I've watched attractive women ruin friends' social lives. It's not pretty to watch, and it's even worse to watch guys who I thought were rational and mature experience omg-shes-hawt-brain-leak-out-ear syndrome and decide that despite all facts and evidence that he's going to somehow get laid by taking her side.
Yeah I'm sure flipping off Nvidia because they won't jump through your little hoops is the mature way to handle dealings with a billion dollar corporation that millions of your users depend on, smooth move there
It's an oportunity to spend money on something entirely new and can get rid of the old stuff! The legacy stuff! The backward-bug-compatibility!
Microsoft dropped compatibility with Windows Mobile Win32 applications in Windows Phone 7. And for Windows Phone 8 they completely rebooted their development environment - new apps are C++/WinRT instead of C#/XAML and Silverlight. Windows RT on ARM for tablets won't run Win32 applications either.
Despite all that they've lost market share and lost ISV support. Which is not surprising really. If Windows Phone 7 won't run any old applications, why should people choose it over Android which has more applications? Including most of the ones that run on WinMo because the ISVs, like the users, decided that a compatibility break meant it was time to port to Android which was growing market share, not to WP7 which looked like it was going to fail.
In fact given that WP7 didn't allow any native code at all and Android did, it was actually easier to port to Android than WP7. Now it's true WP8 does allow native code. But that doesn't mean the old WinMo ISVs who moved over are going to support it because it has such a low market share. And the users who switched from WinMo to Android are most likely going to stay there, unless Google do something as catastrophically dumb as deciding that the next version of Android won't support the old applications.
Sticking with IE 6 in 2012 is a bad idea. Your employees need to use the internet to do their jobs and the demand will surge once their customers require them all to use websites and other tools like salesforce and probably other business social media sites.
One of the benefits to IE6 from a corporate standpoint is that people can't use social media sites. They're supposed to be doing their TPS reports and until their eyes go all foggy and dull like the Gelflings in Dark Crystal who had their life essence sucked out, not frolicking on Facebook.
Seriously IE6 means workers with dull eyes, a biddable temperament and TPS reports being filed on time and in sextuplicate.
Firefox means social media usage, rebellion and a hostile takeover by Urskek Corp (NASDAQ: URSK). Have we learned nothing from what happened to Mubarak?
Wasn't Cloverfield a rather mediocre movie once you got past all the hype? I remember walking out of the cinema vowing never again to fall of Hollywood pig in a poke tactics.
So it's with a certain amount of trepidation that I read that Intel - no stranger to hype, fud and pig in a poke tactics themselves - are using that as a code name.
Despite the valley girl name, it's actually sounds, like, totally bitchin' to me. The CPU is out of order and the first Atom core redesign and the GPU is not going to suck, unlike every previous Intel GPU which they announced wouldn't suck and but then turned out to suck like an Electrolux on launch.
Windows RT is even worse. With MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC you could just cross compile your application and it would run, though of course no one actually bothered due to the low market share (it was essentially zero) of RISC Windows boxes.
With Windows RT aka Windows ARM there's no support for Win32 applications for third parties - all apps need to be WinRT and distributed via their store, unlike Windows x86 which allows for both legacy Win32 apps and WinRT ones. So if WinRT fails there won't be any applications at all for Windows RT. And even if Windows Phone 8 eventually manages to carve out a niche, there's no guarantee that people are going to buy Windows ARM tablets. Why should they when x86 Windows tablets will have legacy compatibility?
What I think will happen is that Metro will flop along with Windows Phone and Windows RT. Windows 9 will go back to the desktop model and Win32. It may or may not run WinRT applications. My guess is that it'll be another Microsoft API that gets deprecated like Silverlight, C# XAML, XNA,.Net, MFC and so on. So you might be able to run them on desktop Windows (maybe Ximian will provide long term support) but on tablets and phones support will be dropped.
In fact this is so likely I can't see why anyone would bother with WinRT or ARM support.
And on servers everyone that matters is already on Linux anyway.
Though I bet there'll be a "Windows for ARM64" server SKU that survives because a few people use it. Windows run on Itanium for ages, long after it was clear that Itanium was crap and the few people that did use it didn't want Windows.
Not that I'm saying ARM64 is crap, I actually think it has a place in datacenters where you need a lot of ultra low power servers. Also if you really tune it, ARM could even end up being faster for your server application than x64 just like Alpha was faster than x86. The problem for Microsoft is that in those sort of applications it's hard to compete with Linux.
What's even worse is that Nokia make some excellent hardware.
If you look at the reviews of the Lumia 920 the hardware is top notch. What is a problem is that no one (well to reasonable assumption) wants Windows Phone.
A lot of people do want Android though. And Nokia has a chance of competing with Samsung which makes excellent but (compared to Nokia) rather pricey hardware.
If you look at phones like a Nokia Express Music series they are pretty damn good. And very cheap. If they'd launched them with Android instead of Symbian I think they'd sell well, especially in poorer countries. And an Android Lumias would be bound to sell better than an WP ones.
Also WP doesn't help Nokia's real problem which is its long development cycles. That's something Sony Ericsson suffered from too. Making phones in unionised Nordic countries is always going to be slower than doing it in Asia. Nokia were well aware of this
"Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than,the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation"
If I were in charge of Nokia here's what I'd do with smartphones.
I'd keep the industrial design in house. I'd should outsource the hardware design and manufacturing to Taiwanese ODMs and switch to Android (if Microsoft want WP support they'd need to pay and I'd do as HTC and Samsung do and still sell mostly Android phones). So you'd have a basic case design done in Europe shared across a series but rapidly redesign the internals - baseband chip up - to keep the performance current. In terms of baseband I'd buy from anyone who would sell chips that could run Android - i.e. Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, ST Ericsson. Nokia would sell its baseband business and let it operate in competition with these suppliers, but Nokia would only buy from it if its designs were competitive.
The bundled apps - Nokia's maps for example - could be either done in house or outsourced.
The idea is that the things that make a Nokia a Nokia - industrial design and bundled apps - would be decoupled from the hardware design which would then happen more quickly.
Also the underlying base band chip would change from phone to phone. So if Qualcomm had the best chip in one generation, they'd get the order. If Samsung had the best chip in the next one they'd get it.
Sony Ericsson originally bought all its baseband chips from Ericsson Mobile Platforms. They got further and further behind Qualcomm in terms of performance, particularly after Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon. Eventually Sony bought out the phone business and started to buy Qualcomm chips. The Ericsson Mobile Platforms was 'cast out of the Ericsson group' (think Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden of Eden) and ended up being part of ST Ericsson.
Basically if you want to get people in Nordic countries to work hard they need to know that they are competing on the open market and their company will be shut down if it is unprofitable. Back when Sony Ericsson only bought from EMP that was not the case.
People said that about their Urban Combat Jetpack and one man tank.
In unrelated news Cornelius Vanderbilt VI, Jr has changed his name to Bruce Wayne and hardly ever seems to appear in Hello magazine anymore. And when he does he has unexplained bruises and sounds like he's been chain smoking asbestos. So I'd say at least one. Hell, I'd say exactly one.
I've always thought that a lot of the problem with ARM systems is that they typically use mobile SDRAM, Which is low power, but is also clocked slowly and has a rather narrow bus. So if you paired an ARM with the same memory you get in an Atom system, you'd see better figures. I think that is part of what has happened with the Chromebooks.
There are a total of 8 x 256MB DDR3L devices (2GB total) that surround the Exynos 5 Dual SoC (4 on each side of the PCB). Each device is 8-bits wide, all connecting up to the 64-bit wide DDR3L memory controller. The DRAM is clocked at a 1600MHz data rate, resulting in 12.8GB/s of memory bandwidth to the chip. The Exynos 5 Dual integrates two ARM Cortex A15 CPU cores as well as an ARM Mali-T604 GPU.
Yeah - Finally an ARM with memory bandwidth, and it seems like it has really paid off if you look at the CPU benchmarks.
It's also worth pointing out that the Atom 570 is a rather old design. The new Atoms are going to be out of order and hopefully have better performance, though you wonder what will happen to power consumption. Lastly Atom is the slowest x86 CPU and Exynos 5 is one of the fastest ARMs. You can get x86 chips that far surpass the fastest ARM - a Core i7 for example.
Also I think Atoms have always been let down by their chipset - the first Atom chipset consumed much more than the CPU. And the Intel GPU in that chipset is like some sort of sick joke. It's not very low power and the performance is terrible.
Still for a long time Atom was better than AMD for low power and cheap and that meant that it basically owned the netbook segment. So Intel spent its R&D resources on Core i7s and i5s because you can make a lot more cash at the high end.
Now with a bit of luck getting beaten by an Exynos 5 and indeed losing the market for Chromebooks at Samsung will cause Intel to spend some R&D resources on Atom. We know there is a new ValleyView Atom core coming, and we also know they are going to put in a decent integrated GPU. With a bit of luck Atoms will get more R&D resources after that so Atom cores get revved a bit more frequently.
Then again, for what netbooks are meant for - web browsing, email etc - they are basically good enough. I'm not going to switch to ARM on netbook, because I like Windows and Windows RT is a locked down nightmare, whereas x86 Windows runs all the things I need. If I need more power for things like Visual Studio, I've got a Core i5 laptop.
And even if Valleyview is a bit of a disappointment, I'm probably going to end up buying a netbook based on it at some point, purely based on the fact that it runs x86 Windows and that is what I want to run.
It's interesting I'm typing this on a netbook. That's got an Atom N570 a 1.6Ghz dual core, in order hyperthreaded CPU. My phone has dual core Cortex A9s which are 1.2Ghz out of order and single issue.
If you'd have said five years ago that Arm would go out of order and Intel would go in order, I'd have thought it was absurd. Then again you're comparing the (then) slowest Atom with the (then) fastest Arm.
An Atom N270 at 1.6Ghz with two threads gets a score of 1000 MIPS Compressing and 1500 MIPS Decompressing.
An Exynos 4210 at 1.2Ghz with 4 threads gets 1380 MIPS Compressing and 2130 MIPS Decompressing.
Unfortunately there's no result for an N570 but judging by the other results doubling up the number of cores should make it a bit faster than the Exynos 4210. Still it's probably quite close. Which is remarkable actually - the Exynos uses slow mobile SDRAM and the Atom uses DDR2.
Actually you're right - a 32 bit kernel with a 40 bit address space can obviously have more than 32 bits of address space.
I remember Windows had a crippled implementation of PAE - memory about 4GB couldn't be paged and could only be accessed with a special API. Basically it was like a Ram disk.
But there's no reason why you could have multiple processes taking up more than 4GB in total - the kernel would just map their address space when they were running and unmap it when they weren't.
That's debatable as well, because Intel only offers a single-core, hyperthreaded Atom at 1.3GHz (with some turbo features), that only performs well in Javascript benchmarks.
I picked a bad example saying 'phone'. Look at netbooks, and servers. Or tablets.
Most of the time the slowest Atom is about as fast as the fastest ARM, and for a bit more $ and Watts you can get a much faster x86/x64 chip.
I think ARM is very safe in mobile devices. It's low power consumption most ARM chipsets have video acceleration, so it can still play HD video. It's licensable too, which is handy for SoCs. Also the cores are tiny.
Moving to Atom would give phones more CPU power but I'm not convinced there is much need for it. I've got an Samsung Galaxy S2 and it's not like there is anything I do that is CPU bound. Smartphones have poor battery life already though, and a move to x86 is going to make that worse.
Now Intel are talking about licensing Atom, but I think they face an uphill battle. ARM's mix of low thermal power/low CPU power compared to x86 and small licensable cores aimed at TSMC is basically ideal for people like Samsung, Qualcomm and so on. In fact Qualcomm have spent a lot of money developing their own microarchitecture for ARM - the Snapdragon and Krait cores. If they moved to x86 they would not be able to do that. NVidia are obviously graphics focussed. So it's hard to see the ARM SoC vendors switching to Intel.
Of course Intel is safe in servers and laptops because there you do need x86 compatibility and more horsepower even at the cost of a higher power consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet if your cleaner stole from your apartment you'd feel the same way and give her a pay rise.
It's a made up story. You can tell because it involves a slashdotter with more experience of sex than the salesgirl.
I've watched attractive women ruin friends' social lives. It's not pretty to watch, and it's even worse to watch guys who I thought were rational and mature experience omg-shes-hawt-brain-leak-out-ear syndrome and decide that despite all facts and evidence that he's going to somehow get laid by taking her side.
Yeah bro, women have scary boob powers.
Need to be treated harshly when they do things like this. Fired and blacklisted should do the trick.
Samsung make the Apple A series CPUs too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X
Manufactured by Samsung on a High-K metal gate (HKMG) 32 nm process
Yeah I'm sure flipping off Nvidia because they won't jump through your little hoops is the mature way to handle dealings with a billion dollar corporation that millions of your users depend on, smooth move there
It's even worse than that. When NVidia did assign someone to work on Optimus support he was told the kernel API he needed to make it work, and had been introduced specifically for Optimus like set ups was GPL only. If I were NVidia I'd just EOL the closed source driver on the groups that the open source and community maintained nouveau driver is now "mature enough to replace it". Smirk.
I know the owner of Porter Industries and he is a very honourable and courageous man. And an excellent dancer.
What about if some trusted third party, like Porter Industries, held the key in escrow?
It's an oportunity to spend money on something entirely new and can get rid of the old stuff! The legacy stuff! The backward-bug-compatibility!
Microsoft dropped compatibility with Windows Mobile Win32 applications in Windows Phone 7. And for Windows Phone 8 they completely rebooted their development environment - new apps are C++/WinRT instead of C#/XAML and Silverlight. Windows RT on ARM for tablets won't run Win32 applications either.
Despite all that they've lost market share and lost ISV support. Which is not surprising really. If Windows Phone 7 won't run any old applications, why should people choose it over Android which has more applications? Including most of the ones that run on WinMo because the ISVs, like the users, decided that a compatibility break meant it was time to port to Android which was growing market share, not to WP7 which looked like it was going to fail.
In fact given that WP7 didn't allow any native code at all and Android did, it was actually easier to port to Android than WP7. Now it's true WP8 does allow native code. But that doesn't mean the old WinMo ISVs who moved over are going to support it because it has such a low market share. And the users who switched from WinMo to Android are most likely going to stay there, unless Google do something as catastrophically dumb as deciding that the next version of Android won't support the old applications.
Slashdot looks like ass on bleeding edge Chrome, Firefox and Opera too. Look at that damn header which is only half visible.
Sticking with IE 6 in 2012 is a bad idea. Your employees need to use the internet to do their jobs and the demand will surge once their customers require them all to use websites and other tools like salesforce and probably other business social media sites.
One of the benefits to IE6 from a corporate standpoint is that people can't use social media sites. They're supposed to be doing their TPS reports and until their eyes go all foggy and dull like the Gelflings in Dark Crystal who had their life essence sucked out, not frolicking on Facebook.
Seriously IE6 means workers with dull eyes, a biddable temperament and TPS reports being filed on time and in sextuplicate.
Firefox means social media usage, rebellion and a hostile takeover by Urskek Corp (NASDAQ: URSK). Have we learned nothing from what happened to Mubarak?
Now bring me my life essence!
Wasn't Cloverfield a rather mediocre movie once you got past all the hype? I remember walking out of the cinema vowing never again to fall of Hollywood pig in a poke tactics.
So it's with a certain amount of trepidation that I read that Intel - no stranger to hype, fud and pig in a poke tactics themselves - are using that as a code name.
Is it any relation of ValleyView?
http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/44385-intel-atom-soc-roadmap-leaked-details-bay-trail-valleyview/
Despite the valley girl name, it's actually sounds, like, totally bitchin' to me. The CPU is out of order and the first Atom core redesign and the GPU is not going to suck, unlike every previous Intel GPU which they announced wouldn't suck and but then turned out to suck like an Electrolux on launch.
What could possibly go wrong?
Windows RT is even worse. With MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC you could just cross compile your application and it would run, though of course no one actually bothered due to the low market share (it was essentially zero) of RISC Windows boxes.
With Windows RT aka Windows ARM there's no support for Win32 applications for third parties - all apps need to be WinRT and distributed via their store, unlike Windows x86 which allows for both legacy Win32 apps and WinRT ones. So if WinRT fails there won't be any applications at all for Windows RT. And even if Windows Phone 8 eventually manages to carve out a niche, there's no guarantee that people are going to buy Windows ARM tablets. Why should they when x86 Windows tablets will have legacy compatibility?
What I think will happen is that Metro will flop along with Windows Phone and Windows RT. Windows 9 will go back to the desktop model and Win32. It may or may not run WinRT applications. My guess is that it'll be another Microsoft API that gets deprecated like Silverlight, C# XAML, XNA, .Net, MFC and so on. So you might be able to run them on desktop Windows (maybe Ximian will provide long term support) but on tablets and phones support will be dropped.
In fact this is so likely I can't see why anyone would bother with WinRT or ARM support.
And on servers everyone that matters is already on Linux anyway.
Though I bet there'll be a "Windows for ARM64" server SKU that survives because a few people use it. Windows run on Itanium for ages, long after it was clear that Itanium was crap and the few people that did use it didn't want Windows.
Not that I'm saying ARM64 is crap, I actually think it has a place in datacenters where you need a lot of ultra low power servers. Also if you really tune it, ARM could even end up being faster for your server application than x64 just like Alpha was faster than x86. The problem for Microsoft is that in those sort of applications it's hard to compete with Linux.
> "If you're not a Linux user at twenty you have no skill, if you're using Linux at twenty two you have no brain."
That's probably more accurate with desktop PCs, though not with servers. With phones I think Android is going to be the equivalent of Windows.
What's even worse is that Nokia make some excellent hardware.
If you look at the reviews of the Lumia 920 the hardware is top notch. What is a problem is that no one (well to reasonable assumption) wants Windows Phone.
A lot of people do want Android though. And Nokia has a chance of competing with Samsung which makes excellent but (compared to Nokia) rather pricey hardware.
If you look at phones like a Nokia Express Music series they are pretty damn good. And very cheap. If they'd launched them with Android instead of Symbian I think they'd sell well, especially in poorer countries. And an Android Lumias would be bound to sell better than an WP ones.
Also WP doesn't help Nokia's real problem which is its long development cycles. That's something Sony Ericsson suffered from too. Making phones in unionised Nordic countries is always going to be slower than doing it in Asia. Nokia were well aware of this
http://www.fonearena.com/blog/30489/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-nokia-our-platform-is-burning.html
"Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than,the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation"
If I were in charge of Nokia here's what I'd do with smartphones.
I'd keep the industrial design in house. I'd should outsource the hardware design and manufacturing to Taiwanese ODMs and switch to Android (if Microsoft want WP support they'd need to pay and I'd do as HTC and Samsung do and still sell mostly Android phones). So you'd have a basic case design done in Europe shared across a series but rapidly redesign the internals - baseband chip up - to keep the performance current. In terms of baseband I'd buy from anyone who would sell chips that could run Android - i.e. Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, ST Ericsson. Nokia would sell its baseband business and let it operate in competition with these suppliers, but Nokia would only buy from it if its designs were competitive.
The bundled apps - Nokia's maps for example - could be either done in house or outsourced.
The idea is that the things that make a Nokia a Nokia - industrial design and bundled apps - would be decoupled from the hardware design which would then happen more quickly.
Also the underlying base band chip would change from phone to phone. So if Qualcomm had the best chip in one generation, they'd get the order. If Samsung had the best chip in the next one they'd get it.
Sony Ericsson originally bought all its baseband chips from Ericsson Mobile Platforms. They got further and further behind Qualcomm in terms of performance, particularly after Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon. Eventually Sony bought out the phone business and started to buy Qualcomm chips. The Ericsson Mobile Platforms was 'cast out of the Ericsson group' (think Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden of Eden) and ended up being part of ST Ericsson.
Basically if you want to get people in Nordic countries to work hard they need to know that they are competing on the open market and their company will be shut down if it is unprofitable. Back when Sony Ericsson only bought from EMP that was not the case.
People said that about their Urban Combat Jetpack and one man tank.
In unrelated news Cornelius Vanderbilt VI, Jr has changed his name to Bruce Wayne and hardly ever seems to appear in Hello magazine anymore. And when he does he has unexplained bruises and sounds like he's been chain smoking asbestos. So I'd say at least one. Hell, I'd say exactly one.
How long till you graduate and have to get a job?
That is interesting.
I've always thought that a lot of the problem with ARM systems is that they typically use mobile SDRAM, Which is low power, but is also clocked slowly and has a rather narrow bus. So if you paired an ARM with the same memory you get in an Atom system, you'd see better figures. I think that is part of what has happened with the Chromebooks.
E.g.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-testing-arms-cortex-a15/3
There are a total of 8 x 256MB DDR3L devices (2GB total) that surround the Exynos 5 Dual SoC (4 on each side of the PCB). Each device is 8-bits wide, all connecting up to the 64-bit wide DDR3L memory controller. The DRAM is clocked at a 1600MHz data rate, resulting in 12.8GB/s of memory bandwidth to the chip. The Exynos 5 Dual integrates two ARM Cortex A15 CPU cores as well as an ARM Mali-T604 GPU.
Yeah - Finally an ARM with memory bandwidth, and it seems like it has really paid off if you look at the CPU benchmarks.
It's also worth pointing out that the Atom 570 is a rather old design. The new Atoms are going to be out of order and hopefully have better performance, though you wonder what will happen to power consumption. Lastly Atom is the slowest x86 CPU and Exynos 5 is one of the fastest ARMs. You can get x86 chips that far surpass the fastest ARM - a Core i7 for example.
Also I think Atoms have always been let down by their chipset - the first Atom chipset consumed much more than the CPU. And the Intel GPU in that chipset is like some sort of sick joke. It's not very low power and the performance is terrible.
Still for a long time Atom was better than AMD for low power and cheap and that meant that it basically owned the netbook segment. So Intel spent its R&D resources on Core i7s and i5s because you can make a lot more cash at the high end.
Now with a bit of luck getting beaten by an Exynos 5 and indeed losing the market for Chromebooks at Samsung will cause Intel to spend some R&D resources on Atom. We know there is a new ValleyView Atom core coming, and we also know they are going to put in a decent integrated GPU. With a bit of luck Atoms will get more R&D resources after that so Atom cores get revved a bit more frequently.
Then again, for what netbooks are meant for - web browsing, email etc - they are basically good enough. I'm not going to switch to ARM on netbook, because I like Windows and Windows RT is a locked down nightmare, whereas x86 Windows runs all the things I need. If I need more power for things like Visual Studio, I've got a Core i5 laptop.
And even if Valleyview is a bit of a disappointment, I'm probably going to end up buying a netbook based on it at some point, purely based on the fact that it runs x86 Windows and that is what I want to run.
Atom design is. 45 nm and just now making it to 32 nm? Snort. It should be 22 nm like the Ivy Bridge
I think it's because Atoms are being made on the TSMC process or one of Intel's older and cheaper fabs to make them even cheaper.
It's interesting I'm typing this on a netbook. That's got an Atom N570 a 1.6Ghz dual core, in order hyperthreaded CPU. My phone has dual core Cortex A9s which are 1.2Ghz out of order and single issue.
If you'd have said five years ago that Arm would go out of order and Intel would go in order, I'd have thought it was absurd. Then again you're comparing the (then) slowest Atom with the (then) fastest Arm.
According to this
http://www.7-cpu.com/
An Atom N270 at 1.6Ghz with two threads gets a score of 1000 MIPS Compressing and 1500 MIPS Decompressing.
An Exynos 4210 at 1.2Ghz with 4 threads gets 1380 MIPS Compressing and 2130 MIPS Decompressing.
Unfortunately there's no result for an N570 but judging by the other results doubling up the number of cores should make it a bit faster than the Exynos 4210. Still it's probably quite close. Which is remarkable actually - the Exynos uses slow mobile SDRAM and the Atom uses DDR2.
Actually you're right - a 32 bit kernel with a 40 bit address space can obviously have more than 32 bits of address space.
I remember Windows had a crippled implementation of PAE - memory about 4GB couldn't be paged and could only be accessed with a special API. Basically it was like a Ram disk.
But there's no reason why you could have multiple processes taking up more than 4GB in total - the kernel would just map their address space when they were running and unmap it when they weren't.
That's debatable as well, because Intel only offers a single-core, hyperthreaded Atom at 1.3GHz (with some turbo features), that only performs well in Javascript benchmarks.
I picked a bad example saying 'phone'. Look at netbooks, and servers. Or tablets.
Most of the time the slowest Atom is about as fast as the fastest ARM, and for a bit more $ and Watts you can get a much faster x86/x64 chip.
I think ARM is very safe in mobile devices. It's low power consumption most ARM chipsets have video acceleration, so it can still play HD video. It's licensable too, which is handy for SoCs. Also the cores are tiny.
Moving to Atom would give phones more CPU power but I'm not convinced there is much need for it. I've got an Samsung Galaxy S2 and it's not like there is anything I do that is CPU bound. Smartphones have poor battery life already though, and a move to x86 is going to make that worse.
Now Intel are talking about licensing Atom, but I think they face an uphill battle. ARM's mix of low thermal power/low CPU power compared to x86 and small licensable cores aimed at TSMC is basically ideal for people like Samsung, Qualcomm and so on. In fact Qualcomm have spent a lot of money developing their own microarchitecture for ARM - the Snapdragon and Krait cores. If they moved to x86 they would not be able to do that. NVidia are obviously graphics focussed. So it's hard to see the ARM SoC vendors switching to Intel.
Of course Intel is safe in servers and laptops because there you do need x86 compatibility and more horsepower even at the cost of a higher power consumption.
Smartphones with >4GB are not that far off. There are a couple of 2GB phones already.
So it's likely that Android will have 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland before long.
Though you can probably kludge it with something like PAE - i.e. a 32 bit kernel with >32bits of address space.
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/15/how-add-kindle-drm-removal-plugin-calibre/