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To: pgerassi who wrote (264305)	8/10/2010 8:39:03 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Sure pete, for some applications ARM is grossly lacking. But for about 1 billion others (namely about that many mobile gadgets each year) it is now the CPU of choice. ARM is outshipping x86 by a wide margin, and it is doing so in the space that is considered "cool" these days. I'm simply spotting a trend which is quite obvious. The problem is that your x86 high performance parts can't compete on power efficiency with ARM, hence they are useless for most of those 1 billion devices. When you couple the above with the additional benefit that designers in Asia have access to ARM based cores for their own ideas, while they don't have the same for x86, I think I can spot the future. Sure Intel, and perhaps AMD will attempt to carve out some space in tablets with x86 designs, but they are starting from a minority standpoint given ARM's entrenched position, and I doubt they ever succeed in getting to be dominant in tablets. And shortly after that ARM will instead start carving out netbooks and then notebooks, or perhaps tablets simply replace both of those because they aren't "cool" anymore, and ARM performance will be advancing fast enough to enable that. The same goes for graphics IMHO. ARM graphics will likely advance in a power efficient manner that will likely blunt the impact of ATI/NVDA graphics for most applications in the cool gadget space. So I'm not sure what either of those two can really do in that space either. ARM will license their graphics tech to anyone in asia as well, so where the heck does that leave AMD or NVDA or Intel for that matter?

To: pgerassi who wrote (264305)	8/11/2010 9:12:07 AM
From: fastpathguru	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Case in point was a 640x480 LCD ARM (1GHz Cortex A9 Dual Core) based X-Server which was slower than a 400MHZ K6-3 doing the same job which is a 12 year old CPU manufactured on a 250nm process. Just curious, what was this chip exactly? I don't expect ARM to excel in the server role, unless the primary goal is saving power and set up as very dense clusters. In the X client role, I'd expect it to excel. TI's upcoming OMAP4 can drive 3 displays, encode/decode full 1080P, display 1080P video for 10H and audio for 145H, has java acceleration, 3d, dsp, etc. etc. etc. (Similar specs to Tegra2, 'cept TI is actually likely to deliver what they promise.) I'm skipping the already excellent current gen of new smartphones, and holding out for an OMAP4 based one in Nov. or so. fpg