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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."
I don't mean to Dis-ARM, ARM or Armless...
But it will do exactly the same thing, 0.5 Watts now, 100K transistors now, 300 MHz now... it wont stay that way though, it's just a slimmer base to build upon, like using aluminum instead of steal. People will still keep reaching for the sky, and with a lighter structure, means they can reach even higher, even more MHz, more transistors, etc...
that some /.ers seem to need to create an enemy of conventional wisdom, even when conventional wisdom is conventional for a reason?
Yes, efficiency is good. But do you really need to smear the idea of higher processing power at the same time you're pointing out the good in low electricity consumption?
I mean... really?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
The marketing term (not the architecture) MIPS == Million Instructions Per Second. It's not the plural form of some other TLA. ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
They are the only chips that you can program and keep your sanity.
Your UID says you are old, but that statement indicates you are too young to have ever programmed a 68K or VAX.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
From TFA:
For 30 years, the PC industry has treated Moore's Law with religious reverence. Its immutable commandment -- thou shalt double the transistors on circuits every 18 months -- created an enviable business model with consumers spurred to buy new, more powerful PCs every few years.
The actual law is about reduction of cost, not increase of performance. Other formulation says:
The transistor cost shall halve every 2 years.
ARM is not breaking any "law".
As I read through the article (I know, I've already violated Slashdot's law, but anyway), I couldn't help but go back to this whole idea of 'under-the-hood performance.' Cars built today don't necessarily have to have the 400 cubic inch plants and 500 horsepower that they sometimes had in the 60's. Engines are half that size and half the horsepower, but because they're designed better, it doesn't matter. (Although I'd love a 500 hp engine anyway.)
As well, continuing the car analog, just because there are still some cars with 500 horsepower engines made today, it doesn't mean everyone needs one. There are plenty of tiny cars doing just fine thankyou
This article suggests that because we're not using giant oversized processors in our iPods and cellphones, that somehow we've violated Moore's law. All it really means is that putting a Ferrari engine in golfcart is pointless.
Oi! Slashdot is not much more than ten years old so even a teenager might have a low UID. Also you don't have to be really old to have done stuff with the Z80 or the 6502 if you did it while you were still in school.
They may up the megahertz, but not at the expense of a more costly product or more power usage. Instead, the ARM chip vendors take a look at what needs the MHZ, such as video/audio decoding, and include special co-processors for those functions on the same silicon. Therefore they don't need to increase MHz for increased functionality.
It is a similar philosophy to using a script written in a slow interpreted language to drive a more complex system composed of high-speed modules written in C.
I think the ARM netbooks are going to have a monster market, like eventually over 100 million a year.
That may sound crazy, but you have to look at the demographics. There are about 6 1/2 billion people in the world. About 1 1/2 billion are in the developed world or the richer parts of the developed world. They all have computers. At the other end are about a billion who are are desperately poor.
That leaves around 3 billion who are in-between. These are the people who have enough money to buy things like bicycles, motor bikes, televisions, and cell phones. A great many would love to own a computer, and indeed many of them spend a lot of time at cybercafes. But they can't afford the price. And there is another problem, namely that half of these people live in areas with no electricity, and for most of the rest the electric service is very eratic.
The first generation of netbooks was too expensive for this gigantic potential market, and besides they used too much electricity. But the new ARM netbooks will be enough cheaper for perhaps 500 million more people, and they will use far less electricity, too. Furthermore prices are just going to keep going down. Pixel Qi is planing on designing $75 models in a few years. Every time prices drop another huge group will join the market.
This all is a huge problem for Microsoft. On the one hand, it would hate to charge the very low license fees it would need to get anywhere in this new market, on the other hand it can hardly afford to ignore it.
Hmmmm... a link to wikipedia modded funny while a link to xkcd modded interesting.
Are the mods on crack?
If you do try this be sure to use a virtual machine or a real low powered machine. Web browsers adjust their memory usage based on what system they run on and with other factors like cpu speed it is very difficult to extrapolate from a fast machine to a slow one.
I rather like PowerPC. Straight forward instruction set.
ARM is nice, but it's a bit compact, what with every instruction allowing an optional conditional or shift/rotate (which does give good performance with a simple design though). And the later ARM versions just got a bit cluttered with its multiple processor modes and extra instruction sets (thumb, java, dsp).
We have heard that before, and the 'super cheap' never quite pans out and ends up 2x.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Insightful? Beating a dead horse more like it. The sort of computer these things are going in will be in a separate category of devices than your workstation. Want a superfast box for graphical modelling? Buy a workstation. Want a lightweight, low consumption computer to access the internet at a cafe? Buy a netbook.
It's already like that. You'll find most big-enough computer companies are happy to sell you servers and workstations and desktops and laptops. They'll even give you specs if you know enough to know what's important in your workstation. We're just adding another category. It's not the end of the world, and it's not the end of graphical modelling.
Although, to the extent your point is that the article was an overexaggeration, well, it's slashdot. What do you expect? I'm going to have to stop visiting it again...
Look out!
PSP (not the most relevant example) might be 300 MHz now, what about PSPII, still 300MHz? Doubtful.
The first PSP ran at 222 MHz. (The 3.50 firmware upgrade unlocked 333 MHz with the WLAN off in games that require firmware 3.50 or later.) The PSP-2000 added RAM, but not much else in the sense of processing power. The PSP-3000 didn't add processing power either.