News - Intel beware, ARM and TSMC team-up for 64-bit and FinFET

[HEXUS]

FinFET promises 'Tri-gate' benefits at 20 to 15nm.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

The world is in a sad state of affairs when even the software ARM machines are running bloats up to >4GB.

[Brewster0101]

Does this potentially mean ARM may enter the desktop market in the coming years!

[brasco]

About bloody time Intel had some competition!

[abaxas]

About bloody time Intel had some competition!

More arm based computers are sold every year, than PC compatible machines have ever been made.

[brasco]

Really!? Where can I buy an ARM PC?

[kingpotnoodle]

The world is in a sad state of affairs when even the software ARM machines are running bloats up to >4GB.

Doesn't on your phone... yet... but servers is another matter, 32 bit addressing is widely seen as one of the major hurdles keeping ARM cores out of the server market. Whilst ARM will probably never be the dominant server architecture it could carve out a niche in certain workloads if this was overcome satisfactorily in a decent CPU.

[kingpotnoodle]

Really!? Where can I buy an ARM PC?

"computers" != PC.

Phones, cameras, consoles, set top boxes, modern TVs etc etc are all computers with a special purpose and very few use x86, most use ARM, MIPS, Power or other RISC architecture CPUs.

[brasco]

That's why I wrote "PC", maybe my first comment should have been "About bloody time Intel had some competition (in the sectors relevant to most of us)!"

[iiee]

@aidanjt your getting old the fact of the matter is people are going to want to be able to do stuff like edit hidef video and play games with hidef textures on there tablets and mobile devices. Tech moves on thats a good thing so look as we don't end up with true memory leaks then arm machines are going to need software that need more than 4gb of ram. More to the point item needs a competitor especially in the the server space (where platforms are less architecture specific) and busy servers need ram often lots of it. So what you call bloat im gonna call features and what you call and sad day im gonna call progress. Then again i guess we could all go back to dos

[aidanjt]

Doesn't on your phone... yet... but servers is another matter, 32 bit addressing is widely seen as one of the major hurdles keeping ARM cores out of the server market. Whilst ARM will probably never be the dominant server architecture it could carve out a niche in certain workloads if this was overcome satisfactorily in a decent CPU.

There's no reason why it can't even now, with big data architectures like Hadoop, 32bit addressing isn't that big a deal, and certainly porting Linux applications to other architectures is a piece of piss. What hasn't Debian been built on?

[aidanjt]

@aidanjt your getting old the fact of the matter is people are going to want to be able to do stuff like edit hidef video and play games with hidef textures on there tablets and mobile devices. Tech moves on thats a good thing so look as we don't end up with true memory leaks then arm machines are going to need software that need more than 4gb of ram. More to the point item needs a competitor especially in the the server space (where platforms are less architecture specific) and busy servers need ram often lots of it.

Sorta old, still in my 20's for this year anyway. All my age means is that I know my way around computers. So I know editing videos requires heaps of processing power, not RAM. Why bother bloating up software, even games, to such a degree? Phones and tablets have tiny displays which are physically incapable of displaying 'hidef' graphics to any appreciable degree, so all you do is waste ridiculous loads of battery life on epeen. As for servers, see above re: hadoop.

So what you call bloat im gonna call features and what you call and sad day im gonna call progress.

And what you call features, I'm going to call irresponsible and incompetent software development. And what you call progress, I'm going to call perpetually broken crapware.

Then again i guess we could all go back to dos

DOS? Oh Gods no. UNIX? Hells yes! Unfortunately that might require people to become moderately computer literate. We wouldn't want that now would we?

[iiee]

@aidanjt

Oh your reply made me laugh aidan. Your largely right of course even most games use less than 4gb of ram even at super high res but remember the ipad type displays increasing mean that that is the kind of resolutions that programs are going to need on tablets. As for video editing not needing ram it depends upon what you are doing. If you need to render anything into a scene (with adobe after effects for instance) then the more ram the better (within the ability of the cpu to process it but 2gb-4gb a core is a good baseline adobe recommend 8gb minimum for after effects). Just encoding is a CPU task but thats normally the last thing you do with a video. But as i said to begin with your largely right arm doesn't need to be 64bit but just because a chip is 64bit doesn't mean it has to address more than 4gb it just means it can. I doubt it will increase the cpus powerdraw hugely and at the end of the day i like to have the option of lot of lots of ram more than not having the option. Oh and Unix really? not a more mainstream implementation like BSD or linux?