• jqp

    Reports of Intel’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

    ARM came after Intel and now Intel is slowly returning the favor. It’s going to get interesting but I wouldn’t bet against Intel. They have manufacturing prowess that few ARM vendors can match.

    By the way, getting Android to run on x86 is really no big deal and had already been done before.


  • Rick Hodgin

    jqp, could not disagree more. ARM sold 3 billion chips last year alone. They are everywhere. ARM has investment capital to continue R&D and their business model is cheap, $0.11 per CPU royalty. AMD is getting ready to produce 28nm ARM CPUs that no x86-based Atom will ever be able to compete with in terms of power savings.

    ARM’s niche is power savings, not performance. You can throw more cores at complex jobs to get them done in parallel if need be, but you can’t do minor jobs with extreme low power on x86 like you can on ARM. And it’s in that area of power-savings that will make ARM win.

    Intel’s x86 performance-based architecture is not for the future of mobile devices, which is the money-making portion of the future of this industry. Intel will continue to make servers and high-end desktops, but for most (MOST) people, ARM-powered devices of the next 5-10 years will be sufficient for ANY task.

    ARM did it right. Predication and a fixed-length ISA with a smaller “thumb” set, allowing for greater code density on most apps, coupled with easy add-on co-processor support for SIMD and custom apps.

    Nothing Intel has can touch it.

  • Rick Hodgin

    One more thing: The incredible success in the U.S. and other countries of low-power netbooks, computers that are by no means power-houses, but are capable (CAPABLE) of running applications, have shown how much the majority of people don’t care about high-end performance, but rather about affordability and usability.

    People want things that work, things they can use. On the whole, they don’t care about the fastest performance. If two offerings are available with similar capabilities in the feature set areas people want, they will buy the cheapest solution every time. And that simply is ARM-based equipment, which doesn’t have the complex proprietary (expensive) hardware requirements to make work.

    I believe wholly in ARM. Can’t wait for quad-core and eight-core and larger applications in future netbooks.

  • jqp

    ARM sold 3 billion chips last year alone.

    ARM doesn’t sell chips, their licensees do.


    *Ever*? That is a pretty long time. And you know this for a fact without ever seeing the product?

    This is the sort of hyperbole that people used to throw around years ago and predict that RISC processors would kill x86. But x86 is still here and a lot of the RISC processors are not.