The problem right now is that pretty much none of the arm SoC manufacturers adds what is needed for supporting a full desktop/ laptop experience, that is more than 4 gb of ram, sata3, general purpose pcie lanes and more memory bandwidth for the igpu. Most of the arm chips right now are stuck at 64 bit ddr4 at most, and the ones we have access too ( being libre) have even less bandwidth and are even more limited when it comes to ram.
Just an example, going from single channel to dual channel on an intel igpu increases performance by 20-30%, and that's even on a gpu design much worse than any powervr or mali gpu. AMD's apus are somewhat better in this regard since they have much more advanced memory compression.
On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 8:39 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net
wrote:
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 5:13 PM, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
bottom line, if AMD want to stay in business they need to get out of x86. part-hardware-emulated x86 fine (like the Loongson 3H architecture did), non-x86, fine. pure x86: dying and dead very soon.
Intel already tried that a *long* time ago, with the Itanium. It was
provided
with software that emulated the x86. But AMD made a 64-bit hardware
version of the
x86 and took over the market because its hardware outran the emulation
on the
Itanium, forcing Intel to follow suit or lose the Windows market.
i assume they tried to target the price-performance market as opposed to the price-performance-watt market. at that top-end they would lose.
Is the situation different now?
yes.
With an ARM version of Windows, and Microsoft's now proven ability to port Wondows to new architectures,
quite
possibly.
that's going (eventually) to eat into the top-end price-performance market as well, but not until x86 hardware-level emulation is common enough to get 70-80% of clock rate AT THE SAME TIME as reducing POWER by 70-80%.
l.
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