Research Shows RISC vs. CISC Doesn't Matter

fsterman writes The power advantages brought by the RISC instruction sets used in Power and ARM chips is often pitted against the X86's efficiencies of scale. It's difficult to assess how much the difference between instruction sets matter because teasing out the theoretical efficiency of an ISA from the proficiency of a chip's design team, technical expertise of its manufacturer, and support for architecture-specific optimizations in compilers is nearly impossible . However, new research examining the performance of a variety of ARM, MIPS, and X86 processors gives weight to Intel's conclusion: the benefits of a given ISA to the power envelope of a chip are minute.

Comments

so why is intel's 14nm haswell still at 3.5 watts?

[lkcl]

ok, so the effect of RISC vs CISC has absolutely *no* relation to power, right? so why in god's green earth is, for example, the allwinner a20 1.2ghz processor - which is still in 40nm btw - maxing out at 2.5 watts and delivering great 1080p video, reasonable 3D graphics and so on - yet intel is having to go to 14nm and, even at 14nm they STILL can't release a processor that, if you run it in a very limited configuration, is STILL listed as 3.5 watts??

there's a quad-core rockchip 28nm SoC. maximum (actual) top power consumption: below 3.0 watts. intel's haswell tablet SoC is 20nm: it's 4.5 watts "Scenario" Design Power i.e. if you only run certain apps in certain ways it *might* keep below 4.5 watts.

i really _really_ want to know why it is that intel cannot deliver an SoC that has an absolute peak limit of 2.5 watts.