You're basing your arguments on 15 years old experience, most of which is not applicable any more.
Neither will ARM help you get it right if you take out an architectural license.
The tools they sell won't get you that far. There are free tools that are basically the same thing for x86 as well, fyi.
And it is not impossible for anyone today to license the x86 ISA. Nor is it too complex, there are numerous examples of companies creating totally independent x86 designs.
Fine, I'll agree that neither is open.
Also, its important not to confuse Open with you can do whatever you want. There are lots of examples of open standards with de-facto standards/restrictions. SPARC is technically Open but good luck adding instructions and getting adoption/support. Same for RISC-V.
AFAIK, there has only been 1 company that has received a full architectural license from ARM which was DEC. DEC's license allowed them to add to/modify the ISA, IIRC. After DEC's license it was over a decade before another architectural license was granted and AFAIK, it was not as extensive as the license that DEC originally got. I don't know if the license was modified when StrongARM was transferred to Intel. Nor do I know if Intel kept the license intact after selling StrongARM to Marvell.
The low hanging fruit for Apple in the PC market is the high performance Mac Pro which is sold to customers they mostly own, Graphics, Audio and Video. Not to mention the scientific market. It would make sense for Apple to release an A10x Mac Pro, reducing it's price considerably since a big part of the cost are the CPU and GPU from third parties.
Do you really think ARM only gives there architecture licensees the ARM architecture reference manual and nothing else?
Put it the other way, do you think ARM would let anyone put on the market an "ARM" cpu that has not even been through a validation that proves it can run ARM code properly?
What kind of tools are you talking about?
I don't think Intel provides to anyone anything comparable to what ARM provides to its architectural licensees.
Can you give examples of any company having taken an x86 license recently?
As said by someone else, you seem to have a very dated view of this, no one today can create a x86 CPU even remotely competitive.
You can of course read all the documentation about the x86 ISA and in theory come up with a x86 compliant implementation (forgetting about the patents), but the devil is in the details, a documentation will have flaws, gaps and ambiguities, and the only way to get it right would be to reverse engineer what Intel does in each of these cases.
I am pretty sure this is what AMD has been doing for a very long time, hence it has been at a disadvantage most of the time (apart from the x86-64 period where Intel got it so wrong that the tables turned).
If you have an ARM license, you just ask, and you get an answer.
The answer might be: this is not defined, do what you want, but at least it should be clearly stated in the documentation and the SW will have to deal with it.
You can define the openness by the possibility of someone else to implement the ISA in HW, which I believe was the starting point of the discussion. and in that regard, TODAY, ARM is open to anyone willing to pay for a license (and this seems to be an increasing number), whereas it is impossible to do it for a full x86 implementation.
You are mixing architectural license with the right to extend the ISA, these are 2 different things.
They are plenty of architectural licensees for ARM today, but afaik it is not possible to extend the ISA anymore (although it is possible to restrict it by not supporting optional features).
Again a very dated view, things have changed a lot since the DEC days.
Custom ARM designs is dying out fast for the same reason, just look at Qualcomm.
Much of that was due to excellent execution on Qualcomm's part (Good 28HPM designs) and failure of execution on the competition's part (Broken bL designs, mediocre physical implementation, disadvantageous process).Qualcomm did great with their custom core in the last generation.
Put it the other way, do you think ARM would let anyone put on the market an "ARM" cpu that has not even been through a validation that proves it can run ARM code properly?
No, that's why the people with with architecture licenses don't call their CPUs "ARM" CPUs. Because they aren't ARM CPUs anymore.
vulcan:X-Gene Worlds First ARMv8 64-bit Server on a Chip Solution
Quad-issue, quad-threaded 64-bit ARMv8-A core
Define "ARM CPU".No, that's why the people with with architecture licenses don't call their CPUs "ARM" CPUs. Because they aren't ARM CPUs anymore.
They have a basic validation suite, but that pretty much the easy part of any validation. Get an ISS(instruction set simulator), run code. The majority of the validation for a new core design or heavy modification to an existing core design is at the unit level which ARM isn't going to be providing much if anything for.
ISS, frameworks, et al.
no because pretty much no one wants to compete directly with Intel.
That has little to do with the fact that there are numerous companies out there that have the full legal ability. AMD has and has had a full license to everything and they haven't been able to compete, but that is down to poor execution and strategy more than anything.
The same can be/will be said for many of the ARM licensees trying to compete with ARM...
Welcome to ANY ISA design from scratch. The same is true with ARM, there are going to be flaws, gaps, and ambiguities. HELL, that's still an actual issue with IEEE FP! So you do what most people do, you go with what every other device does.
The x86 ISA is at least as well defined in available public documentation as ARM is. In fact, x86 has overall a more thorough set of documentation at this point than pretty much every other ISA.
You keep using that word impossible, but it really doesn't apply here. I'm pretty sure that Intel would license x86 to anyone willing to pay the licensing fee as well...
Yes, they have gotten more restrictive.
LOL!!Their goal and they have achieved it was to build a desktop class processor within mobile phone constraints.
Why not? Because they haven't been designed for those frequencies. They have been designed for 4W or so, so why would they have bothered with higher frequencies than 2GHz something? It costs time and transistors and power and die area and money to optimize it for higher frequencies at a reasonable voltage. It just won't work. And never mind cooling the chip seeing how high Apple pushes the transistor density.Can these processors be clocked to 3 to 4 Ghz if they enjoyed the cooling systems of an actual desktop? Why not? I'm sure they have these things water cooled just to see how far they can stress them back in the lab.
LOL!!
Do you know any ARM chip in the world that:
* Has similar IPC to Skylake
* Can be clocked at say 4.3GHz
* At 1.2V
Krait, for example, reaches something like 1.3V at half the clock speed
LOL!!
Do you know any ARM chip in the world that:
* Has similar IPC to Skylake
* Can be clocked at say 4.3GHz
* At 1.2V
Krait, for example, reaches something like 1.3V at half the clock speed :biggrin::biggrin:.
Why not? Because they haven't been designed for those frequencies. They have been designed for 4W or so, so why would they have bothered with higher frequencies than 2GHz something? It costs time and transistors and power and die area and money to optimize it for higher frequencies at a reasonable voltage. It just won't work. And never mind cooling the chip seeing how high Apple pushes the transistor density.
Without additional efforts, Haswell wouldn't go higher than 2GHz.
Of course if you are literraly starting your design "from scratch", but noone does that anymore (because it would take years and mountains of cash for an very uncertain result), you take an existing design, tweak it and sometime switch it to a different ISA.
This is what Nvidia did with Denver, this is what Broadcom is doing with Vulcan, this is what Applied Micro did, this is what AMD is (supposedly) doing, ...
Do you have any source for that?
This is the first time I see anyone saying this, although obviously this may not be public information, I don't see why Intel would make these tools available if they don't get anything out of it (ie a license fee).
Funny that the only example you can give is AMD who has acquired the rights more than 30 years ago.
Again, the difference is that you have a contract with ARM that entitles you to do it and get support for it.
Which is still one big text document very hard to translate into a CPU and validate. ARM won't help you with the design (but as said earlier, if you are starting from scratch today, you are clearly very optimistic), but will with the validation (in a non-trivial way).
Actually that is a big opportunity for Apple, using the chips from FF corner for desktop and from SS corner for iPhone/iPad. That is precisely what Intel is doing.
Has Internet Strongman Juanrga destroyed you so completely that you have totally lost hope with AMD and out of desperation have now jumped onto the ARM bandwagon?
Who says "desktop class" must mean Skylake?
Not sure how you came to that conclusion. Qualcomm did great with their custom core in the last generation. This generation they had to go generic with the A57, and lost lots of market share as a result. Next generation they are going back to custom. The moral I get from this is that custom CPU was a good differentiator for Qualcomm, and that they regret not having it this time around.
Clearly it means Bulldozer.
. . .
(okay, maybe not)
For A8X, I get just under 2340 ms in Kraken 1.1 on iOS 9.1.
For A7 in the iPhone 5s I get 3542 in iOS 9.1, which is a huge improvement from before. It was 5905 in the AnandTech review.
Meanwhile, for A5 in my iPad 2 with iOS 9.1, I get just over 25000, at 25024.
Just ran kraken 1.1 on the 6s and got 1739ms.
So just over double the speed of the 5s which scores 3540ms using same ios9
Impressive speed increase in just 2 years