X86 and ARM: the war for portable devices. Who will win?
At the beginning of the zero technical progress went uphill, mobile began to appear in everyone, the Internet spread everywhere, and devices acquired more and more functions. Everyone lived happily, Intel riveted processors for computers, arm designed them for mobile devices. And everything would be fine until the mobiles began to increase, and laptops decreased. And so, the two camps began a war for the production of processors for devices between phones and laptops. In this short article I want to consider the advantages and disadvantages of both architectures.
The first step towards fueling the war was the release of the Intel Atom processor in 2008. Inexpensive processor immediately caused a small boom. All of a sudden they wanted to use it in their devices, rumors about the next-generation iPhones on atoms began to appear, that this platform of the future is. However, everything is not as rosy as we would like.
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First, a little history.
The x86 architecture was developed by Intel in 1978. After that, a bunch of add-ons were performed on it, including many command sets were entered. Intel policy is designed to remain compatible with software designed for previous versions of processors. This entailed a variety of backups and, in general, in spite of the widespread use of this architecture, programming it on the asm does not give much pleasure.
ARM was developed a bit later than its brother - in 1983. However, this architecture turned out to be much more successful. In fact, the arm has remained unchanged to this day. Of course, various modifications were made, but it wasn’t like Intel to turn the world inside out and keep compatibility with the previous version.
The author, do not torment, let's compare!
So what is the advantage of the ARM architecture? The most important difference is, of course, the fact that arm is RISC architecture, and x86 CISC. What kind of buzzwords are these? And everything is very simple. In the RISC architecture, we have a small set of commands that help the programmer to implement all the actions, and there are many commands in the CISC, and if you need some perverse function, then most likely it is there. Cool CISC microprocessor instructions are certainly good for demanding applications like 3d max, Photoshop, and toys on good engines. But what demanding applications on phones and tablets? They, of course, no. Because of this, arm wins in several things:
1. Lower cost due to fewer transistors.
2. The laconism of the architecture, due to the absence of unnecessary functional blocks.
3. Less heat generation, again due to the smaller number of transistors.
It is also worth noting that arm went a little further than x86 in its development, relative to the structure. Historically, desktop computers have a bunch of chips, and everyone is responsible for their own. So, in addition to the processor, gpu, chipset is required, well, there are also some small adapters for network adapters. In mobile devices, all the necessary things have long been able to push into one chip. A good example would be Nvidia Tegra. There and cpu, and gpu, and then just do not have. Why is it good for mobile devices? Well, except that the device naturally turn out less, less money is required for production. To produce one large chip is often cheaper than two small ones. Again, a plus in the direction of the arm.
Also, arm has another advantage - these are companies that produce the appropriate microchips. On the x86 side, there are two giants, Intel and AMD, and the second is not in a hurry with the release of mobile chips. On the ARM side, there are more than 15 companies, including Nvidia, Samsung, Apple and Broadcom, which allows the architecture to develop at a high pace.
And what are the positive sides of x86? Strange, but they are much smaller. The first is Windows support, which, by the way, is doubtful whether it belongs to the pluses =). Well, a large number of development tools, and good optimizing compilers.
So what will happen next? The opinion of the majority of analysts that by about 2012, arm will occupy 50% of the netbook market. My personal opinion is that approximately by 2015, arm will occupy 35% for absolutely all user devices.
The first step towards fueling the war was the release of the Intel Atom processor in 2008. Inexpensive processor immediately caused a small boom. All of a sudden they wanted to use it in their devices, rumors about the next-generation iPhones on atoms began to appear, that this platform of the future is. However, everything is not as rosy as we would like.
')
First, a little history.
The x86 architecture was developed by Intel in 1978. After that, a bunch of add-ons were performed on it, including many command sets were entered. Intel policy is designed to remain compatible with software designed for previous versions of processors. This entailed a variety of backups and, in general, in spite of the widespread use of this architecture, programming it on the asm does not give much pleasure.
ARM was developed a bit later than its brother - in 1983. However, this architecture turned out to be much more successful. In fact, the arm has remained unchanged to this day. Of course, various modifications were made, but it wasn’t like Intel to turn the world inside out and keep compatibility with the previous version.
The author, do not torment, let's compare!
So what is the advantage of the ARM architecture? The most important difference is, of course, the fact that arm is RISC architecture, and x86 CISC. What kind of buzzwords are these? And everything is very simple. In the RISC architecture, we have a small set of commands that help the programmer to implement all the actions, and there are many commands in the CISC, and if you need some perverse function, then most likely it is there. Cool CISC microprocessor instructions are certainly good for demanding applications like 3d max, Photoshop, and toys on good engines. But what demanding applications on phones and tablets? They, of course, no. Because of this, arm wins in several things:
1. Lower cost due to fewer transistors.
2. The laconism of the architecture, due to the absence of unnecessary functional blocks.
3. Less heat generation, again due to the smaller number of transistors.
It is also worth noting that arm went a little further than x86 in its development, relative to the structure. Historically, desktop computers have a bunch of chips, and everyone is responsible for their own. So, in addition to the processor, gpu, chipset is required, well, there are also some small adapters for network adapters. In mobile devices, all the necessary things have long been able to push into one chip. A good example would be Nvidia Tegra. There and cpu, and gpu, and then just do not have. Why is it good for mobile devices? Well, except that the device naturally turn out less, less money is required for production. To produce one large chip is often cheaper than two small ones. Again, a plus in the direction of the arm.
Also, arm has another advantage - these are companies that produce the appropriate microchips. On the x86 side, there are two giants, Intel and AMD, and the second is not in a hurry with the release of mobile chips. On the ARM side, there are more than 15 companies, including Nvidia, Samsung, Apple and Broadcom, which allows the architecture to develop at a high pace.
And what are the positive sides of x86? Strange, but they are much smaller. The first is Windows support, which, by the way, is doubtful whether it belongs to the pluses =). Well, a large number of development tools, and good optimizing compilers.
So what will happen next? The opinion of the majority of analysts that by about 2012, arm will occupy 50% of the netbook market. My personal opinion is that approximately by 2015, arm will occupy 35% for absolutely all user devices.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/84242/
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