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This isn't just about computational performance. It's just as much about power consumption. Diamondville sits at about 2.5 watts per core, while the A9 sits at

This isn't just about computational performance. It's just as much about power consumption. Diamondville sits at about 2.5 watts per core, while the A9 sits at under 300 mW per core, totalling to some orders of magnitude better performance per watt. Should we say that the comparison is unfair because of this as well? We could maintain that stance up until the point where we compare two CPUs with identical processing power and power consumption, but somehow that would defeat the purpose of comparing at all. And for the record, they could just as well have brought the Pineview and Cedar Trail cores into the picture, as fresh as the A9, which might've been more "fair", but very little still would've changed in computational performance. These tests are really about showing exactly how much you can get out of under a watt of power when opting out of x86.

ajross 15y ago
Sure, there are apples/oranges problems all over the place in this comparison. But you completely missed my point. I'm saying that comparing TI's flagship SoC product with a 4-year old CPU that is three (soon to be four in a month or two) process nodes behind Intel's state of the art and claiming it is somehow representative of "ARM" vs. "Atom" is straight up crazy. How would you like it if Phoronix decided to show off a Medfield vs. ARM11, which are separated by roughtly the same amount of engineering time?
- hackermom 15y ago
  No I got your point exactly. But Diamondville, Pineview et al. represents the current available state of the art in mobile x86 cores from Intel. Medfield isn't released yet, but when it shows up I would be pleased seeing it pitted against the state of the art ARM cores.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Intel hasn't improved performance of Atom all that much in the past 4 years. They've been mostly working on lowering TDP, while in the same time ARM tried to maintain their very low TDP, while increasing performance. Either way, these are still underclocked Cortex A9 CPU's. By the time Intel Atom hits the market in a phone or tablet, it will compete with same clock dual core or quad core Cortex A9, dual core Krait chips, and possibly even dual core Cortex A15 chips by summer. There's no way Intel will remain competitive - not even in performance, let alone power consumption and price.
  - ajross 15y ago
    I'm with you up until the last sentence, where you veer off into fantasy land. When will the ARM competitor to a 4-core 3.7GHz Sandy Bridge arrive? :) [edit, rather than needlessly extend a fanboi thread: the comparison with SB certainly is relevant to your statement "There's no way Intel will remain competitive - not even in performance", which was laughably wrong. Intel won't be losing the lead in performance any time this decade, I assure you.] Look, this is all just fine. ARM has made some amazing progress in the last five years, and they are to be commended. But the cheerleading has gotten out of hand. Intel's death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's become a running gag in the industry. ARM Ltd. is just the latest competitor to show some spunk. Will they succeed where Motorola, MIPS, DEC, and AMD failed? ... Maybe! But I'm not putting a lot of money on it. And I'm certainly not changing my opinion based on a comparison between a brand new Pandaboard/GNexus and a so-old-it-smells-bad netbook. [1] 68000, then R2000, then Alpha, then the K6/Athlon/Athlon64 -- every one of those designs was going to "kill Intel" according to "serious people in the Industry" -- check the Google groups archives for all the fun flame wars.
    - nextparadigms 15y ago
      The comparison with Intel's highest performance chip is irrelevant. Yes, Intel will always maintain a lead in raw performance. But the point is as ARM chip increase in performance to become good enough for laptops, they will still be cheaper and more efficient than Intel chips at that same level - so it makes buying ARM almost a nobrainer. ARM will keep pushing Intel up-market and away from lower-end devices, until there's little market share left in the mobile/laptop market for Intel. Intel won't die. These things take many years or even decades. You could argue that the PC didn't "kill" the mainframe for 30 years since the PC first appeared, but what happened is that mainframes became increasingly less relevant, and PC architectures increasingly more relevant and popular in more than one market.

ajross 15y ago

Sure, there are apples/oranges problems all over the place in this comparison. But you completely missed my point. I'm saying that comparing TI's flagship SoC product with a 4-year old CPU that is three (soon to be four in a month or two) process nodes behind Intel's state of the art and claiming it is somehow representative of "ARM" vs. "Atom" is straight up crazy. How would you like it if Phoronix decided to show off a Medfield vs. ARM11, which are separated by roughtly the same amount of engineering time?

hackermom 15y ago
No I got your point exactly. But Diamondville, Pineview et al. represents the current available state of the art in mobile x86 cores from Intel. Medfield isn't released yet, but when it shows up I would be pleased seeing it pitted against the state of the art ARM cores.
nextparadigms 15y ago
Intel hasn't improved performance of Atom all that much in the past 4 years. They've been mostly working on lowering TDP, while in the same time ARM tried to maintain their very low TDP, while increasing performance. Either way, these are still underclocked Cortex A9 CPU's. By the time Intel Atom hits the market in a phone or tablet, it will compete with same clock dual core or quad core Cortex A9, dual core Krait chips, and possibly even dual core Cortex A15 chips by summer. There's no way Intel will remain competitive - not even in performance, let alone power consumption and price.
- ajross 15y ago
  I'm with you up until the last sentence, where you veer off into fantasy land. When will the ARM competitor to a 4-core 3.7GHz Sandy Bridge arrive? :) [edit, rather than needlessly extend a fanboi thread: the comparison with SB certainly is relevant to your statement "There's no way Intel will remain competitive - not even in performance", which was laughably wrong. Intel won't be losing the lead in performance any time this decade, I assure you.] Look, this is all just fine. ARM has made some amazing progress in the last five years, and they are to be commended. But the cheerleading has gotten out of hand. Intel's death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's become a running gag in the industry. ARM Ltd. is just the latest competitor to show some spunk. Will they succeed where Motorola, MIPS, DEC, and AMD failed? ... Maybe! But I'm not putting a lot of money on it. And I'm certainly not changing my opinion based on a comparison between a brand new Pandaboard/GNexus and a so-old-it-smells-bad netbook. [1] 68000, then R2000, then Alpha, then the K6/Athlon/Athlon64 -- every one of those designs was going to "kill Intel" according to "serious people in the Industry" -- check the Google groups archives for all the fun flame wars.
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    The comparison with Intel's highest performance chip is irrelevant. Yes, Intel will always maintain a lead in raw performance. But the point is as ARM chip increase in performance to become good enough for laptops, they will still be cheaper and more efficient than Intel chips at that same level - so it makes buying ARM almost a nobrainer. ARM will keep pushing Intel up-market and away from lower-end devices, until there's little market share left in the mobile/laptop market for Intel. Intel won't die. These things take many years or even decades. You could argue that the PC didn't "kill" the mainframe for 30 years since the PC first appeared, but what happened is that mainframes became increasingly less relevant, and PC architectures increasingly more relevant and popular in more than one market.