On Sat, Dec 08, 2012 at 10:51:15PM -0500, Michael Mol wrote > It's looking promising. Not that I have a horse in the race, but I > very much like ARM's low power consumption.
There's an article on Slashdot about Intel's relatively new 22 nm SOC (System On Chip) design... http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/12/10/2346257/tsmc-and-global-foundries-plan-risky-process-jump-as-intel-unveils-22nm-soc It's not so much that Atom consumes more power than an ARM SOC, it's that a multi-core Atom, plus a discrete GPU, plus various other discrete components, consumes more power than an ARM SOC. Move the discrete components onto the chip (hence System On Chip), and power consumption goes down. Intel can still wring out a lot of efficiencies. They simply haven't had to in the past. That's totally separate from obvious stuff like fabbing only one core on their low-power-chips. A 2 or 4-core Atom on a smartphone/tablet is the computing equivalant of one person commuting to work in rush-hour-crawl traffic in a minivan or SUV powered by a V8 engine. A single-core chip would be equivalant to a 4-cylinder engine. It'll do the same easy job, but consume less energy in the process. -- Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
