On a sunny day (Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:35:11 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :
I dunno, the ARM netbooks had a lot of trouble few month ago running some applications (in Linux), I think some applications still use extensive asm, a simple example present on all those netbooks is the mpeg2 / H264 / mpeg4 ... long list... drivers. That would all have to be re-written for 'RISC' architecture is asm, and as you probably know x86 has many many special instructions specifically for multimedia, Let's look at an old one here: # cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 3 model name : AMD Duron(tm) processor stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 959.526 cache size : 64 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 1920.77 clflush size : 32
So, mmx, 3dnow, give the x86 an incredible speed advantage over ARM, as ARM will have to to a zillion asm instructions for every high level x86 instruction. It is possible (I did not keep up after that book in the eighties) that ARM also added some special multimedia capabilities, but then again there is the overhead of re-encoding. So I do not expect ARM to make big inroads into personal computing and especially multimedia soon. Why do you think Apple left their old architecture for ix86? Multimedia likely!
Then there is that power issue you mention, sure, but my last encounter with an ARM was on the SkyStar1 PCI satellite receiver card, and that was a power hog so bad it needed an extra fan, and I finally was glad to get rid of it, and replace it by a new card that uses the PC's processor only.... I am not sure if it was the ARM that got so hot or the TI 7010 chip in retrospect, but for me it associated ARM with power hog. I know about the latest netbooks with ARM appearing on the various exhibitions, but why bother? As I wrote in an other post, for embedded, you can use PIC, and then the next step up is a small motherboard (and they come very small these days) with a x86, maybe Intel Atom or something along that line, AMD second source almost. readily available, all software almost or completely for free, portability, asm or C, or even your Power Basic. Unless your PowerBasic is written in C without inline asm, will it appear on ARM? Well maybe it already does, seems a lot of extra work for no gain. What is a Watt? That is even if it saves a Watt or 2, what is the total power consumption of the thing you are making? If you are controlling a 700 kV HV cross ocean DC line with 10GW power? I write that because I just did read the 700kV line here has been operational for some time, and I did not know about it! And now they are planning more all over Europe to make it possible to distribute wind power and maybe solar power so there is always some power, and always there is some wind somewhere.... but no sun at night, solar eclipses... mm let's have nuclear power please. Drifting of topic, what was the topic? :-)