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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."
A quarter of a watt is a percentage of the static I gather walking. A processor like that is powerful enough to run a tiny GPS, an insert in my shoe. Add a little foot-pad to power a HUD and attached map and I always know where I am. This is one of many, many uses. Anyone still thinking "cell phone" is missing the point.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I know, I was simply contesting the "goes against moore's law" part.
Coincidentally, that's when the greatest blasphemy to Moore's Law -- and the biggest threat to Intel's dominance -- is expected to make its entrance into the PC market.
When it isn't, it's similar to automotive racing, this seasons F1 has all sorts of new limitations on engine size, RPM, and materials to promote more power/speed out of smaller, doesn't mean they will stay constant at 750hp @ 12,000RPM, by the next couple of years they will likely be back up to 1000hp, just on a smaller platform.
In 10 years time, there will likely be some even more efficient processor out there (likely already exists) It's all effectively a part of Moore's law, the current base has certain limitations limiting it's linear climb, so a new twice as good base is developed to continue that climb.
Web browsers are interpreters, which are going to be slower than machines that run pre-compiled code
It's worse than that: In addition to HTML, a web browser must parse/interpret JavaScript, Java, CSS, XHTML, Flash (if Adobe ever gets onboard), and regular XML just to display the modern, JavaScript-heavy web application. This gets resource intensive if, say, using an app such as Google Docs on a netbook with little memory, since the browser keeps the DOM structure in memory, and it gets exponential if the user has multiple tabs open with an app/page in each.
/. a while back, but how well they would maintain this for both x86 AND ARM remains another story, in addition to all of the other problems that could ensue, especially at the security level (a bug in the JS parser leading to direct remote code execution, etc.).
A server pre-parsing HTML would mean a browser/server handshake, something IE and IIS could easily do moreso than Apache(2)/Lighttpd and Firefox/Safari/Chrome. Opera does this with their mobile platform, but it is still far from perfecting JavaScript precompilation or even delegating this to the lower-resource device at the client end.
Google was contemplating compiling JavaScript to pure native code in a story I read here on
It's problems like these that keep 300Mhz netbooks with little RAM from being very efficient with full-scale web apps. Just my firefox I'm running now, I have about 20 tabs (mostly regular HTML) open and it runs up my dual-core CPU so high that my fan is running (not much in the background), and it eats memory like crazy. But as far as MS breaking the Wintel relationship to pursue ARM-based netbooks, I don't see it happening unless something drastic happens.
They are the only chips that you can program and keep your sanity.
I completely agree. The most elegant assembly I've even written, easy to optimize, and without all the legacy underpinnings of x86. Apparently the GNU folk can agree as well, because the output of any of my compiled C programs run better on an older ARM than a newer x86 chip (this is on Linux, btw).
Define too young! :P I'm 26 and spent 4 years doing 68k ASM! I even wrote a disassembler while I was in college... which earned a trip to an international teacher's convention. http://detachedsolutions.com/cmdpost/
You do realize that the Cortex series of ARM cores can get to around 1GHz, and that the Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale chips can scale to 1.25GHz easily. And that's when they're drawing a quarter to a half a watt. At worse, you're getting 1GHz/watt.
ARM is used everywhere, it scales handily from fleapower devices, to the GHz range used in the latest smartphones. For every x86 CPU sold, the PC containing it probably contains several ARM processors (Bluetooth and WiFi being extremely common peripherals with ARM processors). A cellphone usually has 2 - one driving the UI, and one in the radio, and maybe two more (again, Bluetooth and WiFi).
400-667MHz seems to be the "sweet spot" right now for a cellphone's ARM processor... (iPhone has it at 400-416MHz, the Palm Pre has a Cortex A8 at 667MHz). And the whole cellphone power management has to be able to drop power consumption to a mere 3 milliamps or so, including the power spikes to maintain a link to the cell towers.
Atom tries, but it's still an order of magnitude too much power for an entire system...
...your average phone is more powerful than your average computer was in 1982.
Sonny, I was THERE in 1982 and I can tell you that my phone (an HTC Mogul) with its dual-core 400 Mhz ARM CPU knocks the socks off the 386 I had aound 10years later, around 1992! In fact, I can run DOSbox and run all the same games I used to play on my fire-breathing 386DX25 in emulation !!
If my phone today was released in 1982 it would probably have been considered a controlled military tool and banned from use by nonmilitary personnel!
Psssssttttt! Wanna guess what I'm typing this post with?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
You mean something like this:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tegra_600_us.html
?