81–90 of 119 posts
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That's a great point. Are there any 64 bit ARM chips on the horizon? I don't know much about chips, so maybe it's not even possible given the architecture.
It's possible, but just like the x86-64 transition it won't be pretty.
(seriously, I'm not trying to troll. I've had exactly one - making sure a project of mine would compile as PIC and that was pretty minor after the required reading)
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"4GB RAM ought to be enough for anybody." ARMS's Achilles' heel is that it's only 32-bit, and I don't think anyone wants to go back to a segmented address space any time soon.
One of the article's contentions is that the vast majority of users are satisfied with Windows and Microsoft programs as they are right now. Most of those programs are 32-bit. By extension, if they are satisfied with 32-bit programs and don't feel a need to switch, then they won't miss 64-bit architectures.
Is ARM's power advantage really that significant for devices larger than the smart phone / tablet form factor? If an Atom-based CPU consumes ~2-3 extra watts but offers marginally better performance and (more importantly) compatibility with an enormous base of existing applications, that doesn't seem like a very compelling argument for switching.
Think of a data center situation though where you can get a ~50% power requirement difference for marginal performance decreases. The cost savings would be huge even if you require more servers to make up for the performance difference. For most home users I think you're right for now but for businesses it could be huge.
50% lower processor power isn't the same as 50% less system power.
As I wrote in a similar thread I think Intel and x86 is already dead - the writing is on the wall - Intel just doesn't know it yet. Below is how I believe a key customer has already planned to leave the x86 architecture as nothing but a footnote in their history (alongside the remnants of PowerPC). --- Currently Apple relies on Intel for a major component in a key product. Strategically, Apple doesn't like to have to…
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What's your best 2 examples?
OSX and Intel processors...
From my experience in running Debian on ARM, I can say that the software difference is really non-existence. Any of the normal Debian OSS software works fine.. I did not run into any problems with software not working except for the closed source programs that didn't have ARM packages. I really can't imagine the architecture shift being that big of a problem, as I'm assuming the bulk of the work for ARM with Debian w…
The tagline from Innovator's Dilemma is that well-managed companies can get into trouble when they are being disrupted. The reason is that it's normally good business to get rid of low-margin products and focus your resources on the ones that make the most money. And then someone takes over the low end and expands into the high end. But Intel is not falling for that one. They have made the Atom, a slow, cheap, low-po…
Also intel is being disrupted from the higher end by GPU's and the new ARM processors(due to performance/watt), and multicore processors like tilera.
Also GPUs have their uses, but general-purpose they are not. GPUs are complements to CPUs (just as coprocessors specialized for floating-point calculations where back in the day).
Most people here probably haven't lived the day when 80387 had to be installed alongside i386 if you wanted decent graphics performance. It is actually interesting that it takes so long for GPUs to be merged with X86.
In my opinion ARM is the only credible threat in the data-center, especially for servers that are mostly I/O bound. But on the other hand costs can skyrocket when scaling horizontally and having 500 HTTP servers (like Digg) is not at all fun.
And IMHO, x86 chips have better performance / watt.
For desktop computing X86 will still dominate, at least for the following 10 years, simply because of Windows; which runs on over 1 billion computers.
Yeah, I know it is fashionable on HN to say Windows is not relevant anymore. Doesn't make it true.
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OSX and Intel processors...
The most striking for me when Jobs announced move to Intel was the bit where he told that they had OS X builds for Intel since the very first version of OS X . Who knows what are they cooking in their secret kitchens.
(e.g., A4 in a MacBook Air).
incorrect. Intel Core 2 Duo 1.4 GHz processor in a MacBook Air http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A13...
I guess author wanted to mention iPad