ARM: True 3D Netbook Gaming in 2010
Gamers may be able to play the latest PC games on netbooks in the first half of 2010 according to ARM.
TechRadar recently spoke with embedded core designer ARM Ltd. in regards to its new 2 GHz multicore Cortex-A9 mobile processor. The company revealed that it is currently developing dual-core, quad-core, and eight-core processor designs for the mobile, netbook and smartbook markets. ARM's VP of Marketing in the processor division, Eric Schorn, said that gamers should see netbooks capable of running the latest PC games sometime in the first half of 2010.
Earlier today, ARM also announced the development of two Cortex-A9 MPCore hard macro implementations--code-named Osprey--for TSMC's 40nm-G process. This allows silicon manufacturers "to have a rapid and low-risk route to silicon for high-performance, low-power Cortex-A9 processor-based devices," and also enables devices to operate at frequencies greater than 2 GHz. "This hard macro implementation operates in excess of 2GHz when selected from typical silicon and represents an ideal solution for high-margin performance-oriented applications," the company said.
PC World also expands the news, chatting with Nandan Nayampally, director of CPU marketing at ARM. He said that the dual-core ARM processor will not always be used at 2 GHz, revealing that the speed can be scaled down to drop power consumption (although it consumes 1.9 watts of power). He said that the speed will ultimately depend on customers who implement the design.
However, if netbooks manufacturers choose to pre-install Windows 7 Starter Edition, they may have to abandon designs using the ARM architecture, as Microsoft announced back in June that the new OS would not run on ARM's technology. PC Magazine suggests that companies such as FreeScale will have to use the core found in Linux-powered smartbooks.
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Yup, sounded exciting except no windows, so how will it game w/o windows? Maybe XP or vista will install on it?
Linux is great, I dual boot all my systems, but for games it's ... meh.
XP will install on it, vista will not. wouldn't be surprised to find some sort of 3rd party emulation such as wine in the mix though...
never really seen an ARM based system perform very well with windows... so guess we'll just have to see.
On the Windows side of things for all who wonder if XP/Vista/Win7 run on ARM, well, the desktop editions don't. But there are also Windows Tablet editions that do run.
Why will Windows 7 not run on these machines?
they are the cores they use in the iPhone3GS and possibly PSP2? sounds pretty cool
Why will Windows 7 not run on these machines?
Because Windows 7 currently only supports Intel x86-compatible CPUs (which includes AMD and Via CPUs). Past versions of Windows supported Itanium and way back in the Windows NT days MIPS was supported. Only the embedded versions of Windows (like Windows Mobile) support ARM but these versions are not entirely compatible with win32 (the application programming interface on desktop Windows) and leave a lot of libraries out that aren't needed for embedded systems. All the different versions and licenses are really quite a mess. Compare this to Linux which is modular and can be customized by anyone for anything.
I have seen promises of an arm based netbook 'coming next quarter' for about a year now and I'm getting tired of waiting to be honest. The OLPC foundation introduced the netbook to the world for developing nations and everyone copied them to make money. Now the OLPC group is working on an arm notebook and soon it will be copied.
Now this is what I call a professional Toms article!
No porn crap, to the point, short, and informative!
I'm surprised ARM goes over the 2Ghz limit,but don't think there will be that many 'modern games' it can run, other than opensource games.
ARM is still not supported by Windows, so a lot of games won't be playable.
I'm also not expecting those ARM processors to be as cheap as the Intel ones. They're not bouncing up to the x86 cpu's like AMD,and VIA; thus their price will be most likely higher.
I'd also like to know how overclockable an ARM processor is or will be, and if there are many Linux applications that allow overclocking.
I'm also not expecting those ARM processors to be as cheap as the Intel ones. They're not bouncing up to the x86 cpu's like AMD,and VIA; thus their price will be most likely higher.
ARM licenses its designs and other companies build the core and set it into a System-on-a-Chip with basically the north and southbridges plus graphics. Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and nVidia all have ARM cores in SoCs out now that are going into mobile phones, PMPs, and "smartbooks." Hell, Nintendo uses ARM for the DS. In short, there's a lot of competition out there with plenty of high quality offerings featuring ARM at relatively low prices. You think AMD and VIA keep Intel's prices low? There are even more competitors with ARM designs.
As for overclocking, the current Cortex 8 is normally clocked at 600MHz in most products, but it can often be pushed up around 1GHz. Smaller manufacturing processes will probably enable greater overclocks.
Wow...
ARM, when will we see you in the desktop?
Once Microsoft allows something other than x86 again right?
On the Windows side of things for all who wonder if XP/Vista/Win7 run on ARM, well, the desktop editions don't. But there are also Windows Tablet editions that do run.
The google OS might be out by then. I'm sure MS would make a version if google made a version for ARM. Browser games should run.
Competition is good!
Once again the holy M$-$Intel$ alliance is killing the already poor competition and new ideas. WE NEED FLEXIBILITY damnit. sigh...
ARM licenses its designs and other companies build the core and set it into a System-on-a-Chip with basically the north and southbridges plus graphics. Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and nVidia all have ARM cores in SoCs out now that are going into mobile phones, PMPs, and "smartbooks." Hell, Nintendo uses ARM for the DS. In short, there's a lot of competition out there with plenty of high quality offerings featuring ARM at relatively low prices. You think AMD and VIA keep Intel's prices low? There are even more competitors with ARM designs. As for overclocking, the current Cortex 8 is normally clocked at 600MHz in most products, but it can often be pushed up around 1GHz. Smaller manufacturing processes will probably enable greater overclocks.
I was more comparing that upcoming ARM processor to the Intel Atom processor. The Atom processor is relatively cheap. I'm expecting this ARM processor to be a competitor to the Intel Atom processor, and am fairly sure it'll be able to beat the Atom in battery life tests.
In performance, it might, or might not..
In any case, seems like a great alternative to current Atom processor used in netbooks.
This is a ridiculous claim. "Latest PC Games" are x86 code, using Win32 APIs, with graphics running DirectX 9+ APIs (Windows XP or higher only)
Windows XP and later Windows desktop version don't run on ARM code
If Eric Shorn truly said that, he was being at least disingeneous. What is worse, for a technical site like Tom's to select that impossible gaming quote to title an article about porting ARM cores to 40nm at TSMC is frankly demonstrative of how low the old good Tom's site has fallen
I don't know about "running the latest PC games", some of which will be Windows API and DirectX specific. However, many of the latest games are also available for the Xbox360 and PS3, which use the Xenon and Cell CPUs respectively and neither is x86 based. Clearly, those are not dependent upon Windows APIs and DirectX, therefore, it's entirely possible that those games could be ported to an ARM based system if there is a sufficient market for them.
A 2GHz dual core ARM would not be performance competitive with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, however, it should be competitive with an Atom CPU and offer lower power consumption. Pair it with a high performance GPU (perhaps a PowerVR SGXMP) and you could have an amazingly high performance (perhaps comparable to a high end gaming PC in 2005) device that could even be battery powered. Put in more powerful (and more power hungry) GPUs from AMD or Nvidia and you might have the next gen Wii.
Maybe just maybe it will play the new games.
Why will Windows 7 not run on these machines?
Windows will only run on CPUs that run x86 code - Intel CPUS and AMD too. A x86 ROM emulator also works, because you can install windows on a Transmetta Crusoe CPU that has a built in x86 emulator. ARM will have to pay a license fee though.
I still don't think this new CPU is going to make a splash.
Why will Windows 7 not run on these machines?
Because it's not x86.
If the ARM CPU supports virtualization reasonably well, it could install Windows just fine, they could take a very minimal stripped down Linux kernel running Virtualbox and run Windows with no problem. They certainly could do it without violating the x86 licensing BS.
even if windows runs and the processor does well and bests all of the current mobile cpus, this doesn't ensure proper gaming in any way. At least not without a proper gpu to go with it... and since the current mobile gpus are both not the strongest nor the coolest solutions,
I believe we are still a ways off..
but good initiative nonetheless.
Greetings from Europe,
Mike
Well, some game makers already have Linux ports of their games - whether they made it public or not. Id software's engines are open source, and Blizzard has a Linux client for WoW that they keep secret (they just say it exists).
Now, imagine this: a $200 laptop come out, using a SoC with enough power to run successful games with nice graphics; priced like a console (DS-like), able to do gaming, but with a keyboard and the ability to run a web browser and an office suite (OpenOffice.org is being ported to ARM); it also sports an OS that is supported by a multibillion company, with free versatile APIs (say, Chrome OS) and which uses a stable, known basis (the Linux kernel).
Back to efficiency. ARM is a processor design that does very well at branching; it has as many general purpose registers as x86-32, but doesn't "waste" transistors on stuff like 'real-mode' 8086 nor 286 backward compatibility, nor does it have a 386 instruction set (which was a CISC-like design) that requires a complex instructions decompiler (ARM is a RISC-type 32-bit processor).
You won't compress an XviD movie in software mode on an ARM core at any meaningful speed; however, the ARM will run the AI of any game at very good speeds (graphics are left to the GPU). And, if you make use of CUDA or OpenCL to access the GPU core with its 64 shader units, you'll be able to compress your XviD movie faster than a 2 GHz Core 2 could.
Now, the biggest problem: who would dare selling an efficient, cleverly designed, inexpensive computer, and not incur Intel's nor Microsoft's wrath? That rules out every PC hardware maker currently in existence.
If the ARM CPU supports virtualization reasonably well, it could install Windows just fine, they could take a very minimal stripped down Linux kernel running Virtualbox and run Windows with no problem. They certainly could do it without violating the x86 licensing BS.
Unfortunately ARM designs so far aren't that hot at emulating x86. I've been following a forum of developers for a Texas Instruments OMAP3530 (Cortex A8-based, 600MHz) platform and last time I checked Qemu allowed x86 code to reach speeds comparable to a 486 at best. Using WINE under a Linux kernel doesn't work because WINE is x86 only, apparently. Things may have moved along since I've looked, though, but don't count on virtualization giving you an XP-capable smartbook. It might have to do with the RISC nature of ARM having to do more work to match the CISC nature of x86: you can theoretically simulate any computer on any other computer, but it'll most likely be very slow if you're simulating a "bigger" one on a smaller one.
ARM is already many steps behind nvidia tegra
Tegra IS an ARM chip.