The Asus Zenfone 2, released 5 years ago, ran on x86 (Intel Atom) [1]. I know someone who was still using it this year Eventually switched but the phone still works. So, to the question:

> Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

Well, technically, yes ;-) This does not change anything to your point though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_ZenFone#Second_generation...

I bought the Zenfone 2 which had an Intel processor, and had a similar experience to the sister comment. The only super annoying thing that happened was when Pokemon Go came out all my friends had it but it didn't support Intel. By the time they made it available for the intel phones (which was a few weeks) the game wasn't cool anymore. :/

I used the ZenFone 2 for about a year ~3.5 years ago; it worked surprisingly well. It was impressive that it really "just worked" like a normal ARM device.

There were some annoying software aspects (the Play Store only allowed me to download x86 apps even though it could run ARM apps), and the device was 100% a battery hog - but cool tech.

Surprised Intel gave up on that effort.

Intel gave up because Atom for smartphones were sold at a negative price after marketing incentives. They couldn’t even get volume from manufacturers when it costed less than zero; because no one wanted to invest upfront R&D costs.

Intel should have made their own phones.

There were a few MIPS Android phones too.

MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets.

Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets.

> Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem:

Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM

Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM

Want more IP coming from a single vendor that just core, interrupt, controller, and DMA? Go for ARM

Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

When MIPS understood that they are losing, they simply gave up on competing, and improving.

And in the end, the lunch went to MediaTek because it was the only SoC vendor that was ready to ship competitive SoCs with 4G baseband without rapacious licensing deals like Qualcomm do.

Actually at that time MIPS suddenly came back to life and had a big push with improved designs and a few deals resulting in pretty decent MIPS socs. Performance was okay, battery life was good, and they were first to market with the latest Android release (I think it was 4.0 or 4.4).

But then everything suddenly stopped and they left the market altogether.

Edit: Regarding this:

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

One of the founders of OpenCores (RIP) told me that ARM lawyers contact him _within hours_ of someone pushing a design they dont like. While MIPS has a bad rep, ARM is probably more aggressive.

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

Er... not convinced about this one.

ARM has been quite lawyerish sometimes.

For a while, parts of QEMU could not be published, at ARM's request, because they implemented instructions ARM did not permit a software emulator to emulate.

At least one non-commercial design on opencores.org was removed at ARM's request.

By comparison, for a while MIPS ISA was completely open for anyone to implement, software or hardware. That's been retracted now, but it was nice while it lasted. ARM has never done that as far as I know.

Even before, I used devices based around MIPS without a licence a long time ago, so long as they avoided implementing one or two "special sauce" instructions that was fine. The instructions weren't necessary, just a neat, patented optimisation, and I have a GCC patch somewhere for building the target without those instructions.

So I don't know about today, but until recently I would have consistently regarded MIPS as much less lawyerish than ARM.

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

Interested in this comment: were MIPS/Imagination known for being particularly litigious around licensing?

There are tons of stories about MIPS going after people for trivial designs.

http://probell.com/Lexra/index.html

> Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM

> Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM

But that's also true for MIPS.

I have not seen any activity from MIPS on GCC for years.

Making a Linux port for a given MIPS based SoC is a known pain. They should've worked towards not requiring any hardcoded configuration for each SoC at all, like Linux on ARM does these days.

Do you mean the device tree?

I thought all major kernel archs were on device trees now...

Yes now, but last time I talked with people who dealt with them, people spoke of their new cores coming with "prehistoric kernels" on usb sticks.

So every vendor had to upstream their own soc in its own

Ubiquiti will still sell you a shiny, expensive MIPS box, as will GL.inet.

Interestingly, they've gone ARM in their latest generation of hardware, e.g. the UDM-Pro uses a Quad ARM Cortex-A57 Core at 1.7 GHz: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switc...

So their MIPS stuff might be consigned to the past at this point.

>I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem.

I seriously doubt it, Broadcom - Qualcomm sale was blocked because there were concerns that the former would inhibit the telecom technologies development of the latter, resulting in strategic disadvantage to U.S. But, in the case of supposed Nvidia-ARM sale I see the quite opposite i.e. huge strategic advantage to U.S. and so I feel the anti-trust might not be at least State initiated.

But, would other U.S. Big Tech who have invested heavily in the ARM ecosystem oppose this is what to be seen. But even there, I wonder whether their fear could be substantiated? What if Nvidia just signs a good agreement with them to alleviate their fears? After all Apple and Qualcomm were strangling each other throats, now see where they are now.

In the end, I think the deal would just go through and it's us who are worried about the future our Raspberry Pis among others things who would feel lost(and actually loose).

Wouldn't the EU antitrust look into that too or is this going to be out of their jurisdiction after Brexit?

Even if the EU did not have jurisdiction British authorities are not very keen on large mergers either.

British resistance caused American Pfizer to walk away from a potential merger with British AstraZeneca.

I'm not sure how much sway British authorities would have, since ARM is now wholly owned by SoftBank?

In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right.

There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

> In a merger of this scale all the big powers (US, EU, China, and I assume also UK now) have basically veto right.

> There are countless examples where country 1 has stopped a merger between a company from country 2 and one from country 3.

From what I've seen, the only method of enforcement for a third-party country is to ban the sale of goods in their respective markets following the merger (like GE/Honeywell in the early 2000s). Would that even be possible in this case?

Not sure how this is enforced. Generally the merger falls apart if there are any indications of this happening.

Don't forget that these are public companies and a stopped merger can affect their stock. Besides, major investors would eat the board alive if they put the company in such situation.

Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ.

Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

> Antitrust regulators power is determined by the size of the market, not the location of the company HQ.

> Antitrust regulators for big markets like the US, EU can effectively block mergers from any internationally operating company. Both AMD and Nvidia need access to EU - their customers certainly do.

They could block the merger and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway, the EU would ban imports. But, wouldn't that further consolidate the market?

> and if the companies decided to go ahead with it anyway

This has never happened, because the profit loss from both parties from losing access to a market with 400M+ people has always made investors blanche.

What I mean is, in what practical way could the EU ban ARM/Nvidia from their market, considering these manufacturers' chips are in many devices? Would that mean devices with those components would also be banned?

What I'm trying to get at is, with a sufficiently large merger, the emerging company may produce products so ubiquitous that it would be impractical to bar them from your economy, due to the widespread use of their products and their integration into other products.

I believe as long as ARM sells their hardware in the EU, they are able to look into antitrust issues.

Not that I disagree with you, but ARM doesn’t sell hardware—they sell licenses to designs of the aforesaid. Nonetheless, don’t forget that nVidia, insofar as it sells hardware in the EU, would definitely be within the scope of local anti-trust authorities.

I don’t see this being much liked by those authorities, either. nVidia is clearly interested in doing this deal because it will give them competitive advantages, and it’s pretty clear by their behaviour versus other firms (including Apple!) that they have so much of that already that they don’t have to “play nice”. Giving them further purview to do as they please is basically what anti-trust is designed to prevent, whether you focus on industry relations or the ascendant on consumers.

I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around.

I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7!

Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

Not only internally. Infotainment Systems with the CE7 and SH4 combination had been built well beyond 2012. Only around that time Arm got traction.

At some point in time it got then renamed in embedded compact.

Source: worked in the automotive together with a couple of supplier which built those systems.

SH4 is out of patent now - do you know if the J-Core can run CE7?

Unlikely, since the SoC is different.

I salute you sir!

What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.

There is a recent post about it.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/mo...

> What’s the current roadmap for CE?

No clue sorry! I left many many years ago.

CE7 was incredibly good, the minimum image size we had it running on was ~20MB on disk.

I saw the WPF-esque XAML demos for CE7 - I was really impressed and also hopeful that it would lead to smooth fluid UIs in embedded devices like car infotainment systems and home thermostats.

Oh how naive I was!

(I assume the push for WPF-like XAML in CE7 was because at the time (2011-2012?) there was still hope of a CE7-based Windows Mobile competing with iOS and Android, and Microsoft realized the mistake of not modernizing CE's UI system at-all between 2002 and 2012? Windows Mobile 6.5 was a hideous eyesore (and all the pretty home-screen functionality was literally just skin-deep).

Palm and handspring used moto 68k before PalmOS 5.0, ARM since then

Are you sure?

Intel makes both CPUs and GPUs.

AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs.

nVidia would make both CPUs and GPUs.

What would be the difference?

Actually, as long as there are a number of arm design licensees, the situation would be way better than it currently is for x86: beyond Intel and AMD there is basically no other player in that field (Via? Transmeta? are they even noticeable?).

The difference is that Nvidia would be a customer and the owner of ARM at the same time. An Nvidia controlled ARM will primarily exist to make Nvidia happy at the expense of all other ARM customers.

nVidia already makes CPUs and GPUs (they make the CPU that goes into the Nintendo Switch, for example). Buying ARM doesn’t change much in that regard, except that they can save on licensing fees and it puts them in a position to disrupt competitors who also produce ARM processors.

I would think not licensing new IP would be the main concern. basically hogging ARM IP completely for themselves and their products. It would take a couple of years for companies and devs to switch to a different architecture, but you can be sure that there are competitors willing to fill that gap.

Why would nVidia disrupt competitors?

They need to pay $30bn to buy ARM which means they want to maximize the return for that purchase, which would be selling more and not disrupt for competitors to look elsewhere.

Why give them the opportunity to do so?

What’s at steak? Why is it too much?

It’s not that they will go out of their way to harm it. The ecosystem will change from being the top focus of arm to becoming more of an afterthought. Nvidia arm could end up taking more of a take it or leave it stance because those customers are no longer the top priority.