[citation][nom]Zanny[/nom]Kal'el Tegra chips are 45nm, the Wayne series after that in early 2012 will be 28nm, and I expect ~20nm by 2013. They use TSMC for both gpus and socs, while AMD is using TSMC for the radeon 7000 gpus that are on their way.ARM processors are extremely power efficient, and once you have 4 cores at 2ghz each performance on consumer grade laptops becomes a non issue. I expect by 2015 for there to be a general market of $300 - 500 ARM windows laptops with battery life in the neighborhood of a day under load, and the $1k + market will be dominated by skylake by Intel at 16nm. The ARM assembly language is just fundementally better than x86 because it isn't backwards compatable all the way to the original i386 instruction set. Sandy Bridge E is a great example. 2.3 billion transistors, but in the end a ton of those are spent supporting legacy instructions that no longer make sense with current designs of cpus and hardware in general, but are still there because they keep the zombie beast of x86 alive for so long. Its not like didn't try to fix it - they made Itanium as a better replacement. Only problem was the problem the windows ARM machines will have - if you cant run x86 software, you are dead from inception. One advantage for ARM will be a somewhat reasonable portability between iOS and Android to ARM, and Linux already runs on ARM as do many linux apps, GCC compiles to ARM, etc. The OSS community tools work on ARM already, whereas for a long time after Itanium came out they didn't, but that is irrelevant for average joe consumer.One other thing to consider - how many general purpose consumers use software anymore? Everything is web based. You can get the entire rage of general purpose software through google docs and the prepackaged bloatware MS will throw in.What is hilarious to me is how much this much be costing M$. They have to rewrite everything in the NT kernel for ARM, port .net and everything else they have made for a decade, and expect it to sell well enough to justify that huge investment.[/citation]
No, just no.
Do not compare ARM vs x86, the ISA's are too different to be directly compared. And don't even attempt to go into the utter disaster that was IA64. Itanium was NOT a better instruction set, Intel did not try to save the world from x86, it was the exact opposite. They were trying to lock out third party manufacturers from producing CPU's capable of running MS Windows. IA64 sucked, nobody liked it and thus it never gained any traction. In the heavy RISC world you have SPARC and PPC, and both of those are better ISA's the IA64.
x86 is not a bad instruction set. It works very well for what it was designed to do, run single process's at high speed. We've just moved onto bigger and better micro-processing design's, of course trying to move the entire world to a different architecture isn't going to work without an evolutionary growth (EMT64 vs IA64) vs a disruptive revolutionary one.
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