

Who, us worried? Naww...










Comments     Threshold


They can do it.
By Smilin on 1/21/2011 12:12:58 PM , Rating: 2
Intel has made some big drops in power consumption in the past and we tend to think of them as only making heavy chips because that's what everyone buys. Heck just take one of their quad cores and lop 3 cores off of it, run it at 1.5ghz speeds with undervoltage and you're halfway there without really lifting a finger.

(not saying this alone would do the trick but you get an idea).

Furthermore we're talking about the future, not the present.
In the future intel will be releasing whatever they release but think about ARM for a moment:

They have to figure out how to increase processing while maintaining that low power consumption. They have little experience in multi-core design beyond coprocessors. Intel and AMD have been fighting this fight for a couple generations now and they're getting really good at it (especially w/ memory controllers). ARM also has yet to make a leap to a full 64bit instruction set. Intel/AMD(in particular) found a wildly successful path to accomplish this. ARM also doesn't do microcode for crap. This is going to be an issue as their designs become more complicated. One moderate errata and it's going to be mass-recall instead of an update.

ARM makes an awesome low power processor but they made huge tradeoffs to accomplish this. Those tradeoffs are going to bite them hard in the future.

