ARM Launches Cortex-R Processors

[truerock]

Also very important to know...
Microsoft Windows 8 will run on ARM CPUs.

 

[f-14]

[citation][nom]dogman_1234[/nom]ARM: "We have come to aid the consumer"Intel:"Can't let you do that ARM!"[/citation]

ARM vs. CORE thus began the war of Total Annihilation that would consume galaxies for over a millenia!

ok time to scratch the itch to play some old school TA.

 

[jprahman]

If the RISC processor has a reduced instruction set, does that mean they are not doing as many things in hardware as an x86 processor might, therefore making the OS code bigger and slower to do the same things that a more complex processor would in hardware? -OR- Does that mean there is an abundant number of instructions in the x86 instruction set that no contemporary software actually uses, thereby wasting CPU real estate and power? IF that's the case, then couldn't the x86 architecture simply drop the oldest, unused instructions and tell everyone who is affected (and cares) to, well, recompile?

Yes, x86 does a lot of things in hardware that RISC doesn't. For example, x86 actually have string manipulation instructions like the STOS instruction for example. RISC shouldn't cause code bloat because each RISC instruction takes less memory to store, and even if there is some small increase in code size performance shouldn't take a hit. Keep in mind that all modern x86 CPUs don't actually run x86 instructions natively, they actually have a set of decoders that convert the x86 instructions to "micro-ops", which are basically RISC instructions.

Also it's not really feasible to start hacking instructions out of the x86 instruction set. Back during the 16-32-bit transition and again during the 32-64bit transition a number of archaic instructions were removed, but to start hacking away at the ISA just to wring some extra performance isn't going to work. Besides, what about all the legacy software that isn't maintained anymore and as a result wouldn't be recompiled.

 

[Pyroflea]

No specs? Fine then.

 

[robochump]

[citation][nom]joytech22[/nom]Woo go ARM! I hope that at least one company can stay ahead of AMD and Intel in the mobile market in terms of ARM performance.[/citation]

I fully expect that when ARM is HUGE that people will call ARM users ARM-sheep. Mark my words!!! ;-)