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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 ma

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

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.