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“For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line” ARM could well become a huge breakt
by ianai 8y ago
“For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line”
ARM could well become a huge breakthrough for tech. For the first time, it’s possible to license and customize silicon to purpose with much less overhead. We’re used to the usual combination of specialized processors (cpu/gpu), but this will open up further specialization - crypto (proc-bound), file systems (possibly some parallelism, need for gobs of flash), AI, UI (proc-bound, benefits from high frequency and no interrupts), who knows what else.
- GuiA 8y agoIt has already started - most flagship phones these days have a litany of specialized coprocessors (for biometrics, neural networks, imaging, etc).
- Waterluvian 8y agoDon't they have special chips just for decompressing specific video formats? Ie. Why I noticed some time ago that suddenly phones stopped chugging power just to watch YouTube.
- solarkraft 8y agoYes. Those "coprocessors" are special circuits on the SoC, typically somewhere on the CPU sillicon.
- saagarjha 8y agoNot sure about special chips, but yes, most processors have hardware encoding/decoding for common video formats.
- teknopaul 8y ago"ARM could well become a huge breakthrough for tech." ??? Arm has been around since 1987 Runs billions of devices. Its always been possible to license arm, at a cost. Now there are free open source architectures which are suerly more interesting for custom silicon than paying huge license fees to Arm Holdings.
- mycall 8y agoRISC-V is picking up steam in this same front.