Moore's Law Is Becoming Irrelevant, Says ARM's Boss 236
holy_calamity writes "PCs will inevitably shift over to ARM-based chips because efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance, the CEO of chip designer ARM tells MIT Technology Review. He also says the increasing adoption of ARM-based suppliers is good for innovation (and for prices) because it spurs a competitive environment. 'There’s been a lot more innovation in the world of mobile phones over the last 15-20 years than there has been in the world of PCs.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not built for speed?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Wirth's Law [techopedia.com]:
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.
Re:Efficiency! (Score:4, Informative)
That's a false comparison, though. If users mostly ran benchmarks 24x7, that would be a good test of efficiency. The reality, however, is that CPUs mostly sit idle, so to compute average efficiency, you have to factor that in.
Granted, a faster CPU that can reach an idle state sooner can be more efficient than a slower CPU that runs at full bore for a longer period of time, but only if the idle wattage is fairly similar.
Re:Title is rubbish (Score:4, Informative)
What?
twice the transistors, half the price. That is what Moore's law boils down to, according to his paper. Read it.
And yes, it's not relevant for a number of reasons.
As a real world example:
In 06 you could get a 3 GHz computer. If Moore's law still impacted speed, we would be able to get a 24GHz chip right now.
Re:Duh (Score:2, Informative)
Except Intel CPUs have been becoming far more power efficient over the last few years too. I recently replaced my old Pentium-4 Windows PC with a new i7-based PC. The P4 has one core, runs two threads, is rated at around 130W and, when playing games, the system sounds like a jet engine. The i7 has four cores, runs eight threads and is rated at 77W. When playing games I can hardly hear it under my desk and the air coming out the back is barely warm.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
According to this [phoronix.com] old benchmark by Phoronix (which was even linked by Slashdot), the i7 is more power-efficient than the ARM Cortex A9 in PandaBoard. The i7 got 85 Mop/s per Watt, while the ARM managed only 38.
The advantage of low-power processors like ARM's is low power consumption when idle, which admittedly is where most computers (and tablets, phones, etc) spend most of their time.
Re:Efficiency! (Score:5, Informative)
Funny you should hate on Medfield when a Razer I with Medfield has better battery life than a krait Razer M with the exact same screen and battery. But it looks like you never let facts get in the way of your koolaid.