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Honestly, I think by the very end we will see Intel dominating mobile markets. The thing is, Intel are process kings. Nobody else comes close. Both the economi
by DSingularity 12y ago
Honestly, I think by the very end we will see Intel dominating mobile markets.
The thing is, Intel are process kings. Nobody else comes close. Both the economics and the performance. And when it comes to processors design that has to respect many physical limits (wire delay, transistor behavior, ..) tuning process knobs will gain you much more than tuning architectural knobs. I think in the end process technology wins this fight.
The reason we haven't seen competitive Intel products is that they just haven't cared about power for like ever. Their company is built for speed. Their income is from performance sensitive markets. All these power sensitive markets were pretty new and until recently -- pretty inconsequential in terms of revenue. Their process is not tuned for this. But I guess now that all these power sensitive users are starting to want more performance maybe Intel can rely on some of its strengths.
When you have a massive company like Intel it takes time to change directions. I honestly think by the time Broadwell or Skylake comes out you will start to see Intel power-competitive in the low performance segments.
- csirac2 12y agoI hope they get there soon. ARM SoCs have a bad habit of running only heavily hacked, out-of-tree, unmaintained kernels abandoned so long ago (or inexplicably they launch with an already 2-year-old kernel) that they'll never boot systemd. Yet even the weakest/slowest of Intel's Bay Trail lineup still uses at least 80% more power than the ideal candidate ARM solution I'm evaluating.
- hobolord 12y agowhat is the ideal ARM solution that you're comparing with?
- csirac2 12y agoIt's based around Cortex A9. Admittedly the modules presented with bay trail had a few features the ARM solution didn't, so it wasn't apples-to-apples.
- papaf 12y agoThis is not always true. Arch support for ARM SoCs is good and you get a shiny new kernel with systemd everywhere: http://archlinuxarm.org/ http://archlinuxarm.org/
- thoughtpolice 12y agoDo you really get a modern kernel on the Samsung Chromebook (v1)? Last time I tried, Arch still stuck with their hardwired 3.4 kernel, IIRC.
- csirac2 12y agoI'm not talking about linux distributions. Arch can only boot whatever kernel happens to be available for a particular SoC just like all the other distros. Here are some TI chips, they're still pushing kernel 2.6 for some processor families: http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Sitara_Linux_SDK_Supported_Platforms_and_Versions http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Sitara_Linux_SDK_Sup...
- mark-r 12y agoYou make a good argument, but you forget one thing - app compatibility. There are two dominant platforms, and they're both based on ARM. "Competitive" processors won't be enough to make a difference - even clearly superior processors aren't going to be compelling. Apple has shown a willingness to switch horses in the past, but now that they're designing their own chips I think we've seen the last of it.
- restalis 12y ago"You make a good argument, but you forget one thing - app compatibility. There are two dominant platforms, and they're both based on ARM." Android can be compiled for x86 (and in fact there are even gadgets deployed with it on the market¹) and the applications for Android don't run native. Consider therefore that there aren't any issues like those faced by other architectures when were trying to compete with Intel desktop monopoly. ¹ http://www.utok.com/en/700-series/utok-i700 http://www.utok.com/en/700-series/utok-i700
- pcwalton 12y agoMost of the top 25 apps on Android are games, and most of the games use the NDK.