On 03/22/2012 02:31 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Tom Lane wrote:
That opinion is flat out ridiculous. Or maybe it makes sense if you
think consumer desktops are the be-all and end-all; but they are not.
Consumer desktops and notebooks. The things we normally call "computers".
Those have always been and should remain our primary target.
Check out the numbers from The Economist:
http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/20111008_SRM111.gif
The number of desktops has been flat for last 7 years. The growth in the
smartphone/tablet area dwarfs 'what we normally call computers'.
The whole article is at http://www.economist.com/node/21531109
Wow, you seem to really hate x86. But please accept the fact that, no matter
how much you hate x86, it is THE relevant architecture right now.
ARM claims an installed base of 25 billion CPUS, and current deployment
rate of 6 billion new CPUs per year. Granted, a large fraction of that
are microcontrollers (single purpose, no virtual memory etc), but still,
the total number of x86 machines is about 500 million.
Nonsense. As long as we have healthy secondary architectures, we can promote
them to primary when it really makes sense, i.e. when/if the x86 apocalypse
happens. (By the way, don't count on it happening at all. The end of x86 has
been proclaimed so many times, yet each of the prophecies has been proven
wrong so far. Not even the move to 64-bit and Intel putting its weight
behind a non-x86 64-bit architecture were able to kill x86. What was killed
instead was the Itanium, dubbed "Itanic" by many. Don't be too quick to
write off x86!) There is no need whatsoever to make the move to primary now.
I had an interesting discussion with VIA---asked them why don't they
compete with Intel's inexpensive Atom platforms. They weren't interested
in the low end; they claimed that there's plenty of demand for
traditional 'few hundred bucks' price point. I think they are wrong
about how sustainable that demand is---ARM has low-end CPUs for >1$ (ST,
NXP, TI), and the OS-capable ones for under 10$.
Now, does it mean that we need to rush the ARM primary architecture? Of
course not--as others have said, one gets the job because one can do the
job, but we need to figure out the details of how to get there:
- toolchain/build environment speed
- better and/or standard installation mechanism
- QA techniques
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