Thought Dump

2010/06/21 01:36 AM PST: Just some ramblings
about the future placement of CPUs.

I have a feeling that ARM based CPUs will be making their way into PCs and will no longer be relegated to low-power mobile devices. Here are a few reasons why:

• The advent of ARM designs like the Snapdragon and Apple's A4
• The increasing number of "full-featured" programs designed to run on those platforms.
• The shift away from marketing gimmicks (eg. MHz myth) and increased focus on and demand for low-power, high-performance computers (especially laptops, netbooks, ipads, whatever the crap kids are calling things these days)
• Consequently, desktop-class CPU manufacturers like Intel have been scrambling to try and fill this need with nonsense like centrino and the Atom line of processors.
• Current desktop class CPU technology is still advancing at the same alarming rate as it has been in the past, but the advances have become less tangible for the ordinary computer user because of bottlenecks in other parts of the computer (main memory, disks) and because software has not kept up with hardware and/or is not able to take advantage of these advances (hard to write multi-threaded code for casual software applications).
• speaking of multi threaded code...
• it will inevitably become a requisite programming practice as more and more processor cores and threads become available for programs to use. As such, we should start seeing a shift away from entirely general purpose cores to having chips with a GP along with several specialized co-procesors (an example being the IBM Cell)
• ARM architecture already allows for co-processors, so such designs seem like a logical evolution. As things currently stand, ARM designs are simply not powerful enough for desktop computing. But this could change through the use of several specialized co-processors and good coding discipline.
• x86 ISA is weird and unpleasant. RISC designs are superior to non-RISC designs. Feel free to disagree.
• Many of the tasks that your typical user needs their computer for are capable of being solved using much less powerful and expensive hardware and much more intuitive application design (for example, when the iPad first came out, I was hatin' on it like a madman until I started seeing that this could become a major trend in basic computers suitable for the VAST majority of people).

That said, ARM and similar designs won't be replacing desktop CPUs any time soon and will never fully displace them. Gamers will still need ridiculously overpowered rigs, workstations will still need to have raw crunching power, and even with the increased FP performance in v7 designs, ARM still falls short in this and many other areas.

Additionally, OS vendors would have to rewrite their OSes or else come up with new ones. That will take a very long time. Otherwise, we could potentially look forward to using Android and whatever other miniaturized OSes are available for today's mobile devices (webOS? iOS?--if hell decides to freeze over one day...) And still, miniaturized OSes aren't appropriate for all applications.

do you have a comment or something to add? feel free to send off an email to:
 thoughtdump_AT_bowmasters_DOT_org

As you can probably tell, this site isn't advanced and I don't have any automated commenting system. But if you send a reasonable email I might read it and even post your response up here on the site.

2010/05/14 10:28 AM PST: NEW! NEW! NEW! NEW!

Featured Character:

--Tak, "The Black"

Character profile page coming soon...

2010/04/30 2:45 AM PST: I seem to get more and more boring every day...
Ah, I got nothing to say.


2010/01/06 10:15 PM: Happy New year!
New year, new thought dump.