Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dman 4700 days ago
Next couple of years are going to be interesting. Intels been winning for so long that it seems that theyre immune to the innovators dilemna. Will be interesting to see if the arm platform will break into the mainstream of desktop / server computing or if Intel will prevail and have 80% of the desktop and mobile market.
1 comments
Nelson69 4700 days ago
How good is ARM at running just generic ARM binaries? There are all the custom hardware parts, we can ignore them, but can I build a 32bit ARM binary that will run on a wide range of ARM cores with good/great performance?

Historically, it has been my experience that pretty much all the non-x86 platforms the compiler and hardware specific optimizations tend to have a pretty dramatic impact. Intel just has so much code and existing code streams to factor in to their designs for new hardware. Maybe this has changed. It's a hard road if mismatched or non-hardware optimized binaries are slow and pokey and hardware specific optimized binaries are competitive. Come out with a great 64bit ARM core that can run nearly all ARM binaries with decent performance (clearly, excluding stuff that needs custom hardware..) and ARM could be pretty disruptive.

link
Tuna-Fish 4700 days ago
ARM realized that this was a problem when they got into smartphones, and while the lineup was a total and complete mess in 2008, their modern high-end chips actually provide a pretty uniform experience.

The half-watt microcontroller replacements still need custom builds, but the chips used in top-line smartphones can now all run the same compiled OS and apps. They are going to do a 64-bit transition soon, it will be very interesting how that will turn out.

link
gsnedders 4700 days ago
Historically the big thing has been the variety of floating point units — nowadays VFP3 is pretty much a de-facto standard on the high-end ARM chips (it's required from Cortex-A8 onwards in the application profile), and what's done on Android (where you have a huge diversity of hardware, some with FPUs, some without) where performance matters is you ship one hardfloat binary and one softfloat binary.
link