ARM Challenging Intel in the Server Market: An Overview
by Johan De Gelas on December 16, 2014 10:00 AM ESTMore Competition
There is no doubt that customers would benefit from Intel being challenged in the server market. There have been people arguing that the server market is healthy even with only one dominant player, since Intel is doomed to compete with previous Intel CPUs and cannot afford to slow down its update cycle. We disagree, as it is clear that the lack of competition is causing Intel to price its top Xeon EP quite a bit higher. In the midrange, there is no pressure to offer much better performance per dollar: a small increase is what we get. The recently launched Xeon E5 v3 is barely 15% faster at the same price than the Xeon E5 v2. So we would definitely like to see some healthy competition.
Are Economies of Scale and Volume Enough?
Yes, economies of scale is one of the reasons that Intel was able to overtake the RISC competition. However, simply accounting Intel's success back at the end of previous century to being the player with the highest unit sales is short sighted. Look at the table below, which describes the situation back in late 1995:
| Vendor | CPU | SPECint95 | SPECfp95 |
| Intel | Pentium Pro 200 | 8.2 | 6.8 |
| Digital | Alpha 21164 333 MHz | 9.8 | 13.4 |
| MIPS (SGI) | R8000 90 MHz | 5.5 | 12 |
| SUN | Ultra I 167 MHz | 6.6 | 9.4 |
| HP | PA7200-RISC 120MHz | 6.4 | 9.1 |
There are three things you should note. First, excluding the Alpha 21164, Intel managed to outperform every RISC competitor out there with their first server chip in integer performance. Intel managed this by excellent execution and innovative micro-architecture features (such as the 256KB SRAM + core MCM package and out-of-order micro-ops back-end). Intel also had a process technology lead and used 350nm while the rest of the competition was still stuck at 500nm.
Second, Intel was lucky that the top performer – Alpha – had the lowest marketshare, software base, and marketing power. Third, the server and workstation market was divided between the RISC Players. Software development was very fragmented among the RISC platforms.
So in a nutshell, there were several reasons why Intel succeeded at breaking into the server market besides their larger user base in the desktop world:
- Focused investments in a vertical production line and excellent execution, and as a result the best process technology in the world
- The performance and technology leader was not the strongest player in the market
- The market was fragmented, so divide and conquer was much easier
Currently, the ARM SoC challengers do not have those advantages. As far as we know, Intel's process is still the most advanced process technology on the planet. Samsung is probably close but at the moment their next generation process is not available to the Intel competitors.
Right now, Intel dominates - or more accurately owns - the server market. Every possible piece of expensive software runs on Intel, which is a very different situation from back in the RISC world of the nineties, where many pieces of important software only ran on certain RISC CPUs. Today, the server market is anything but fragmented. That makes the scale advantage of the ARM competitors a very weak argument. Intel's user base – the growing server market and declining desktop market – is large enough to sustain heavy R&D investments for a long time, contrary to the RISC vendors in the nineties which had to share a very profitable but again fragmented market.
If you're not convinced, just imagine the Alpha 21164 was the dominant RISC Server CPU, with 90-95% server market share. Just imagine that instead of having some server applications running only on SPARC or on HP PA-RISC, that every server software ran on Alpha. Now combine this with the fact that Windows on Alpha was available. It is pretty obvious that it would be have been a lot harder for Intel to break into the server and workstation market had this been the case.
So just because ARM SoCs are sold in the billions does not mean they will automatically overtake Intel server CPUs. Intel beat the RISC players because the market was fragmented, and because none of them were executing as well as Intel. For ARM alternatives to really gain traction, they need to do a lot more than simply compete in a few niche markets, as Calxeda has shown.
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esterhasz - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
But this is exactly why a wider array of machines based on their chips would make sense: the R&D cost is already spent anyways, since iPhone and iPad need chips, selling more units thus reduces R&D cost per unit. Economies of scale.I don't believe a MBA variant with ARM is down the road either, but the rumored iPad Pro could develop into something similar rather quickly.
OreoCookie - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
If you want to talk about ARM on the desktop, that's a whole other discussion, but one that most certainly needs to include price: if the price difference between a Broadwell-based Core M and a fictitious Apple A9X is $200~$230, then this changes the discussion completely. Two other factors are graphics performance (the Core M has »only« 1.3 billion transistors, the A8X ~2 billion, indicating that the mythical A9X may have faster graphics) and the fact that Apple controls the release schedule and can spec the SoC to meet its projected needs. To view this topic solely through the lens of CPU performance is myopic.darkich - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
Your comparisons missed the picture spectacularly.A8X is a 20nm 2-4W TDP chip with a price that is probably around 70$.
Top of the line Core M5Y70 is a 14nm 4.5 W TDP chip with a price of 270$.
And it has a weaker GPU, btw. (raw performance). And it throttles massively, effectively giving only 50% of the benchmark performance.
If you're going to compare that to an Apple chip, compare it to a 14nm A9X with custom derived PowerVR series 7 GPU,(scales up to 1,4 TFLOPS) vastly expanded memory controllers connected to a much faster RAM (compared to one in the iPad) upclocked to 2GHz, that are available at any time.
darkich - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
.. *with cores upclocked to about 2GHzFlunk - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Nintendo already sells ARM systems, the 3DS and the DS before it are both ARM-based. The PSVita is ARM too. I don't see an ARM Macbook Air anytime soon, they need a bigger and higher-clocking chip for that and it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.Nintendo Maniac 64 - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Even the Game Boy Advance used an ARM7 for its main CPU.jjj - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Obviously there are handhelds using ARM but the point was about bigger cores and clearly not handhelds.DLoweinc - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Don't quote Wikipedia, not suitable for this level of writing.garbagedisposal - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
Says DLoweinc, master of knowledge and scholarly writing.In contrast to your childish and outdated opinion, Wikipedia is a perfectly valid source of information, go read about it and quit crying.
Daniel Egger - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
The problem really is the custom solutions can simply not compete with Intel on any level for general purpose computing (which the majority of applications are), not on performace/price, performance/power and not even on features/price.For instance I can see a huge market for sub-Xeon (or Atom C) performance at a corresponding price -> not going to happen because everyone is targeting > Xeon performance at ridiculous prices because they're expecting the margin to be there however there're simply to many compromises to be made by the buyers so that has to fail.
Also I can see a huge demand for Atom C - Xeon performance at lower power consumption however no one seems to be really targetting this, all we get are Raspberry Pi's and a bit beefier but close from even Atom C. The new virtualisation techniques (Docker et al) opened a whole new can of possibilities for non-x86(_64) devices because virtualisation is suddenly possible and much more lightweight than ever before but no one seems to want to jump this opportunity.
I'd really like to buy some affordable general purpose (BYOM/BYOS) hardware which has a little bit of oomph and takes little power which should be the powerful sides of any of the contenders but somehow all fail to deliver and I don't even see an attempt to change that.
If I want mind-boggling performance at decent performance/price ratio with real virtualisation and 100% standard software compatibility there's no way around the high end Xeons (and maybe AMD iff they manage to get their asses back up) and none of the contenders is ever going to challenge that so they might as well stop trying.