Slashdot Mirror
The Linux-Proof Processor That Nobody Wants
Bruce Perens writes "Clover Trail, Intel's newly announced 'Linux proof' processor, is already a dead end for technical and business reasons. Clover Trail is said to include power-management that will make the Atom run longer under Windows. It had better, since Atom currently provides about 1/4 of the power efficiency of the ARM processors that run iOS and Android devices. The details of Clover Trail's power management won't be disclosed to Linux developers. Power management isn't magic, though — there is no great secret about shutting down hardware that isn't being used. Other CPU manufacturers, and Intel itself, will provide similar power management to Linux on later chips. Why has Atom lagged so far behind ARM? Simply because ARM requires fewer transistors to do the same job. Atom and most of Intel's line are based on the ia32 architecture. ia32 dates back to the 1970s and is the last bastion of CISC, Complex Instruction Set Computing. ARM and all later architectures are based on RISC, Reduced Instruction Set Computing, which provides very simple instructions that run fast. RISC chips allow the language compilers to perform complex tasks by combining instructions, rather than by selecting a single complex instruction that's 'perfect' for the task. As it happens, compilers are more likely to get optimal performance with a number of RISC instructions than with a few big instructions that are over-generalized or don't do exactly what the compiler requires. RISC instructions are much more likely to run in a single processor cycle than complex ones. So, ARM ends up being several times more efficient than Intel."
Except it doesn't matter and hasn't for years. The world's most popular applications run in browsers, not desktops.
Author, a well-known Linux fanboy, has butthurt because Intel won't share their toys with his favorite operating system in the whole world. News at eleven.
Well it's a matter of personal preference but personally I think android is pretty lousy and suffers from many of the same issues that desktop Linux does such as lack of standardization and a somewhat clunky interface.
This. Android's smartphone marketshare reminds me of Windows' desktop marketshare. Just because it's ubiquitous doesn't mean it's any good. Android is free/cheap, and "good enough." But jesus, do I cringe whenever I see someone on the bus scrolling through a list of contacts or panning/zooming on a webpage on their Android phone.