On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 3:25 AM, Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote: > On 01/25/2011 09:16 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: >> background: >> >> https://wiki.linaro.org/ChristianReis?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=embedded-gpu-lca-2011.pdf >> http://lkcl.net/laptop.html >> >> 45nm and the upcoming 28nm geometry is going to allow SoC RISC CPUs to >> become massively more price as well as power efficient than CISC x86 >> architecture could ever be. > > Welcome to the 1980's, Luke. Here's your MIPS system. > > Welcome to the 1990's. Here's your copy of OS/2 for the PowerPC > "Pineapple". > > Welcome to the 2000's. Here's your StrongARM.
:) yes. look at the speeds of those CPUs, compared to the geometry, and what the equivalent x86 could do, at the same time. at .35 micron, everybody was kinda equal (80s). by the 90s - 90mhz (gosh, wow!) for 180nm, but even by then x86 was cooking eggs in order to "beat" ARM and MIPS, riding on the back of windows. that basically set the advancement of computing back for about... 20 years. MIPS and ARM CPUs now run at 1.5ghz at still under 1 watt in 45nm. Marvell's "ARM-compatible" design, which remember went through Intel's hands before it got to Marvell, is *not* ARM Cortex, it's completely utterly different, has a superscalar architecture and at 1.2ghz chews up and spits out Intel Atoms for breakfast. at 28nm it's going to be... irrelevant that the main RISC CPU is 74,000 transistors (MIPS 64-bit) because it'll be running at 2ghz, be running in a quad-core or even 16-core arrangement and... who gives a damn if an x86 gets even 100% more performance at those kinds of speeds! especially when x86 does so by having to still be a thousand times more transistors and so uses vastly more power. ... or am i preaching to the converted, here? :) l. p.s. yes i know my history on microsoft's decisions to drop all but x86 for NT 4.0, rob, due to pressure from the hated win95 team... they're paying for that, now, and they will never catch up. the game really has changed, sort-of almost overnight. people have sort-of noticed, but haven't really put all the pieces together and interpreted what exactly it really adds up to. _______________________________________________ Celinux-dev mailing list [email protected] http://tree.celinuxforum.org/mailman/listinfo/celinux-dev
