Between 1991 and 2013, more than 50 billion microprocessors based on ARM patents have been sent into the world. Of those, 75% were shipped in 2009-2013. AnandTech has a story describing where those billions and billions of chips have gone. Short answer: most (~60%) are in mobile devices, with a further 20% in embedded devices. Early growth was from low-performance chips, but more recent growth is coming from higher-performance designs. The article notes that:
... ARM cores are used all over the place, including in things like HDD and SSD controllers. The modems that work alongside the main apps processors in mobile devices are also frequently home to ARM processor IP. ... Although ARM definitely has its fair share of area and power optimized designs, ultimately it's the serious focus on performance that's been responsible for the surge over the past few years.
Intel has been building low-power chips with its Atom processors, but they still think that current server style chips will stick around, if only because the software they run will always need the meaty core only Intel (and AMD) can provide.
(Score: 1) by crutchy on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:33PM
that's a lot of chips
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:18PM
Yes, it is. That's 7 - 8 chips for every man, woman, and child on the planet. (50 billion / 7 billion).
Actually, Since 58% of the market is mobile, that means 29 billion chips (50 billion * 58%) wound up in cell phones. With 10 billion cell phones in the world since 1991 (I back-of-napkin extrapolated [time.com]; note the date of the article), that means there are 3 chips in every cell phone.
What does that mean? I'm a little suspicious of these numbers. But I could be wrong. I didn't do a lot of research into this and they aren't divulging the sources of their numbers.
(Score: 2) by TK on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:23PM
One CPU, one GPU and one to handle the radio(s)?
IANAEE
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:47PM
Yea, says right in the summary they're often used to handle the modem connection, so there's one. Maybe a processor or GPU. Possibly some integrated controllers for the screen or even battery.
But I think the major reason is that we may be dealing with different definitions of cell phones here. A Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip, and I'm pretty sure it's one designed for cell phones. So in ARM's number, every Raspberry Pi sold is probably counted as a cell phone; but those obviously won't be in the count of total cell phones sold. Clearly the Pi alone isn't responsible for that difference, but I bet you can count every single MP3 player running Android/iOS/Windows Mobile for example. And PDAs if anyone still buys those. So the fact that ARM says they sold a cell phone chip doesn't necessarily mean it actually went into a cell phone.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:05PM
The thing with ARM is, and I'm sure to get a LOT of hate from the ARM guys for saying this, but the vast majority of ARM chips? Disposable. I mean how many of you have one or more cellphones sitting in the sock drawer? Bought a weaksauce tablet that is likewise gathering dust? MP3/MP4 Player? Looking around my apt I can come up with probably 20 ARM chip devices that are just gathering dust and I don't even hang onto old consumer junk!
While this makes a lot of money when you look at the overall market the thing is they are only making a few cents on your average ARM chip, whereas AMD and Intel are making probably a couple dozen bucks on their mainstream chips. Also so far nobody has been able to get ARM to scale up its IPS beyond a certain point without just blowing its power budget to shit, which is why we are now seeing fricking octocore phones coming out and the quad tablets are heading rapidly towards the $100 pricetag.
And if there is one trend i have noticed in the shop its thus, which don't bode well for ARM long term....folks like battery life ONLY up to a point. it really don't take too many of those "waiting" animations to pop up for people to get REALLY pissed off at a device and chunk it, see the cheaper ARM tablets for an example. this gives AMD and Intel a HELL of an advantage because they both have damned good chips (the new Atom and the Jaguar) that are pretty damned low power while just curbstomping the ARM offerings, hell the Jaguar is in 2 out of 3 new consoles this generation, making quality gaming easily portable to jag tablets and laptops!
Do I think ARM will ever go away? NO, it is too easy to specialize an ARM chip and there are too many places where power and price are king, PMPs, industrial, kiosks, etc, but what I DO think will happen is that you will see their usage in tablets and cellphones start to drop fast in the next 24 months as folks begin expecting hi-def media and desktop performance from their portable devices. Something like using AMD zerotech to drop a Jaguar into "mobile mode" so it gets 8 hours of battery life (with the ability for the OS to bypass when the user does something that requires more power) and then when you get home popping it onto a keyboard case which turns it into a laptop? Frankly that is very doable right now, with the power gains both AMD and Intel have been seeing it will be trivial to do in the next years or so. On the ARM front it seems to have hit a power/thermal wall when you get close to 2GHz, hence the adding of more and more cores but we already knows where that leads as AMD and Intel done tried that, while a few of us can actually use hexacore and octocore for the vast majority anything above triple is overkill.
So while ARM won't be going away I do see a serious drop coming, it won't be today, won't be next month, but in 24 months? Yeah I have the feeling only the super low end gear will be using ARM, everybody else will be on ULV AMD and Intel.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 11 2014, @02:31AM
Get out of your basement and actually use these ARM devices the way they were intended, as mobile devices. I was in Japan travelling to the Snow Festival in Sapporo last February, and was really irritated that none of the trains I used to get there had any power sockets, not even the Hayate Shinkansen from Tokyo to Shin-Aomori. I naturally used my phones and stuff to take pictures and videos and all that once I got there, and while they did go down to low power levels they didn't do so before I myself got tired from all the walking in the below freezing temps. I would have been more pissed than at a "waiting" animation if the power ran out of my gear while before I was done with all my touring. As it was, I didn't need to charge anything until that afternoon, taking the overnight train back to Tokyo (which had no power outlets either, but I had a 10,000 mAh power bank which I didn't need until then). When you're mobile like that, power consumption is king. A supercomputer in my pocket that will last for a paltry eight hours if I don't use it at full tilt is not worth as much to me as a more modest computer that I can use for longer than that without being tethered to a power outlet.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday April 13 2014, @11:12PM
Sorry I can't find the link ATM (my Bing-Foo does sucketh) but I remember reading a few years back the average person? Spends less than 5 hours between mains a good 90%+ of the time. With both AMD and Intel having mobile that can easily go 6 hours plus? that really isn't a problem friend. Hell my netbook that is nearly 5 years old and I still get over 4 hours with BT turned off, I kill WiFi and its nearly 5, and that is with a first gen Bobcat, the Jaguar has the new zerotech and an squeeze a good 35% longer life from a battery than mine. Then of course there is the dirt cheap "powerbanks" I'm seeing all over the place, where for $7-$15 you get a charged USB brick you can use to power your devices on the fly, pretty slick.
At the end of the day it really don't take too many "waiting" animations and Android hangs for folks to get REAL tired of that shit and this is one place where X86 really shines, as the IPC of X86 over ARM is just unreal. We'll know within 24 months who is right but I'm already having to jailbreak and mod dual and quad core tablets and phones because folks just aren't happy with the performance and as we saw with X86 you can't just throw more cores at the problem.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by crutchy on Friday April 11 2014, @09:39AM
they're prolly in microwaves, tv's set top boxes, routers, switches, car stereos, car engine management computers, security alarms, mp3 players, printers, etc etc etc
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday April 11 2014, @05:55PM
And let us not forget there's a chip, most likely a tiny early/old 500MHz ARM-2 or something, in almost every USB stick, SD card, microSD card, and so on as well.
50 billion sounds reasonable even with a high percentage of recycled use. A person could easily own a hundred such processors without knowing it.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:34PM
some open architecture like SPARC or OpenRISC would be so much cooler
(Score: 1) by BananaPhone on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:43PM
I don't if SPARC is really open or not but the Oracle taint makes it DOA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @03:57PM
Sparc is indeed open and license free. There are even 2 relatively modern microprocessor sources available under some Sun license(?) IIRC, the T1 and T2.
Oracle like Fujitsu can produce Sparcs, but so can everybody else. There is no license claim.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday April 10 2014, @05:57PM
I doubt the actual design of current Sparc chips [what gets imaged on silicon] are free. The architecture might be, so you could come up with your own design which is compatible with it, but that's still a bunch of work to implement a dead architecture [yay, we get to compete with Oracle. wait, why are we surrounded by goons?].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @06:51PM
ISA doesn't really matter these days and SPARC has a well supported ecosystem. So you can either use a ARM instruction set license (only instruction set, NOT actually use ARM designs) which you pay for and develop your chips like Qualcomm (Krait) or Nvidia (Tegra) or you could use the SPARC instead and pay nothing for the instruction set.
And by the way, the verilog sources of the SPARC T1 and T2 are GPL'ed. So that is what you could actually put on silicon, not bleeding edge but also not too old (2007). Possibly the only open sourced 64-bit multi-core SMT designs out there.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday April 10 2014, @07:03PM
but those are 75-100W processor designs...and you would have to compare performance of those vs current ARM CPU's.
there are reason's why nobody [shipping any noticeable volume] is using these designs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @07:57PM
Jesus, some people just cannot be pleased. There are also the open source LEON designs, those are low power and rad-hard versions are currently used mainly in satellites (ESA and Co.).
The only reason why nobody is designing Sparcs for your smartphone is because it would take the effort to port Android and quite some balls to commit to a different ISA in this business. The ISA itself does not matter at all and if a Tegra had a different instruction set it would perform almost equally. In the old days ISA mattered because it took more or less die area which was the original reason for RISC. Nowadays at 22nm, no one cares about that fraction anymore which is why we can just accept x86 as it is licensed like ARM.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday April 11 2014, @01:16AM
Well, switching to a different feature size [22 nm vs whatever the sparc tapeout is] is a big deal. It's not just printing the thing a little smaller. It's a significant effort and then you have to validate the processor works right afterwards.
I have nothing against these other architectures/ISAs, and I'm sure companies have looked at using them, but I'm sure they came up with pretty good reasons not to use them, versus the primary benefit of "no licensing cost" [and I'd get a raft of lawyers to look really closely at how the license for the sparc layout applied to the final chips because the head of Oracle can be a bit of a dick].
A big thing for a company would be "how is this architecture moving forward". With Sparc, you are kind of on your own, or you have the hassle of dealing with Larry [if anything, that is a big reason for companies to stay FAR away from Sparc].
And who else is using it? Do you also want to be responsible for getting Android to run well on that architecture [non-trivial]?
There are a bunch of costs and risks when you venture off the beaten path of ARM/x86, and they are likely to be much larger than the licensing fee's for ARM/x86.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:35PM
Mmm... 50 bun chips [wikipedia.org]...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:18PM
+1 Yummy.
I do like a good chip butty
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:45PM
Ya know I never got Brits and the whole "chip butty" thing, I mean who wants a sammich with no meat? Now big ass steak fries on a burger? that is all kinds of awesome, but why would you want just the fries without the burger? BTW speaking of strange foods you want to try something totally awesome sauce to the max? Mashed potatoes on pizza! You take some good quality mashed potatoes (home made from real potatoes is best, instant is okay, avoid that watery KFC shit like the clap) and spread a nice even layer across the pizza, preferably thick crust but its still awesome on a good thin crust. The potatoes pick up the flavor of the pizza while giving it a nice creamy texture that when mixed with the cheese, meat and crust? Give it a hell of a mouth feel and takes an average pizza and makes it awesome and an awesome pizza becomes hellagood!
As for ARM, considering how many little things use ARM chips that number isn't surprising, hell you probably have over 10 billion ARM chips just sitting in sock drawers in outdated phones. As long as ARM is the cheapest game in town somebody will find a use for 'em, from smart TVs to routers to thermostats.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by MrGuy on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:42PM
I've read it several times, and I still don't understand this sentence.
Intel is building Atom chips, but ARM chips will stay around because they're from Intel? So...self block? Probably not what you meant, but not clear what you DID mean.
I don't know who the two instances of "they" refer to, or if it's the same group each time.
Why does the Atom chip factor into the decision making of "they"?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Open4D on Thursday April 10 2014, @12:59PM
Intel has been building low-power chips with its Atom processors, but Intel still thinks that current server style chips will be in demand in the future, if only because the software that these kinds of chips currently run will always need these kinds of chips.
Seems about right?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Koen on Thursday April 10 2014, @03:21PM
What is special about 1991?
The ARM project started in 1983 by Acorn Computers.
VLSI produced the first ARM silicon on 26 April 1985 [google.com], and it worked by the first time. It was released as a second processor for the Acorn BBC Micro [wikipedia.org].
In June 1987, the Acorn Archimedes series [wikipedia.org] with ARM processor was released.
In 1990 [wikipedia.org], Acorn spun off the design team into a new company named Acorn RISC Machines Ltd., which became ARM Ltd when its parent company, ARM Holdings plc, floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.
/. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:01PM
They want to make the range as small as possible to make it sound more impressive. If you take the entire range from 1983 - Today you probably have 50XXXXXXXXX chips, which would yield (roughly) the same number.
(Score: 1) by beardedchimp on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:10PM
It could be that they don't have accurate figures before 1991.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:59PM
So if the company was spun off during 1990...1991 would be their first full year of operation. I'd assume 1990 is when they started licensing the design to other companies as well. So, it's a new company and a new sales method. When you're looking at sales data, both of those would be quite significant. The marketing folks who came up with these numbers don't give a damn about the architecture itself. They're celebrating the success of ARM *as a company*, not ARM as a processor architecture.
(Score: 0) by Freeman on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:10PM
I support ARM by building my computers with ARM chips and ARM GPUs. Typically, I can find fairly good stuff cheaper than from Intel and Nvidia. I built a hexacore gaming rig a year ago for about $700, including windows. This year or next, I hope to drop that by at least $100 by going with SteamOS. :-)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:22PM
you do realize that steam and everything attached to it is x86 only
(Score: 1) by emg on Thursday April 10 2014, @04:36PM
I suspect they meant AMD, not ARM, since ARM make CPUs, not GPUs.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Thursday April 10 2014, @05:06PM
Windows is x86-only right now too, isn't it?
I seem to recall they announced plans to introduce ARM support, but I didn't think that was anywhere near done yet...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2014, @05:15PM
SteamOS aims for PC, if you would consider anything ARM there you would *seriously* downgrade your performance/graphics which is definitely unacceptable to of those who pay the majority on the steam platform.
It's the same reason why Apple won't go ARM on their macbooks anytime soon because the performance would drop and every customer would be angry when the "next" generation performs worse.
Besides, there is absolutely no reason why you would want ARM on a notebook or gaming PC. The low power argument doesn't hold anymore because Intel proved they can even beat ARM there. ARM also tends to scale up very badly as you can see with the A15 cores.
(Score: 1) by Freeman on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:15PM
Yeah...., ok for some reason my brain was thinking AMD. XD It's been a long week.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"