

ARM: Heretic in the church of Intel, Moore's Law - troystribling
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9131098

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jerf
That headline is mind-bogglingly stupid. Cheap, powerful chips as a
_refutation_ of Moore's law? Buh-what?

Of course, it starts off by an entirely-fabricated misquote of Moore's law.
Wikipedia's article strikes me as pretty good and there are a number of
reasonably good ways of looking at it, including component density over time,
or price-per-transistor. Note that neither "raw performance per CPU" nor "MHz"
show up in any formulation; nothing in Moore's law says whether you need to
take your X nanometer process and make a hundred Opterons or a thousand ARMs
per silicon wafer.

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duskwuff
From the end of the article:

"Last month, a Motley Fool blogger suggested that Apple might drop the ARM
processor in the next version of the iPhone, either for the next version of
Intel's Atom, codenamed Moorestown, or if Apple build its own chip using the
technology from its acquisition of low-power chip maker P.A. Semi Inc. last
year."

Apple switching the iPhone to Atom is highly unlikely. They'd have to either
scrap their entire library of software (running it under emulation would be
unusably slow), and they'd probably end up losing out on power consumption
anyway.

Building their own ARM is totally possible, though.

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rbanffy
ARM is so small Intel could license ARM's IP and build an ARM core inside an
Atom processor, sacrificing a tiny little bit of the cache memory. If the ARM
core could use some logic on the Atom side, the sacrifice would be even
smaller.

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easp
Didn't intel have a license to Produce ARM CPUs? Didn't they end up producing
StrongARM after they acquired it from DEC (or was it already Compaq).

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skwiddor
I can't believe they think a Windows version is pre-requisite to success in
penetrating the server market

Taking websites as an example : The clear leader amongst web servers used by
the million busiest websites is Apache with a 66% share. It has a 47% lead
over its closest competitor, Microsoft-IIS, much greater than on the web as a
whole.

netcraft confirms it -
[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/03/15/march_2009_web_...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/03/15/march_2009_web_server_survey.html)

~~~
duskwuff
Not to mention, an ARM edition of Windows wouldn't be much good without either
(1) a binary translator or (2) everyone rewriting their software to run on
ARM. The OS does not exist in a vacuum.

~~~
charltones
or (3) everyone making source available? Could a more heterogeneous processor
market drive people towards open source purely from the practical aspect of
being able to built the right version to run on their kit?

~~~
sketerpot
It's more likely to drive people to use a JITting virtual machine.

