Intel Now Brother in ARMs

At the Intel Developer Forum now taking place in San Francisco, it was announced that Intel is entering into a new licensing agreement with ARM and will start producing ARM SOC (single-chip systems) for smartphones using third-party technology using third-party orders.
Immediately after reading this phrase, many probably will have the desire to immediately go into the comments for participation in the next series of eternal discussion “monsters vs. aliens ” “x86 vs. ARM” - please, it's up to you. But for those who still want to understand and understand what is happening and why now and what happened earlier in Intel and ARM relations, welcome to Cat.

The full news sensation goes like this: Intel Custom Foundry Division (Silicon Workshop for Intel Customers) now offers access to ARM's licensed intellectual property - ARM Artisan physical IP , including POP IP, based on the most advanced ARM cores and the Cortex processor series. Production will be conducted on the latest 10-nm process technology (not yet used in x86 production), which will achieve best-in-class performance indicators for power consumption, performance and chip area and successfully use the CPUs in mobile, IOT and other devices. One of the first customers to produce the above ARM chips will be LG Electronics .

In general, Intel and ARM ... What ?? For some, it sounds like "Coca-Sola started Pepsi production ...", but this is absolutely not the case! The history of cooperation between Intel and ARM has almost 20 years, and is not going to end.
')

▍So what happened?

It is well known that Intel silicon factories are the most advanced in the world, superior in technical capabilities to their competitors. But few know that not only Intel chips are released on them. Since 2010, factories have provided opportunities for third-party companies to manufacture their own systems for them, and, in turnkey mode, from design with IP provision to testing. And companies successfully use this service. The first customer was the Altera FPGA developer, later acquired by Intel. And in 2014, Panasonic announced its intention to use the services of Intel Custom Foundry for the release of systems on a chip. ICF clients include Achronix Semiconductor, Netronome, Microsemi — as you see, this is not a x86 architecture at all.



In addition, Intel is one of the largest holders of the ARM license - both for the core (core) and the architectural one, which makes it possible to create its derived cores based on ARM. Moreover, in 2010 (already in the iPhone era), Intel brought ARM the largest revenue in the form of license fees, well ahead of Samsung and Apple. Unfortunately, it is not possible to find later data, but even without them it is clear that this news is just an upgrade of old ones, the transition of Intel to the most modern ARM technologies.

But the greatest interest this news is in conjunction with the recent (spring 2016) news that Intel stops / cancels the release of Atom processors for smartphones, that is, the x86 CPU in this market no longer compete with ARM. This ended a very interesting decade in the history of the development of processors for Intel mobile devices, which began with the abandonment of the Intel ARM CPU (XScale) - the company sold its corresponding division in 2006 and ended with the abandonment of the Intel x86 Atom.



Why did this happen? Although some news items contain thoughts like "the processor giant admitted that the ARM architecture for the smartphone and tablet segment is much better, " because of my professional work in the past 12 years and knowledge of x86 and ARM microarchitecture, I strongly disagree with this statement. Today, ARM and Atom are about equal. But for the victory of x86, this, alas, is not enough.


MegaFon Mint - the first communicator on the Intel Atom in Russia

Rejecting Atom in this segment, I would explain this. Here you live in a house that you have long ago bought and arranged to your liking, and where everything suits you. Not 100% of course, this does not happen in life at all, but close to that. And one day, a real estate merchant comes to you and starts to persuade him to "pay him a little and move to a new house." And your reasonable question - “why?” Explains that “the new house is, first of all, in a prestigious area, and its total area is 5 meters larger than the old one”. To which you, most likely, will answer that prestige and 5 extra meters are certainly good, but obviously not enough for additional payments and terrible mess with the move. And in general, you and the old place have excellent neighbors, a number - a gym and a shop, and you can make an extension to this house in the future. And although the merchant promises that he will definitely help with the relocation, and in general you will live closer to work, most likely you will refuse. Especially if you are a freelancer. Now, if you were offered an extra floor, a swimming pool, and even for free, you would have thought ...

In the same way, most likely, the manufacturers of smartphones reacted to the proposal to replace the ARM processor with x86 in the devices manufactured by them ...

▍And some more ancient ARM history at Intel

In the mid-1990s, DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), in collaboration with ARM, created the StrongARM processor, which in 1997 was sold to Intel. At the beginning of 2000x, the StrongARM core was reworked by Intel engineers and led to the emergence of a XScale processor (with two families: PXA for mobile devices and IXP for networking), which developed until the summer of 2006, when, as was said above, the entire PXA business was sold to Intel by Marvell Technology Group.


HP iPAQ rw6815 - communicator based on Intel PXA

In 2004-2006, I was engaged in exactly XScale - was responsible for interaction with all independent manufacturers of software for mobile devices in Europe, and my first ever article on Habré, written back in 2009, is Mobile History. ARM, Atom, X86, PDA, UMPC and other letters and numbers ... - that's about it. Perhaps it will be interesting for you, like me, to see it from the perspective of today.
Since then, we have posted quite a few posts on Intel Atom mobile processors on the Intel blog, up to ... the moment when, in a sense, everything returned to its original position.

And now, finally - welcome to the comments. Intel - ARM General!