Am Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:24:58 +0100 schrieb Florian Philipp <li...@binarywings.net>:
> Am 09.12.2012 04:51, schrieb Michael Mol: > > On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Grant <emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> It seems like ARM processors will destroy x86 before too long. Does anyone > >> think this won't happen? > > > > It's looking promising. Not that I have a horse in the race, but I > > very much like ARM's low power consumption. The way I see it, they're > > only a short list of features away from obliterating x86: > > > > * I'd like to see fast division. > > I keep hearing about how this or that is slow because of ARM's lack of > > strong division. > > > > * I'd like to see a modern baseline of strong instructions. > > x86 kept continually improving in a very fragmented way, but there > > were, from time to time, baseline collections of feature sets you > > could expect all processors to have. i386 represented one. i686 > > represented one. Currently, it's x86_64, which implies not only a > > 64-bit flattened address space and a departure from real mode, but > > also a collection of SIMD instruction sets and other features > > developed between the release of the Pentium Pro and AMD's Hammer > > architecture. > > > > ARM just feels...fragmented. And I don't have the impression I could > > write my code assuming the availability of SIMD (presuming I use > > things like OpenMP to expand my code to leverage it, rather than > > writing processor-specific code. Though OpenCL could very well > > alleviate that issue.) > > > > +1 with regard to fragmentation. What I especially despise is the lack > of a common boot infrastructure. If I'm not mistaken, it is still > impossible to make a kernel that boots on all (or at least a large > subset of all) ARM platforms [1]. > [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/496400/ I'm no embedded developer, but I read recently that the first batch of multi-platform ARM support has been merged in Linux 3.7: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-7-Part-5-CPU-and-platform-code-1758293.html -- Marc Joliet -- "People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup
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