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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.'"
CEO of a company that makes more efficient CPUs than the competition says the future is in efficient CPUs. News at 11.
But every newer version of operating systems has more bloat than ever. There must be some corollary to Moore's Law which states successive Operating Systems will still require higher performance, but users will now become accustomed to slower response times.
We could call it the Blort Law.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.)
...and by this, Intel's fab advantage will eventually make ARM irrelevant.
Simply optimizing code could do that
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
" efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance"
Sure, so why don't you start off by telling us why an Exynos Cortex A-15 chip running a web benchmark is using about 8 watts of power, with the display turned off so only SoC power is being measured, while Intel has already demoed a full-blown Haswell running Unigine Heaven at... 8 watts.
So when the miraculous Cortex A-15 uses the same amount of power as the supposedly "bloated" x86 Haswell, while Haswell is running a benchmark that is massively more intensive than a web-browser test, who is really making the most "efficient" platform?
Exynos Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-testing-arms-cortex-a15/7
Haswell Demo Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKvVdhkgAxg
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
As a geek I love a powerful general purpose machine that can do all the things an ebook reader/music player/web browser can do AND a whole lot more like play 3d games, run a math or science simulation, allow you to record and edit video, memory and processor intensive image editing. To me a tablet is little more than a crippled PC with the keyboard removed (fantastic, why did I learn to type at 90wpm again??), and a smudge screen interface (hate viewing photos through finger marks!!!). It's really awesome that we have dumbed down our computers to the point of mediocrity. Even finding a decent e-book reading or music playing app - the things these pieces of shit are touted at making easier - is a nightmare. So many book readers don't even let you zoom on images. And browsing the web without flash support is like trying to surf with one leg. I don't mind that there are dumbed down idiot boxes for those who like to post pictures of food on Facebook, but I really resent the impact on general purpose computing.
Moore's law just predicts transistor density - it says absolutely nothing about computational power. Increases in transistor density can make electronics more efficient per watt, but this still is aligned with Moore's law.
The title is stupid, and the actual article says almost nothing like it.
It's called Gate's Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Sure efficiency matters, but only in portable devices. Desktops or other computers connected to the mains don't have a problem.
Hey its winter already, a watt used by your CPU is a watt less that has to be used by your radiant or convective heater.
Sigh. It seems there is a new, hip, propaganda trend on Slashdot: pro-ARM articles are posted, and a bunch of ARM zombies come out saying how anything ARM makes will (magically) be lower-power or more power-efficient than anything x86.
So I'll start a tradition of posting this same response every time (originally posted by me here):
"ARM isn't magic; there is nothing in the ARM ISA that makes it inherently lower power than x86. Yes, I'm counting all the decode hardware and microcode that x86 chips need to support legacy ISA. There just isn't much power burned there compared to modern cache sizes, execution resources, and queue/buffer depths which all high-performance cores need regardless of ISA. If you have an x86 processor that targets A9 performance levels, it will burn A9 power (or less if Intel makes it, given Intel's manufacturing advantage). If you have a ARM processor that targets Sandy Bridge performance levels, it will burn Sandy Bridge (or more) power."
It is just expressing itself differently as we begin to hit the wall with process size decreases and speed increases. If wattage of the cpu goes down, you can pack more cores into the same area. Computing power is still going up.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Efficiency only really matters when supply is limited. On a cell phone or any portable system power is limited, and improvement in power efficiency will extend battery life. ARM is a good option when it comes to things like a tablet, but when you start to do everything an Intel styles chip can do they start to get more tricky. Sure ARM probably has a lower floor so it's minimum power usage is a lot lower, but when you start having it do everything in the same time span as an x86_64 does then it starts to look too similar to actually matter. Unless using an ARM processor can save me well over 500 bucks a year on my power bill I don't see their efficiency as actually that much of an advantage.
Mobile chips are shit to people who need renderfarms, simulation farms etc. People still do real work out there.
People who keep crapping on workstations and servers seem to think everyone just needs a computer for texting, facebook and angry birds.
He misses another point (though reference to competition hints at it). With Apples switch from PowerPC to x86 and now this move to ARM, and Linux going mainstream via Android on ARM, software developers are getting ever better at making things portable and hence making the underlying CPU architecture irrelevant. Also notice that Android tried to make this explicit by running most stuff on the Dalvik VM.
Sure, power efficiency and die-area are important in many places, but don't think ARM is somehow going to have a lock on that.
I think we need some expert analysis on this one.
The PC is used to create content. A smartphone is used to consume content. The PC functions autonomously (in a pinch). The smartphone is permanently welded to its cloud-nipple. The PC brings you smart ideas in shabby attire. The smartphone brings you shabby ideas in smart attire. The PC discourages walled gardens. A smartphone never leaves home without one.
Wake me up when my smartphone comes with a holographic projector capable of conjuring up 40" of viewing pleasure at a comfortable focal plane, and either a haptic keyboard (gravitational hologram?) or a brainstem feed a million times better than Swype.
Next we'll declare that mopeds and Harleys are the same form factor because there are more Asians than balding fat men. Clearly a modped is more like a Harley than a smartphone is like a PC.
Of course! Naturally, one *merely* needs a sufficiently clever compiler...
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
To be more specific, Anandtech reports that Intel HD 4000 runs Skyrim playably. If it plays current gen games, it can't be all bad.
So there you have it. IMHO, geeks create fictions by transmogrifying anecdotal data into quantitative data...why? Simple, quantitative data has less uncertainty, and therefore is easier for a 'geek-minded' person to sythesize
put that dictionary away. it's doing more harm than good.