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ARM Hopes To Lure Microsoft Away From Intel
Steve Kerrison writes "With the explosion of netbooks now available, the line between PC and mobile phone is becoming much less distinct. ARM, one of the biggest companies behind CPU architectures for mobile phones (and other embedded systems), sees now as an opportunity to break out of mobiles and give Intel a run for its money. HEXUS.channel quizzes Bob Morris, ARM's director of mobile computing, on how it plans to achieve such a herculean task. Right now, ARM's pushing Android as the OS that's synonymous with the mobile Internet. But it's not simply going to ignore Microsoft: 'What if Microsoft offered a full version of Windows (as opposed to Windows Mobile or Windows CE) that used the ARM, rather than X86 (Intel and AMD) instruction set? Then it would be a straight hardware fight with Intel, in which ARM hopes its low power, low price processors will have an advantage.'"
Look at how quickly Apple ported Mac OS to Intel.
Apple maintained an internal cross platform port.
And does ARM actually make a desktop-class CPU (as compared to Intel/AMD's mid or high end cpu's)?
ARM CPUs are advancing faster than x86 CPUs.
The Cortex A8 has roughly P3 performance (per clock), and clock speeds varying from 600-1000mhz. This is without Out of Order execution, 64bit support, or any other fancy stuff. The power envelope is about 50 milliwatts load. Most SoCs bundling GPU, DSP, LCD controller, wifi, etc. consume around or under a watt.
The Cortex A9 should be significantly faster. If I recall correctly, it has OoOe and sports a 2-4 core multicore architecture, with increased clockspeeds, in the same power envelope. Look up TI's OMAP4 SoCs. When these are released in 2010, we'll have Pentium D/GeForce 6600 level performance using up a hundred or so milliwatts, and generating a completely negligible amount of heat.
Now maybe you can see the implications of this?
ARM doesn't actually ship or make CPUs, they license IP cores. There are a whole shit ton of ARM cores out there, though.
It uses the same kernel. It uses the same CoreGraphics, Foundation, and CoreAnimation frameworks as well as countless others. About the only difference is that OS X on the iPhone does not have AppKit or Autozone.
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Flash is pretty inefficient, but it does run (admittedly not great) on the N810 which has a 400MHz ARM processor, which is a generation behind the Cortex A8s, so a Cortex A8 should have no real trouble with Flash.
I hope some non-Adobe Flash implementation is ready for real use soon as the only possible reason for Flash to be as slow as it is is that Adobe must not care at all about its speed.
Centralization breaks the internet.