[drill_sarge]

I am getting tired of this whole dumb x86 vs. arm comparison bullshit. You cannot compare chips (read: chips not even talking about architecture here because it's not relevant) which are designed for complete different purposes (high performance big ooo workstation cpu vs. low power mobile chip). Please stop making those.

[Scaevolus]

People always focus on the instruction set -- "ARM's fixed length instructions are easy to decode, so it will win in the long run" -- ignoring how decoding is a tiny fraction of a CPU's silicon and power budget. Memory controllers, pipelining, and efficient superscalar instruction dispatch have far more effect, and Intel has a large lead on ARM in these areas.

[ranjithparakkal]

"Memory controllers, pipelining, and efficient superscalar instruction dispatch have far more effect"

Memory controllers(atleast the SOC(chip) level ones) are normally developed by the silicon vendor - like Nvidia, Broadcomm, Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, Freescale etc. Not ARM. And these companies have been working on it for many years. They have had graphics, video acceleration, display, camera-interface IPs all integrated into one SOC for almost a decade now. Intel is infact relatively new to this kind of integration.

In anycase everything including memory controllers, pipelining and superscalar has already been taken into account in this benchmark.

What has been left out is higher clocks and hyperthreading. Two things that ARM doesnt have yet.

[acqq]

Something is wrong Ranjith, you have more "dead" posts, you probably triggered something like "too many posts for a new account."

Hallo admins, Ranjith is the author of the linked article!

[rwmj]

Probably the main one is cost. ARM licenses are cheap, and the many manufacturers work on knife edge profit margins. Intel makes very large profits on high end chips that only it can fab.

On the other hand, Intel has better technology and could cannibalize itself. The future will be interesting.

[haricm]

Drill, I partly agree with you. But as you know ARM is getting into servers in a big way. The idea is low power servers(green servers as it is called) of course, and there are several silicon vendors already working on it. ARM recently announced Cortex-A57 and A53 precisely for this segment. The A57 can be expected to have a similar performance to that of A15, but with higher clocks. Hence this discussion, I believe, is not totally irrelevant.

[drill_sarge]

It's not exclusively about the architecture (granted fully fledged x86 out-of-order cpus have some junk to carry around but the architecture overhead isn't that big). The assumption that always is made ARM = low power is just not true. At least not in all scenarios. Nobody expects a typical workstation x86 grade cpu to be competing with a designed for mobile arm-chip. But it's not about architecture, just look at the upcoming Atom chips. They seem to be very competitive with their arm counterparts. On the other side it is probably no problem to build a big arm processor like the typical intel/amd desktop cpu (not talking about shoving 5000 small mobile arm cores in it because that is just programmers and everyones nightmare). TL;DR You design a processor for a specific purpose regardless of architecture.

[ranjithparakkal]

Drill,

The thing is that ARM licenses its core, while Intel doesnt. ARM allows many many silicon vendors to do their own thing. Make their own server CPUs etc. Something they had never been able to do before.

I have no doubt that Intel will get competitive over time on the power front, if they are not already there yet. But people need to know that ARM is getting competitive on the performance front too. So that many silicon vendors, not just Intel, can come out with servers, and SOCs for other types of applications which is pure x86 right now.