ARM — Heretic In the Church of Intel, Moore's Law

ericatcw writes "For 30+ years, the PC industry has been as obsessed with under-the-hood performance: MIPs, MHz, transistors per chip. Blame Moore's Law, which effectively laid down the Gospel of marketing PCs like sports cars. But with mobile PCs and green computing coming to the fore, enter ARM, which is challenging the Gospel according to Moore with chips that are low-powered in both senses of the word. Some of its most popular CPUs have 100,000 transistors, fewer than a 12 MHz Intel 286 CPU from 1982 (download PDF). But they also consume as little as a quarter of a watt, which is why netbook makers are embracing them. It's 'megahertz per milli-watt,' that counts, according to ARM exec Ian Drew, who predicts that 6-10 ARM-based netbooks running Linux and costing just around $200 should arrive this year starting in July."

Comments

Still focus on a single metric

[fermion]

So we are going to be stuck with low power devices that can't edit a picture or a movie. Too bad if I want to do graphical modeling. Everything will be sold on based on power consumption

The problem with the PC industry is that it focuses on one or two numbers, without looking at how those specs actually creates a fast machine. It is like cars being sold by the number of cup holders. Computers are sold by the speed on the CPU and amount of memory. What is not talked about is whether it will function as a computer. Is the bus fast enough to keep the processor running. Is the memory fast enough. Is the memory available for CPU use, or is half of it going to the GPU. This si too much for many consumers to grasp but without it it can be hard to find a functioning computer. It is like cars with enough horse power and four wheel drive, but will tip over if and when the electronic suspension fails.

What we have is another useless arbitrary metric.