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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...
ARM chips are nice, but they are not as fast as Atoms and their low power usage does not guarantee long battery life. It needs to perform at least on the level of a Dothan 600MHz before I'm interested - web surfing is already a pain at that level of performance.
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
u mean this?
http://www.revogear.com/
These are ARM based, you can move them around, but they're no laptops.
You speak London? I speak London very best.
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
This is my sig.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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
Look at this PDF, page 8, top left picture
It's actually from here
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp
That said, I suspect whoever wrote it was aware of the Snopes article.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
?
I know it's not ARM, but this thing's also not x86 - a MIPS-based mini-notebook: Alpha 400 MIPS netbook.
They're pretty inexpensive too. I might pick one up just to play around with it.
The trick is that the ARM instruction set is *WAY* more efficient than the x86. The fact that the current ARM's are basically in order units is less important due to the design of the instruction set.
A minor correction here: The ARM instruction set is simpler and is much less feature rich than x86. This, combined with self imposed limitations (mostly around in-order execution) ARM (the company) is able to design CPUs with a much lower transistor count than x86 chip designers are capable of managing.
Not having a huge instruction decoder, having to do instruction reordering, or basically doing any of the things that makes x86 so damn fast, and staying a generation or two behind on manufacturing techniques to avoid leakage issues, enables ARM CPUs to have their amazing power profile.
The instruction set is kind of a mess really. It has been hacked onto a number of times, with the latest additions really showing signs of having wedged into the existing instruction encoding space. With features like the original (crappy) thumb, and now the fixed "Thumb2" (which we are all supposed to be calling Thumb and ignore the old Thumb, or something like that), and the fark-up that is ARM's floating point support (They have 3 implementations, 2 of which are still in use, and those two versions respond dramatically different to some basic key floating point operations), the ARM instruction set isn't nice per say, but ARM did the right thing and by keeping their eye on power consumption always.
(For those who are getting linguistically confused: ARM the name of the company, the name of their CPU line AND the name of their instruction set. Oh it is also the name of their reference manual, the ARM-ARM.)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I've got an Axim 51v with an ARM 624Mgh processor, running WM 5, WiFi G, Bluetooth, a VGA screen (albeit 4 inch) and a separate GPU. It fits in my pocket and I use it for reading e-books, rudimentary surfing and Word and it plays games quite well. I wouldn't mind something like this with a somewhat larger screen a little faster CPU. It wouldn't fit in my pocket of course, but that why god invented messenger bags. BTW, It's a few years old and has more processing speed and storage than quite a few of my older desktops.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
We have heard that before, and the 'super cheap' never quite pans out and ends up 2x.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Backlit TFT displays will at some point be replaced by E-Paper which only uses power to change the display./quote.
I doubt that's gonna happen for several reasons.
First, e-Paper refresh rate is horrendous, and it is unlikely to improve to the same levels as TFT for the foreseeable future due to inherent technology limitations. Moving solid particles around (which is what eInk does) is always going to be slower.
Second, while eInk screen doesn't have to be redrawn all the time, when you actually need to redraw it, it may well use more power (I'm not sure about that one, actually, but it would make sense). And how often would you need to redraw? Well, if you leave the mouse in, every time the pointer moves... so you'll need a touchscreen and no pointer. And as few smooth animations as possible. In fact, it may well require a total redesign of UI to make it work - so forget existing apps.
Third, eInk is useless in below-average lighting conditions. Remember that it doesn't emit light by itself, and it is not transparent, so you can't use a backlight (and if you did, that would suck up power just as it does in TFT). And you can't make the particles transparent, because the whole point of technology is to make them reflect light...
Fourth, eInk color gamut isn't going to be any better than printed stuff, ever, for obvious reasons. This may be good enough for some stuff (most office/productivity apps, web browsing), but forget about decent video (remember last time you've read a movie review in a journal? remember what the screens looked like... that's right, crap).
All in all, I think that it might work out, but only for a true "netbook" - a device that's only useful for surfing the Web, and nothing else; and even then with some interactive stuff (e.g. YouTube) crippled. Also, given the pace of technological advances in e-paper, it's going to take a decade at least before we get that stuff in production (there's still no working color e-paper available for use in production e-reader models, even though the first prototypes were shown over 2 years ago).