

My dual core can beat up your quad core, and other mobile CPU mysteries - primesuspect
http://icrontic.com/article/dual-core-faster-than-quad-core-mystery

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mariuz
It is interesting to compare the new TI arms with current Intel atoms Here is
previous benchmarks on ubuntu The dual-core Cortex-A9 1.2GHz on the TI
OMAP4460 with the PandaBoard ES is mostly comparable to the first-generation
Intel Atom N270 in terms of raw performance.
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubunt...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_armfeb&num=1)

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Maxious
There's the beginnings of support for the little core/big core paradigm in
Linux: "Operating System Support for the Heterogeneous OMAP4430:A tale of two
micros"
[http://www.ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/LeSueur_Rod...](http://www.ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/LeSueur_Rodgers_12.slides.pdf)

Think they said if it's not in kernel mainline soon, they'll write a usenix
paper instead

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justincormack
There is a good LWN summary of what will probably happen short and longer term
here <http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/481055/f5344869dc672690/>

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nn2
reads like an ARM commercial. is that independent writing?

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wpietri
I confess I stopped reading when they said that "Even Apple Macintosh
computers now use x86, after nearly 30 years of utilizing a competing and
incompatible ISA known as PowerPC (PPC)."

I understand it's all ancient history now, and that I probably shouldn't
expect a ton of fact checking from somebody named "Space Penguin", but it was
circa 10 years on Motorola 68k processors and then 12 on PowerPC before the
Intel switch in 2006. Maybe the rest of the article is solid, but if I'm
reading an article on the details of processors, it worries me when they miss
a detail about processors.

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makeramen
If you finish the article, it's not really about any of that at all, he's just
writing a flourishing introduction. A detail like that isn't that important in
the scope of the article.

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adrianmsmith
But how can I know if I can trust the information in the article that I don't
know (the reason I'm reading it), if the information I do know is wrong?

"Maybe the rest of the article is solid, but if I'm reading an article on the
details of processors, it worries me when they miss a detail about processors"
I think expresses it pretty well.

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MarkPNeyer
a computer is not a machine that does computing. it is a primarily a machine
that moves information around, and occasionally performs computation on it.

as such, a quad core will saturday the processor - memory bandwidth much
sooner than a dual core chip will, which stalls the pipeline. couple that with
that four cores will abuse the cache much more than two will and you have a
recipe for slowdown.

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JshWright
s/saturday/saturate/ ?

Perhaps we can use all this extra processing power for a better autocorrect
implementation? ;)

