Folks,
I know I don't need to ask to be corrected if I am wrong here, but there seem to be some important issues being missed where Crusoe is concerned. Here goes.
One. The real issue that I have heard grumbling about centers less on speed differences as they do on the failure of the chip in laptops to really extend battery life as much as was anticipated.
I have heard gains are only 1.5x typical consumption. That is a long way from the 2.5 to 3x times that had been touted earlier.
Two. There are two lines of the chip, one explicitly aimed at "laptopish" devices, and the other for lighter weight appliances. Therefore it is perfectly appropriate to expect the chip to do what it is supposed to do in a laptop. It isn't being scaled up beyond its specs as some comments here seem to suggest in defense of its performance.
Three. The key issue in performance is due to what I understand to be a failure to deal appropriately with changes of state.
I was told that the algorithms have trobule dealing with interrupts. As a result, instead of smart updating and caching, there is a presumption that all of state has changed. This is apparently where the performance hits occur I have heard this is strictly a Windows issue. But for the laptop market as a whole, that is clearly a big issue
At any rate, the real problem no matter what the cause is that you effectively end up with performance that is about as good as you would get in ultra-conservative mode on current systems. Not awful, but not great either.
And there I think is the real key. If an end user feels delays to be unacceptable or performance net net is about the same, they just won't find a real world difference in their interaction with the device. Coupled with less than expected gains in battery life, and you basically end up in pretty much a stalemate with Intel products, and possibly worse off against the new low-power chips they are rolling out.
Just seems like the hype wave got ahead of deliverable real world performance.
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Folks, I know I don't need to ask to be corrected if I am wrong here, but there seem to be some important issues being missed where Crusoe is concerned. Here goes.
One. The real issue that I have heard grumbling about centers less on speed differences as they do on the failure of the chip in laptops to really extend battery life as much as was anticipated.
I have heard gains are only 1.5x typical consumption. That is a long way from the 2.5 to 3x times that had been touted earlier.
Two. There are two lines of the chip, one explicitly aimed at "laptopish" devices, and the other for lighter weight appliances. Therefore it is perfectly appropriate to expect the chip to do what it is supposed to do in a laptop. It isn't being scaled up beyond its specs as some comments here seem to suggest in defense of its performance.
Three. The key issue in performance is due to what I understand to be a failure to deal appropriately with changes of state.
I was told that the algorithms have trobule dealing with interrupts. As a result, instead of smart updating and caching, there is a presumption that all of state has changed. This is apparently where the performance hits occur I have heard this is strictly a Windows issue. But for the laptop market as a whole, that is clearly a big issue
At any rate, the real problem no matter what the cause is that you effectively end up with performance that is about as good as you would get in ultra-conservative mode on current systems. Not awful, but not great either.
And there I think is the real key. If an end user feels delays to be unacceptable or performance net net is about the same, they just won't find a real world difference in their interaction with the device. Coupled with less than expected gains in battery life, and you basically end up in pretty much a stalemate with Intel products, and possibly worse off against the new low-power chips they are rolling out.
Just seems like the hype wave got ahead of deliverable real world performance.