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by CPlatypus 5317 days ago
6x the performance . . . for 8.5x the TDP. It's pretty easy to see why ARM designs are already preferable for almost anything that has a battery, and laptops are outselling desktops already. Sure, there will always be applications where single-thread performance will matter more than total performance or performance per watt for many cores - believe me, we learned that lesson at SiCortex - but those applications are not enough to sustain Intel as we know it. There's a reason they're developing MIC; without it they'd be squeezed between ARM clients and servers with 20+ ARM/MIPS/POWER/SPARC cores per chip (not even counting GPU/FPGA server plays). They need their own many-core product to compete.
1 comments
pbharrin 5317 days ago
I will take 6x the performance for 8.5x the TDP. My 3 year old MacBook Pro has plenty of battery life for my use case. You have to look at absolute performance numbers for the application.
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divtxt 5317 days ago
The only thing I use that causes the fans on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Air to kick in is Flash, so I would definitely consider a slower CPU.

Also, note that the savings/benefits can be in ways other than more battery life e.g. price, fanless & sealed cpu, etc.

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da_dude4242 5317 days ago
How are they mutually exclusive products?
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CPlatypus 5317 days ago
Does it still have plenty of battery life when you're doing something besides commenting on Hacker News? Perhaps more importantly, how fast do you need a single instruction stream to be? I'm writing this on my own three-year-old MacBook Pro, but I know that its battery life is mostly contingent on the CPU remaining idle 99% of the time. For any multi-tasking workload, or even for single-task workloads if the software is written correctly, a more efficient CPU architecture with many smaller cores would offer both greater responsiveness and longer battery life even during my most computationally intensive moments. Maybe you're one of the 1% who really need higher single-thread performance, and not just because of crappy multi-core-naive software, but the market is driven by the other 99%.
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