Opinions - ARM to Intel: it’s not just about the transistor

[HEXUS]

Following Intel’s 22nm announcement, ARM’s Ian Drew offers his perspective.

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[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nice to hear that ARM is also working on 20NM and 22NM chips too!!

[watercooled]

I'm quite looking forward to seeing ARM chips in desktop computers. Even the chips available now would be more then enough for most people, coupled with an appropriate OS of course - it doesn't make sense for the OS to use more resources than any applications likely to run on it.

[aidanjt]

Me too, atom is nice and all, but x86 + low power is a bit of an oxymoron.

[badass]

Me too, atom is nice and all, but x86 + low power is a bit of an oxymoron.

Considering that to make an x86 chip these days they are internally RISC then use a hardware decoder to convert from x86 to the chip's internal instructions thay are at a disadvantage.
It shouldn't be about the instruction set TBH. It should be about the compiler.

[aidanjt]

Meh, moving to internal RISC actually improved power consumption by removing dozens of lesser used instruction logic units and being able to improve the efficiency of the remaining ones. But yeah, sufficiently generic code should easily compile for any target architecture, and the need for a gazillion specific instructions is long since dead. Modern compilers already do a pretty good job of optimising, too.

[amdavies]

These reportedly launched a couple of days ago and are currently sold out:-

http://trimslice.com/web/

ARM desktops have been available but in very small quantities, it's the software that's lacking currently. Hopefully Android's tablet implementation can translate to a regular desktop and several flavours of Linux are also being ported over (Ubuntu, for one, is supposedly available for ARM). The company that produces the Trim Slice even went as far as advising people to wait for the software to catch up before buying the hardware, which is commendable.

[aidanjt]

Hmmm? http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/...armel/iso-dvd/

Software isn't the problem, lack of market interest is. As it has been for 27 years. So ARM 'desktop' unit sales have pretty much been relegated to esoteric developers. Maybe ARM can ride off the smartphoneesque bandwagon to leap onto the desktop arena. We'll see.

[watercooled]

I've been considering getting something like a Beagleboard to play around with. It's a pretty impressive platform when you consider it can do most everyday tasks fine on about 2 watts.

[aidanjt]

Indeed, it'll be nice to see ARM desktops going mainstream. Intel and AMD will crap themselves. But they're so small and cheap you could practically integrate them into monitors.

[amdavies]

Chromium sort of running on a Trim Slice, I know I'm beginning to sound a little shill-ish, but I'm not, honest. Plus, the hardware is a little too expensive at the moment, were it to come down to about half of what it is currently (possible with a scale up in production) these could do well:-

http://trimslice.com/web/chromium-os-on-trim-slice

[aidanjt]

Yeah I wouldn't be interested in chromium os.