What will Microsoft use its ARM license for?
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From: gnirre on 26 Jul 2010 07:33 Will Microsofts design an ARM processor? If so, what operating system will it be intended for? What architectural features would Microsoft be looking for in its own ARM processor? Is the main purpose to be infull control over the next ARM version "ARMv8"? By the way, what characteristics does the Apple ARM Cortex A8- processor Apple A4 have? Is this known? - Jan Tångring, editor of swedish language electronics news site etn.se
From: Robert on 26 Jul 2010 11:46 "gnirre" <gnirre(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:284da124-7934-42bb-a58c-899a935a04ce(a)5g2000yqz.googlegroups.com... > Will Microsofts design an ARM processor? If so, what operating system > will it be intended for? What architectural features would Microsoft > be looking for in its own ARM processor? > > Is the main purpose to be infull control over the next ARM version > "ARMv8"? > > By the way, what characteristics does the Apple ARM Cortex A8- > processor Apple A4 have? Is this known? > > - Jan T�ngring, editor of swedish language electronics news site > etn.se A few possible choices: 1) Phones. 2) a Larrabee type thing with 2x as many cores, as ARM is smaller. 3) They have that new Kinnect/xbox thing. Maybe cheaper with a custom core? 4) Try the i960 coprocessor again, this time with something easier to customize.
From: jgd on 27 Jul 2010 14:34 In article <284da124-7934-42bb-a58c-899a935a04ce(a)5g2000yqz.googlegroups.com>, gnirre(a)gmail.com (gnirre) wrote: > Will Microsofts design an ARM processor? I doubt it very much. They probably want to put an ARM with custom peripherals onto a chip in some piece of equipment. They do sell quite a lot of electronics in various forms: this could well go into a Zune successor, for example. > If so, what operating system will it be intended for? Well, almost certainly not Windows. ARM does not have 64-bit addressing, and doesn't have the kind of performance per thread that modern AMD and Intel x86-64 processors provide. Windows has got used to that kind of performance, and stripping it down to run at a useful speed on an ARM would be really hard work. Besides, the usefulness of Windows is in the range of applications available, and many of those were not designed to be portable to other architectures. The one-per-child laptop guy who appealed to MS to produce an ARM version of Windows 7 last year clearly didn't understand what he was asking for. As for phones and suchlike portable devices, Windows Mobile already runs on ARM for them. > Is the main purpose to be infull control over the next ARM version > "ARMv8"? We're already up to ARM9, I think. MS would not be acquiring control over the architecture by buying an AMD license; to do that they'd have to buy ARM the company. ARM doesn't want to be bought, and few to none of ARM's customers would want MS to own ARM. > By the way, what characteristics does the Apple ARM Cortex A8- > processor Apple A4 have? Is this known? There's some stuff on Wikipedia: four cores, about 1GHz clock speed. -- John Dallman, jgd(a)cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
From: Paul Gotch on 27 Jul 2010 19:45 jgd(a)cix.compulink.co.uk wrote: > We're already up to ARM9, I think. We are up to ARM architecture version 7. The various ARM9s were implementations of ARMv4T and ARMv5TE originally designed in the late 90s and early 00s. > > By the way, what characteristics does the Apple ARM Cortex A8- > > processor Apple A4 have? Is this known? > There's some stuff on Wikipedia: four cores, about 1GHz clock speed. The Cortex-A8 is not multi core capable, so that's rather unlikely. -p -- Paul Gotch --------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Andy Glew "newsgroup at on 27 Jul 2010 23:15
On 7/27/2010 11:34 AM, jgd(a)cix.compulink.co.uk wrote: > In article > <284da124-7934-42bb-a58c-899a935a04ce(a)5g2000yqz.googlegroups.com>, > gnirre(a)gmail.com (gnirre) wrote: > >> Will Microsofts [sic] design an ARM processor? > > I doubt it very much. They probably want to put an ARM with custom > peripherals onto a chip in some piece of equipment. They do sell quite a > lot of electronics in various forms: this could well go into a Zune > successor, for example. If that was what they wanted, they could have bought a much cheaper license, that allows them to use an existing ARM core design, and build an SOC out of it. Instead, according to reports ARM has bought an architecture license, that allows them to create their own completely different CPU design. Different CPU pipeline. I'm not sure, but I believe it may allow them to create a 64 bit implementation (probably with ARM agreeing on the ISA details). |