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Moore's Law Is Becoming Irrelevant, Says ARM's Boss
holy_calamity writes "PCs will inevitably shift over to ARM-based chips because efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance, the CEO of chip designer ARM tells MIT Technology Review. He also says the increasing adoption of ARM-based suppliers is good for innovation (and for prices) because it spurs a competitive environment. 'There’s been a lot more innovation in the world of mobile phones over the last 15-20 years than there has been in the world of PCs.'"
The guy says nothing of the sort, it's just the title of the article. All he says is that efficiency is becoming more and more important, and that ARM offers such efficiency. (He *also* says that ARM can offer performance as well.)
Wirth's Law:
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.
That's a false comparison, though. If users mostly ran benchmarks 24x7, that would be a good test of efficiency. The reality, however, is that CPUs mostly sit idle, so to compute average efficiency, you have to factor that in.
Granted, a faster CPU that can reach an idle state sooner can be more efficient than a slower CPU that runs at full bore for a longer period of time, but only if the idle wattage is fairly similar.
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Except Intel CPUs have been becoming far more power efficient over the last few years too. I recently replaced my old Pentium-4 Windows PC with a new i7-based PC. The P4 has one core, runs two threads, is rated at around 130W and, when playing games, the system sounds like a jet engine. The i7 has four cores, runs eight threads and is rated at 77W. When playing games I can hardly hear it under my desk and the air coming out the back is barely warm.
According to this old benchmark by Phoronix (which was even linked by Slashdot), the i7 is more power-efficient than the ARM Cortex A9 in PandaBoard. The i7 got 85 Mop/s per Watt, while the ARM managed only 38.
The advantage of low-power processors like ARM's is low power consumption when idle, which admittedly is where most computers (and tablets, phones, etc) spend most of their time.
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Funny you should hate on Medfield when a Razer I with Medfield has better battery life than a krait Razer M with the exact same screen and battery. But it looks like you never let facts get in the way of your koolaid.
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