ARM — Heretic In the Church of Intel, Moore's Law 390
ericatcw writes "For 30+ years, the PC industry has been as obsessed with under-the-hood performance: MIPs, MHz, transistors per chip. Blame Moore's Law, which effectively laid down the Gospel of marketing PCs like sports cars. But with mobile PCs and green computing coming to the fore, enter ARM, which is challenging the Gospel according to Moore with chips that are low-powered in both senses of the word. Some of its most popular CPUs have 100,000 transistors, fewer than a 12 MHz Intel 286 CPU from 1982 (download PDF). But they also consume as little as a quarter of a watt, which is why netbook makers are embracing them. It's 'megahertz per milli-watt,' that counts, according to ARM exec Ian Drew, who predicts that 6-10 ARM-based netbooks running Linux and costing just around $200 should arrive this year starting in July."
Only 6-10? (Score:5, Funny)
What happens when those 6-10 netbooks get sold? What about the rest of us? Seems like it's hardly worth it to build so few. They should be building them by the thousands!
Rocks don't use any electricity. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we should make computers out of them. In fact, they did...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus [wikipedia.org]
Re:Rocks don't use any electricity. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:a quarter of a watt (Score:2, Funny)
ARMs powered by legs...
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Incomplete quote (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Only 6-10? (Score:5, Funny)
"I think there is a world market for maybe five netbooks." - The ghost of Thomas Watson [pcworld.com]
Re:1982?!!??! (Score:5, Funny)
Psssssttttt! Wanna guess what I'm typing this post with?
Your fingers.
Re:Nonsense. (Score:3, Funny)
Not really. Brains don't spontaneously explode.
Re:Horsepower (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nonsense. (Score:1, Funny)
Go back much less than a couple hundred years and people believed in all sorts of weird things, like industrial activity angering the weather god, and spirits turning monkeys into men, and a really big magic bang.
Re:1982?!!??! (Score:5, Funny)
Aw, how innocent you are.
Re:1982?!!??! (Score:5, Funny)
Psssssttttt! Wanna guess what I'm typing this post with?
Your arm?
Re:Nonsense. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nonsense. (Score:3, Funny)
Go back a couple of hundred minutes and people believed everything was created by a big man in the sky!!