On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Grant <emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: > It seems like ARM processors will destroy x86 before too long. Does anyone > think this won't happen?
It's looking promising. Not that I have a horse in the race, but I very much like ARM's low power consumption. The way I see it, they're only a short list of features away from obliterating x86: * I'd like to see fast division. I keep hearing about how this or that is slow because of ARM's lack of strong division. * I'd like to see a modern baseline of strong instructions. x86 kept continually improving in a very fragmented way, but there were, from time to time, baseline collections of feature sets you could expect all processors to have. i386 represented one. i686 represented one. Currently, it's x86_64, which implies not only a 64-bit flattened address space and a departure from real mode, but also a collection of SIMD instruction sets and other features developed between the release of the Pentium Pro and AMD's Hammer architecture. ARM just feels...fragmented. And I don't have the impression I could write my code assuming the availability of SIMD (presuming I use things like OpenMP to expand my code to leverage it, rather than writing processor-specific code. Though OpenCL could very well alleviate that issue.) * I'd like to see virtualization be a thing. Productivity and efficiency on x86 *soared* with the compartmentalization that came with hardware-assisted (and therefore cheap! and fast!) virtualization. I haven't heard about the same on ARM, although Citrix is working hard on porting Xen there. Paravirt may well be the first common means of virtualization on ARM... -- :wq
