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I read somewhere that ARM was growing fast because it hadn't been as thoroughly developed as x86 in the past. So right now ARM manufacturers were catching the lowest hanging fruit, so to speak.

Is ARM going to hit a limit soon like x86 has?

Also in the comments of the article someone says that the x86 architecture is outdated vs SOC architecture.

Is this true? Does this mean we'll see SOC on desktop in the near future?

2 comments

Yes and no. ARM is growing fast, it is growing fast because there are lots of manufactures making ARM cpus.

First there is diversity, while Intel or Atmel might announce 3 new CPUs with 2 or 3 variants each in a year, you have 10 manufacturers each with several new offerings so that it many many different CPUs.

The ARM "tax" (licensing fee) is lower then the minimum Intel "margin" (what they demand over the cost to produce) so the device maker's margins are better.

ARM is more open about its various interconnects so it is easy^h^h^h^hpossible to add features to an ARM CPU in a custom SoC. And to delete features if you don't need them. The Cortex M4 cpus without Floating Point is a good example, try to buy a Pentium processor without a built in FPU.

The thing that kept Intel in the driver's seat was software, and it was why (in my opinion) Itanium never had a chance over AMD64. Software, software, software. And once open source broke the server OS monopoly and smartphones became the computer for the masses, ARM was a good bet.

Is there a CPU saturation limit? That is an interesting question.

Yes, the specs of Centriq and Vulcan are probably similar enough to Skylake that there's no catching up left for them to do. At best they could advance at a similar pace to Intel/IBM.

When it comes to the desktop, Intel is driven more by business concerns than technology. Putting the southbridge on the processor doesn't have that much advantage, but AFAIK Zen can run by itself with no external southbridge to some extent.

Well, Vulcan is now kaput, Seattle seems disowned and X-Gene is up for grabs, so only Qualcomm and Cavium remain as contenders in the server SoC space. I predict they still have a solid shot but it will require a lot of uncomfortable adjustments along the way.