Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on August 27, 2014 3:56 pm wrote:
> When do you date this time of "ARM/MIPS once dominant and then Intel coming in"?
> As a comparison point, Atom comes out in 2008.
> I'm looking at AnandTech and they have reviews going back to 2010. The first two
> reviews are for an ARM-based unit (a pathetic little thing that's a single HD with
> attached ethernet) and an dual-core Atom unit running Windows Storage Server.
>

The market has existed going back to 2002ish. The vast majority of the systems were MIPS/ARM based at the time until basically being completely ARM dominated with StrongARM/Xscale.

> Going to Tom's hardware and backwards in time, I see some Atom units in early 2010, a Tolapai
> unit (Pentium M SoC), a Conroe unit (early 2009), ARM for late 2008, something that looks to
> be AMD-based in mid 2007, something in early 2007 which is Windows-only (which I take to imply
> that it's running some version of Windows of an Intel core), mid 2006 we have something Intel
> based --- but it's an IOP 80219 which is an XScale (did you see that twist coming?!).
> [Intel sold its XScale/ARM unit to Marvell in 2006, so it's sorta the
> descendant of this chip that's in all these later ARM-based NAS's].
> Before 2006 we don't seem to have much NAS as a category; I'm guessing before then CPUs
> were not powerful enough/cheap enough for this to be a separate category and we're still
> in the world of the "file server" as the category, except for enterprise.
>
Nope, the market has existed for well over a decade.


> What I get from this (admittedly impressionistic) scan of the past is a rather different history from
> what you give. What I see is devices that are pretty much all Intel until about 2010 --- admittedly
> in once case using the ARM ISA, but based on Intel IO parts. The early ARM parts begin really low end,
> supporting a single drive (no RAID), and grow from there, only really taking off in 2011 or so.
> This is not really surprising. Part of the initial NAS market was based on Windows Storage
> Server (obviously x86 only), so we need to start by putting together a Linux infrastructure.
> Even when that's in place, we need Linux ported to ARM which again takes time. I don't know
> when that was really up and running, but, as a datapoint, Linaro is founded in mid 2010.
>

While true that Intel basically took over the market in ~2005/6 with the Xscale IOP80219 and various over processors including StrongARM had a presence many years before that. People were using linux on ARM dating back to at least 2005 and BSD on MIPS dating back to at least 2002. I should know, I actually have several of these early NAS devices lying around still.