[Arm-netbook] AMD considering releasing the PSP

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 4:51 PM, Eric Duhamel <ericxdu23 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On March 10, 2017 10:34:55 AM PST, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> 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.
>>
>
> I'm rather curious about this. "x86 is dying" is a rather vague statement.

 it's more that they're on a losing battle in the all-important
"price-performance-watt" metric due to the extra overhead associated
with x86 instruction decoding compared to RISC (that 500mhz dual-core
Cortex A9 video produced by ARM comparing to a single-core 1.6ghz atom
for example) combined with the power square law vs clock rate means
that  staying at the absolute top-end of performance (i.e. *ignoring*
entirely the price-performance-watt metric) is about the only option
available.

> Do you mean producers investing in x86 processor based hardware are likely to be pushed out of making profit by non-x86 competitors?

 they *can't* make profit.  $25 for one of the recent intel "tablet"
style processors - and that's the budget cut-down version that has a
64-bit DDR3 interface and a whopping 650 pins as opposed to a 128-bit
interface with a THOUSAND - where everyone else is aiming for FOUR i
mean they're pissing in the wind basically.

l.