On 01/25/2011 09:42 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > 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? :)
No, you are not preaching to the converted. Underestimating the ability to adapt a specific instruction set to take advantage of manufacturing improvements is something you'd think people would grow out of after 30 years. I'm saying that network effects mean the system with the most users is the one everybody wants to write code for, and the system with the most software is the one everybody wants to use. Costs are almost entirely a question of unit volume, it's all start-up amortized over a production run. When you say "RISC will make chips cheap", you're making arguments that people made 30 years ago and it simply did not happen. You keep talking about Windows. Who cares about that? The mainframe gave way to minicomputer gave way to microcomputer which is giving way to the smart phone as we speak. (Sure, minicomputer got renamed "Personal Computer" by IBM's marketing department, apparently forseeing all the porn on the internet. The switch to laptops was a sustaining technology, not disruptive, and thus doesn't really matter in this context.) The emphasis on "cloud" is a giveaway: each previous technology got kicked up into the "server" space as it stopped being what people directly interfaced with to get their computing done. Carrying around decks of punched cards became archaic, sitting at a minicomputer TTY became archaic, having your own laptop isn't archaic yet but once everybody carries a smart phone that can do everything the laptop could it's only a matter of time. A Nexus one has half a gig of ram, a gigahertz CPU, up to 32 gigs of SD card, and a couple different types of internet access which is plenty powerful enough to be a self-hosting development enviornment with the right software. It also has a USB port that you can plug a http://us.toshiba.com/computers/accessories/dynadock or similar into to give you the full PC UI, except you carry it around in your pocket and it's available to you all the time. That's _today_, and the next versions will be better and cheaper. Why would you bother owning a 30 pound paperweight with a fan five years from now? (People are experimenting with UI stuff ala iPad, but it's based on scaling smart phone programs and usage patterns up rather than scaling PC programs down.) Linux is a good server OS, so the transition to "cloud" doing fine for it. Meanwhile, the real fight is between Apple's arm variant and Google's arm variant to establish the new dominant end-user OS that people will be using those servers through, but it has nothing to do with RISC. (Arm has multiple instruction sets with Thumb2 even before you get to Neon with all that floating point and vector SIMD stuff, plus the modern ones are SMP with all the cache coherency IPC stuff that implies.) And yet you talk about 64 bit _Mips_? I agree that's irrelevant to the new emerging standard that's going to get the unit volume to become cheap. You're acting like you can confidently predict the future when you clearly don't understand the _present_. I think your level of certainty probably contra-indicates accuracy in your predictions, dude. Rob _______________________________________________ Celinux-dev mailing list [email protected] http://tree.celinuxforum.org/mailman/listinfo/celinux-dev
