HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ

I love how ARM's killer feature of low power consumption came completely by accident. [1] ACORN designed ARM as a desktop processor with good memory bandwidth, and only discovered its energy efficiency when a prototype continued running without a power supply from signal input voltages.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ

Here's a link to the video of an interview with Steve Furber [1], who worked on the chip's development, discussing this.

[1] https://youtu.be/1jOJl8gRPyQ?t=508

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ

Steve Furber on the creation of ARM, quite interesting.

Also signal input can in certain cases power devices[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/1jOJl8gRPyQ?t=502

⬐ acqq

Also the parts of the interview of prof Furber:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y4WG549i3YY

"Building the BBC Micro (The Beeb) - Computerphile"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=izy6h_vvSxU

"The Path Towards ARM & BBC B - Computerphile"

⬐ todd-davies

I'm lucky enough to have Professor Furber as a lecturer at Manchester. His insights into how mobile systems are designed and engineered are fascinating, as is his work with SpiNNaker project.

⬐ danellis

Me too, in 1997! He often referred to his work from the 80s, and it was great to hear it from the horse's mouth.

⬐ pjmlp

Back in the day I remember going through Computer Shopper (UK version) and learning about the Archimedes in alternative computing section.

Sadly never saw one live.

⬐ danellis

I grew up with Acorn computers. The Archimedes was an amazing machine for its time, and for an aspiring programmer, having a structured BBC BASIC (fastest interpreted BASIC in the world) with a built-in ARM assembler made for some quick learning.

⬐ vegabook

I love arm and own a cubietruck and a Pi. But my initial hopes of clustering up tons of arms together have been dashed by a very hard dose of reality: the bog-standard core i7 in my Dell M3800 is 50x faster. Try this on your pi in iPython:

  import numpy as np
  xx = np.random.rand(1000000).reshape((1000, 1000))
  %timeit np.linalg.eig(xx)

67 seconds on my RPi B 2, 1.2 seconds on my i7 (admittedly, using MKL optimizations but the factor would still be 15x without it, and arguably, MKL is simply making full use of the Intel instruction set). I get 0.65 on my desktop Precision Xeon. Fully 100x faster.

So yes ARM is great. But let's be honest, Intel is vastly, vastly ahead when it comes to anything that is not a toy.

⬐ minthd

For a more fair comparison, paypal recently deployed X-Gene ARM servers[1]. They said about it: "“The X-Gene-equipped units [at PayPal] cost approximately one-half the price of traditional data center infrastructure hardware and incurred only one-seventh of the annual running cost,”".I assume they compared it to an equally powerful intel system.

[1]http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/04/29/paypa...

⬐ vardump

The original Pi has plenty of processing power. It's just not in the ARM core, but in Videocore IV. Did your implementation or the library you used use VCIV?

Bear in mind VCIV can encode h.264 video 1920x1080 @30 fps. The architecture should be just fine for linear algebra, if 32-bit floats are enough for you.

Raspberry Pi is a very misunderstood device and 95%+ of its true performance is going wasted if you just use it as a simple ARMv6 + VFP Linux computer.

⬐ joosters

Also bear in mind that the ARM processor in the Pi is several generations old... it was never cutting edge even when the Pi was first introduced.

⬐ Jugurtha

>So yes ARM is great. But let's be honest, Intel is vastly, vastly ahead when it comes to anything that is not a toy.

Well, I agree if you're using "toy" as Romans used "Barbarian". If you mean by "toy" anything that's not desktop, then yes.

But if you look at what happens in an industrial setting and do a teardown on those tools (oil industry, for example), you won't find Intel processors, you'll find FPGAs and ARM processors in a bunch of tiny toys that cost about 75k each.

So it appears that "toy" is not what the device is destined to be, but what the people who buy it end up using it for.

As with any programming language, you can print "Hello world" and leave it at that, or you can build a massive thing.

The limits of imagination are unfortunately reached way before the hardware limitations are.

⬐ JoeAltmaier

Mobile is big. But so are servers. I read America's energy budget is 1% server farms, which makes it scary big.

So I'm not so sure industrial devices plus mobile adds up to that. Any figures you can share?

⬐ Jugurtha

Correct me if I'm wrong if I assume you use the word "mobile" to mean "something that's portable" and not in a "mobile phone" way..

If this is the case, then the example I gave was about oil services companies using such devices in their 'tools'.

These tools are used to do things like Reservoir Characterization (is there oil? How much? How easily can it be extracted? What does it look like inside? At what depths?).

Here's another example:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2012/06/21/oil-giant-t...

It's such a shame they don't really communicate a lot because they do some really, really cool stuff. The featured company is known as "The biggest company you've never heard of" (3 x the size of Halliburton, 80+ countries, etc).

Also, the automotive industry uses a lot of stuff with ARM architecture (from Atmel, Altera, etc).. I know I've seen in ECUs (Electronic Control Units). These things control the vehicle (injection, etc).

They're also used in PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) -Stuxnet targeted Siemens PLCs, for example of what the things are-.

And let alone the stuff you find in air conditionners, alarm systems wether for home or cars, elevators, other types of machinery, etc..

⬐ JoeAltmaier

Yeah but industrial doesn't even show up as a pimple on the spreadsheet of devices. Because so many consumers. Billions of consumers.

⬐ vegabook

Yes the RPi is a fantastic device and I am building a small minimilastic hardware terminal for financial visualization around it which will be dirt cheap and surprisingly powerful, mainly because its graphics are actually really fast enough for 3d vector viz. I was just pointing out that there is a lot of "arm is taking over" commentary out there and that needs to take into account the performance differential, which is still enormous.

⬐ joezydeco

I'm sure Intel wishes they owned a larger share of that "toy" smartphone/tablet market right now.

⬐ rdsnsca

They do... they are actually paying OEM's to use their mobile chips.

⬐ acqq

Look at the power consumption: without USB, the Pi needs just one Watt. If the Intel that you compared to used more than 15 Watts, the Pi was better per Watt. And in some uses you care about performance per Watt, like when you have a smartphone. That's why ARM rules there.

⬐ None

None

⬐ danellis

> let's be honest, Intel is vastly, vastly ahead when it comes to anything that is not a toy.

That just shows a lack of understanding of the market. Not every application needs powerful processors. Sometimes they need low-power or low-cost processors. Something is not a "toy" when it is specifically engineered to meet different but equally serious requirements.

ARM-based processors vastly outsell Intel processors.

⬐ vegabook

Actually, dollar for dollar, Intel:ARM sales looks a lot like Intel:ARM performance. Something like 50:1.

⬐ danellis

When Intel are selling hundreds of millions of processors a year and ARM are selling tens of billions a year? That's pretty much the opposite way around.

(By 'selling processors' I mean 'licensing cores', of course, as ARM are fabless.)

⬐ vegabook

That's like comparing grains of wheat to fully baked lasagnas, buddy. What matters is what the market is prepared to pay for the tech. No arguments here. Fifty:one. It's a verifiable fact just like my ipython example.

Now that does not mean that grains of wheat are not useful. As I said, I love the Pi and I own two arm platforms for which I have ambitious use cases. I just don't delude myself about who owns the performance.

⬐ danellis

Then with that 50:1 (I just checked, and it is for 2014 revenue) you're comparing the annual revenue of a company that licenses CPU cores with a company that makes CPUs, solid state drives, servers, networking equipment... so yes, obviously Intel has a higher revenue.

⬐ JoeAltmaier

Latest figures I can find (2012) show Intel outselling all ARM/mobile by 5X. That must have changed?

⬐ Veratyr

Intel during Q3 2014 set a record 100 million processor sales that quarter[1].

During the same period, ARM reports 1.1 billion "processors and smartcards" shipped[2]. As for how many of those are in smartphones (powerful), ARM is estimated to power 90% of smartphones[3], of which 326 million were sold during Q3 2014[4].

If you're after dollar sales, Q3 2014 had them at $320m[2] and Intel at $14.6b[5].

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-finance-record-revenu...

[2] http://www.arm.com/about/arm-holdings-plc-reports-results-fo...

[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/darcytravlos/2013/02/28/arm-hold...

[4] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25224914

[5] http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2014...

⬐ JoeAltmaier

Why are smartcards conflated with processors, do you think?

⬐ danellis

http://www.arm.com/markets/embedded/smart-cards.php