ARM leaps forward!

[WolfToTheMoon]

IBM is only interested in custom products for specific customers. And they would probably do such a thing with ARM if somebody came knocking at their door with a big enough bucket of money...


Freescale, on the other hand, has falling revenue and is bleeding money. It's only a matter of time before they switch to supporting just one viable architecture and it's no brainer that PPC is not it.

[WolfToTheMoon]

As an example: take my damn noisy and hot Intel i5-based laptop and give me a cold, silent, efficient ARM-based laptop with 1/4 the raw power. Keep raw power for yourself! All I need is a video core with HW geometry transformation engine and HW fullHD H264 & MPEG2 decoding.
You see? The ARM computer is more capable, better designed and respects the enviroment by not needing a thermonuclear plant for himself as Intel chips usually do.

Underclock your i5 and it'll use very little power while still having very good performance. No need for a CPU switch
That's what I did with my Turion, at 900 MHz it's noiseless and produces very little heat - still sufficiently fast for everyday computing
When I need power, I bring it back on it's native 1.8 GHz clock.

[takemehomegrandma]

To meet x86 head on you need to be able to beat them in all of it's strong areas, not just defend your own.
 
They can complain about x86 being the wrong instruction set, but to prove it they need to launch an ARM core that can beat an i7 and they can't.
 
As soon as ARM is faster as well as cheaper and less power hungry than x86, then everyone will switch everything to it.

I think we will see something novel regarding parallel processing, like a combination of a "traditional" CPU (probably a few of them on chip) with more than enough horse power for most traditional applications, connected to a massively paralleled, high speed GPU that will join in on "general computing". I think the key here would be the removal of any bottle necks in between them, to get *massive*, super fast, direct, on-chip bandwidth in between them. That would bring a whole new meaning to CUDA, and this together would bring *a whole new class* of processors.

Could be wrong of course! But there are interesting things ahead...

[commodorejohn]

Freescale, on the other hand, has falling revenue and is bleeding money. It's only a matter of time before they switch to supporting just one viable architecture and it's no brainer that PPC is not it.

PPC has been Doomed Forever since 2005, hasn't disappeared yet.

[Iggy]

IBM is only interested in custom products for specific customers. And they would probably do such a thing with ARM if somebody came knocking at their door with a big enough bucket of money...


Freescale, on the other hand, has falling revenue and is bleeding money. It's only a matter of time before they switch to supporting just one viable architecture and it's no brainer that PPC is not it.

That would explain the flood of new PPC designs including two new 64bit cores (a first for Freescale). Yep, look like they're abandoning the market.:laugh1:

[Iggy]

I think we will see something novel regarding parallel processing, like a combination of a "traditional" CPU (probably a few of them on chip) with more than enough horse power for most traditional applications, connected to a massively paralleled, high speed GPU that will join in on "general computing". I think the key here would be the removal of any bottle necks in between them, to get *massive*, super fast, direct, on-chip bandwidth in between them. That would bring a whole new meaning to CUDA, and this together would bring *a whole new class* of processors.

Could be wrong of course! But there are interesting things ahead...

That's an interesting approach and it allows you to retain the performance for when you need it.
Basically, I decided that most of the time I just didn't need it so my current primary machines are two Intel Atom powered netbooks (I'm typing on a 1.8GHz one right now).
They were cheaper then the price of a Chromebook, they have real hard drives (not cloud or flash storage), and they probably perform as well or slightly better then a similar ARM based system.
Plus they run X86 Windows apps (no small selling point).

And, of course, when I still want my Amiga flavored fix I can used my PPC based MorphOS system.

[gertsy]

Intel Haswell.

[WolfToTheMoon]

That would explain the flood of new PPC designs including two new 64bit cores (a first for Freescale). Yep, look like they're abandoning the market.:laugh1:

They will be forced to in the near future. They're loosing market share left and right, revenues are down, most divisions are selling less products... It's pretty obvious a point where they'll not be able to support and develop 2 distinct architectures is not far away....

[takemehomegrandma]

That would explain the flood of new PPC designs including two new 64bit cores (a first for Freescale). Yep, look like they're abandoning the market.:laugh1:

If they will have to cut somewhere (which they probably will), then it won't be their ARM section. They are even replacing some PPC based applications with ARM themselves, and this is something happening in many embedded industries which has been traditional PPC strongholds, like automotive. AFAIK.

Not that PPC matters anymore to anyone interested in desktops/laptops, but anyway...

[persia]

It's only a matter of time before Microsoft abandons PPC in it's XBox.  It makes no sense in the unified Windows 8 world to support a dead end processor that's different to both tablet/phone and desktop...

[TheBilgeRat]

They will be forced to in the near future. They're loosing market share left and right, revenues are down, most divisions are selling less products... It's pretty obvious a point where they'll not be able to support and develop 2 distinct architectures is not far away....

Rumors from my buddies at the Intel campus in Beaverton aren't very rosy either.  ARM is making a dent.

[haywirepc]

Google CollectAllYourDataOS    :roflmao:

Thats so true, I wonder if the idiots buying anything running that know just how much of their info is getting sent back to google?

Good news on the arm stuff... Competition is ALWAYS good. Hope to see some
16 core arm processors soon. :anger:

Steven

[Iggy]

It's only a matter of time before Microsoft abandons PPC in it's XBox.  It makes no sense in the unified Windows 8 world to support a dead end processor that's different to both tablet/phone and desktop...

By that logic, it wouldn't have made sense to move to a PPC in the 360 when the original Xbox used an Intel processor.

Nothing about the next generation of video games is well known, except that the first to market (the Wii U) is again PPC based.

[Iggy]

Rumors from my buddies at the Intel campus in Beaverton aren't very rosy either.  ARM is making a dent.

2? You obviously don't know their product line very well.
There are at least four distinct ISAs currently supported (more if you considered discontinued but still listed products like the 68060).

[takemehomegrandma]

It's only a matter of time before Microsoft abandons PPC in it's XBox.

As I've said before, I wouldn't be totally surprised if the new X-box will be ARM based, powered by Denver/nVidia. Watch it happen!

We'll see in time I guess...

[Bundi]

"We're still talking about sub-2.0 GHz processors here (for the moment).
PPCs were at 2.7 years ago when Apple abandoned them because they weren't getting faster quick enough"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/08/tsmc_28_nanometer_cortex_a9_arm/

I guess they can scale the clock speed for markets that demand it.