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

Posted by timothy on from the how-far-can-I-survive-from-an-outlet dept.

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."

2 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. I love ARMs... by jonr · · Score: 5, Informative

    They are the only chips that you can program and keep your sanity.
    The ARM code is just beautyful design, one weeps with joy after struggling through x86 hell.
    And computing/electric power ratio is fantastic.

  2. Re:They think a bit differently by philipgar · · Score: 5, Informative

    ARM has a couple processors already that are pretty high on the performance measurement. For instance the Arm Cortex A9 has a dual issue pipeline, and limited support for out of order processing (similar to the original Pentium processor in that regard). This chip also can contain up to 4 cores, and have up to a 2MB L2 cache. I think they can run up to about 1GHz. They also have full support for floating point and all that good stuff. I'm pretty sure ARM is also working on developing an true OoO processor that will likely be running in the GHz range which would likely be ideal for a netbook.

    Remember, with a netbook, you don't gain much by lowering the CPUs power consumption to less than 5 watts or so. The reason for this is simple, the display, ram, hard drives and everything else consume enough power that it won't really help battery life very much. I can imagine though that a quad core ARM A9 at 1GHz would make for a really nice netbook. Having multiple cores is nice on those for web browsing (playing flash in the background of your tabs, etc), and also for many media tasks. It would also be great if they included a graphics chip (or gpu as part of a SoC system) that could handle h.264 decoding for the netbook.

    Phil