Slashdot Mirror
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."
Not really. ARM has been around for a long time. Its biggest use is in embedded systems- phones, printers, etc. In those markets cost and power usage matter more than performance. They may make a line with more performance eventually, but they make money hands over fist in places where pennies matter (after all, if you sell 1M phones with a processor thats 5cents cheaper, thats 50K more profit). They won't give that up.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You're right. Both approaches have their place. What you're observing is the manifestation of an overriding need to prove one's superior intellect. It's a sign of poor socialization.
I, for one, welcome multiple approaches to achieving multiple goals.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
Netbooks can use much less power than they do today. Real netbooks use solid state storage, which has negligible idle power consumption and very low read power consumption. In the future, RAM may be replaced by one of the contenders for persistent RAM (e.g. MRAM) with zero idle power consumption. Backlit TFT displays will at some point be replaced by E-Paper which only uses power to change the display. At that point, the CPU and the wireless network are about the only consumers of power, so every improvement counts.