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Boosting Battery Life For RISC Processors

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the staying-unplugged-longer dept.

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.

2 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. The market decides... by jonr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Ummm... maybe they can learn from... by class_A · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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"