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Boosting Battery Life For RISC Processors
prostoalex writes "National Semiconductor and ARM Holdings will jointly develop the power management solution for RISC chips, that they estimate will improve battery life by 25-400%. The target date of the first sample product is Q2 2003." My old Tadpole laptop sure could have used this. I counted myself as lucky when I got a whole 45 minutes out of a battery.
It is a simple question of market laws. The x86 architecture is the ruling class, therefore it gets most of the research money, and as a results has the fastest running processors.
When the ARM came out, it blowed the 386s (The top x86) and 68020's out of the water. We were talking 3-4 times faster. And when the ARM3 came out with it's cache, it really kicked 386 ass.
And remember the Alpha? Another RISC design that was way ahead the rest. The only one left is the PowerPC family, still holding on to the x86 juggernaut.
And programming the ARM was a bliss. 13 general purpose registers, the barrel shifter. (Do a arthimetic and shift in the same instruction) Conditonal branching... It was a real joy. The x86 assembler is what programmers do in hell.
J.
Very true. Look at this for a laugh. A minimal installation will take approx. 120MB of disk space and 40MB of RAM. I can't help wondering what they are doing over there (at M$).
As an old Acorn user who switched to Mac back in 1998, I can safely point you to this fact without appearing anti or pro Apple/IBM/ARM.
"ARM Company Milestones: ARM History - 1985 - Acorn Computer Group develops the world's first commercial RISC processor"
I have to agree that the P4 is a monster when it comes to transistor count and the PowerPC and the derivates are amazing. However, there will always be idle parts of the CPU core that can be shut down during different periods (for example fp ops.). Just since you have a simple (as in beatiful, optimized, etc) architecture does not mean that you should not further improve it by using state of the art optimization methods.