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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."
What happens when those 6-10 netbooks get sold? What about the rest of us? Seems like it's hardly worth it to build so few. They should be building them by the thousands!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Maybe we should make computers out of them. In fact, they did...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus
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