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ARM Revives CISC vs. RISC War With New 64-Bit Designs

Just when you thought everything in the semiconductor sector that could happen had happened, the RISC vs. CISC war is rearing its head again with the introduction of 64-bit processors from ARM.

October 31, 2012

Just when you thought everything in the semiconductor sector that could happen had happened, the RISC vs. CISC war is rearing its head again with the introduction of 64-bit processors from ARM.

ARM, which has cleaned up in the mobile market over the past several years with the explosion in demand for low-power smartphone and tablet platforms, on Tuesday announced that it is finally bringing 64-bit to the mobile space after half a decade of development.

Somewhat lost amidst more immediate concerns about Hurricane Sandy, ARM and Advanced Micro Devices held press conferences this week announcing rather stunning developments. The latter company, one of the industry’s two main proprietors of x86 chip design, on Monday notified us that it has acquired an ARM license and plans to release ARM-based server chips in 2014 — leaving Intel, appropriately enough, as the sole promoter of the x86-or-the-highway bandwagon going forward.

That would be news enough, but beyond the alliance with a frankly struggling AMD, ARM’s new Cortex A57 and Cortex A53 processors position the upstart architecture to seriously challenge Intel’s long-standing dominance in PC and server platforms, potentially reinvigorating the dormant instruction-set battles of years gone by and helping semiconductor firms such as Samsung, Calxeda, and ST-Microelectronics to legitimately launch competitive new product lines targeting everything from the laptop market to the data center.

"This is a huge announcement for ARM and its ecosystem. As it did in the x86 world, adding 64-bit to the ARM architecture significantly increases the amount of RAM the system can address," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy.

"This offers the most benefits in the server space as evidenced by the AMD and Calxeda announcements. It will take a while to develop the new 64-bit ecosystem as we saw in the x86 world and we will see software first in the server space that will start shipping in 2014 and make its business biggest impact in the client space in 2015."

IDC analysts Shane Rau, Abhi Dugar, and Jean Bozman also characterized the ARM news as "significant" in a Monday note and predicted that 5.7 percent of server processors would be ARM-based by 2015.

The research firm said the introduction of 64-bit chips would help ARM begin to move into Windows servers over time.

"Historically, ARM has been of greatest interest in the embedded and micro-server spaces—where low-power consumption and small sizes for the chips themselves provided opportunities for ARM products," the analysts wrote. "Further, ARM is based on open-source technologies—and runs on Linux operating systems now. In future, IDC expects that 64-bit ARM products will also run Microsoft Windows given their respective support of the UEFI standard by AMD and ARM."

IDC listed a number of ARM partners that it expects to introduce new ARM-based 64-bit products in the coming months and years, including AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung, and ST-Microelectronics. It also listed Nvidia, Marvell, Texas Instruments (TI), and Qualcomm as current licensees of the 32-bit ARMv7 architecture that are also expected to snap up licenses for the new 64-bit ARMv8 architecture.