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A 1.6GHz Intel Atom spanks an entire week of lunch money out of a 1 GHz ARM, in terms of CPU performance. No doubt AAPL can mostly hide that with faster SW, rel
by rphlx 17y ago
A 1.6GHz Intel Atom spanks an entire week of lunch money out of a 1 GHz ARM, in terms of CPU performance. No doubt AAPL can mostly hide that with faster SW, relative to Windows Vista/7. But I would hate to compile anything on A4, whereas, a $200 Linux netbook is fine for most development.
IMO it's sad for something iPad's size to not have a reasonable native development environment.
- wmf 17y agoA 1.6GHz Intel Atom spanks a 1 GHz ARM Not necessarily; ARM claims that the Cortex A9 is the one doing the superscalar out-of-order spanking and I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- chadaustin 17y agoI'd love to see citations on both rphlx's and wmf's claims. Not trying to sound mean - I'm honestly interested in the future of low-power computing and I kind of hope ARM wins.
- pieter 17y agoHere is one link: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/16/ARMCortexA9SMPDesignAnnounced.aspx http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/16/ARMCortexA9SMPDe... Also Anandtech on the Cortex A9: http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3714&p=3 http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3714&p=3 and the pages around that.
- rphlx 17y agoHere is my reasoning -- An Atom Z530 1.6GHz core has almost exactly 2X the Dhrystone MIPS of a 1.0GHz ARMv5TE-based network SoC (I actually ran it; those are not bogus vendor marketing #s). A9 probably has much higher IPC than ARMv5 -- but I doubt it's high enough to beat an Atom running at 60% higher frequency; that is a hell of a gap to close architecturally. I also suspect Atom has higher DRAM bandwidth; the A4 pkg looks a bit small for x64 DRAM. Finally, A4 may or may not have more than 1 core; Atom definitely has 2. I am talking pure performance, not performance per watt, which is not interesting to me in this situation. I can almost always find AC if I'm using something iPad-sized.
- colinplamondon 17y agoThat's the whole point here- by preventing multitasking it's possible to give every single app massive resources, relative to an Atom chip. No YouTube videos buffering with Skype running in the background and three Word docs fired up. The perceived performance is phenomenal, and that's the whole point. As for native development environments, no one gives a shit outside of HN- that's what Macs are for. Pony up the extra $700 and you're good to go with a MBP.
- adolph 17y agoUnfortunately, Atom uses two weeks worth of spanking energy to get that week out of ARM.