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Why do you prefer ARM over x86?
by mattyb 17y ago
Why do you prefer ARM over x86?
- pingswept 17y agoLower power consumption, I'd guess.
- rbanffy 17y agoI also like the cleaner instruction set. It may make compiler writer lives easier, render better optimization strategies, among other things.
- ssp 17y agoIt's maybe a little nicer for assembly programmers, but x86 is not that bad any more, and the predication and auto-shifting features in ARM are not that easy to deal with for compilers. The main thing that may be problematic for x86 is that the individual cores may get smaller and simpler, which means that the decoding hardware will take up a proportionally higher portion of each one.
- blasdel 17y agoNo ball-and-chain of Windows compatibility holding you back. No possibility of being lazy and using a traditional PC BIOS + ACPI etc. architecture. x86 doesn't even have mature alternatives: EFI doesn't really help anything, and OLPC's OpenFirmware approach was implemented poorly. With ARM there's already a bunch of well-implemented variant architectures from multiple vendors with full support in dozens of operating systems.
- wmf 17y agoYep, on ARM you don't have those problems; you have different ones: every system has unique firmware and requires a special bootloader and kernel, making it impossible to create one OS image that will boot on many ARM systems. http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/ http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/ There is hope, but I doubt it will arrive in time for the first wave of ARM "smartbooks": http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/ http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/ Also, Ubuntu and Chrome OS seem to have divergent plans for firmware.
- rbanffy 17y agoIf OLPC pulls the XO-1.75 off, there will be a reference design for ARM-based notebook that is open-source from top to bottom.