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The problem is scaling. Intel is scaling down its chips, while Qualcomm/ARM is scaling up. If tomorrow Qualcomm (or somebody) decided to roll out a 200w TDP 4
by valarauca1 12y ago
The problem is scaling.
Intel is scaling down its chips, while Qualcomm/ARM is scaling up.
If tomorrow Qualcomm (or somebody) decided to roll out a 200w TDP 4.0GHz chip. Likely the best they could do is throw a lot of cores at the problem (enter Oracle's T-5 SPARC). Which failed, the market wants parallelism, but they still demand a certain threshold of single threaded processing speed.
Qualcomm/ARM has to fight dragons like branch prediction, caching, multi-issue out of order pipe-lining, etc. if they want to compete against Intel. And these are Intel's crown jewels, they aren't going to give them away without a fight.
While when Intel wants to compete with Qualcomm/ARM they just shoot their processor power budget in the knee caps and start ripping components out (figuratively, not literally).
- dlevine 12y agoQualcomm doesn't need to scale up. Qualcomm is slowly scaling up by releasing ever more powerful Snapdragons. Eventually, Qualcomm's chips will be fast enough to do everything we could reasonably want (or at least most things that most people could reasonably want). It could almost be argued that the majority of people (minus tech nerds and a few other people with special use cases) can get by just fine with a smartphone plus a tablet.
- valarauca1 12y ago>Qualcomm doesn't need to scale up. >Qualcomm is [...] scaling up. So what? They don't need to do what they are doing? Then why are they doing that?