On Mon, 28 May 2012, Erik Trimble wrote:
I don't have hard numbers, but my last impression while at Snoracle was that the T1/T2 were being made on 90nm - that is, at *least* two full generations behind what AMD & Intel were doing at the time (45nm). Even after the shrink to 65nm it's a full 3 gen behind the latest 22nm.
The SPARC T2 CPU re-rendered at 22nm would be smoking fast while consuming relatively little power due to using fewer transistors.
ARM chips certainly aren't doing well in the appliance/embedded market for traditional "sealed computer disguised as something else" except at the extreme low-end consumer field. Portable devices, sure. But
There is an emerging ARM server market and a number of very large players plan to introduce ARM-based server hardware. The ARM-based server hardware is nothing like big x86 iron. Instead, the servers are based on many small cards and a network switching fabric which achieves the equivalent of virtualization but without so much security risk or single point of failure. In spite of being small, the new ARM micro-servers have enough capacity to run an OS like Illumos.
This sort of design is apparently anticipated to be successful since both Intel and AMD have made the necessary acquisitions so that they can offer competing systems with their own low-power x86 CPUs.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn [email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
