I'd really love to see some more competition to the traditional PC computing platform.
Right now Intel seems to driving the market at this moment, after they learned from their very costly mistakes with the "NetBurst" architecture.
I think they *get it* about the need to go with massively general multicore cpus.
But I think they're vulnerable.
The Atom is an interesting processor design. Going back to low power and simplicity. But based on some articles I've read the x86 can't efficiently be replicated on a die because of the vast real estate overhead of the x86 decoders. But intel has doggedly decided that they will do x86 multicore.
So the opportunity is: use an architecture which has a very good & easily executed instruction set which allows for vastly wide replication on silicon.
I guess IBM could do this but they really don't seem interested in going after a general consumer market. they're hapy with providing cores for gaming consoles or charging an arm & a leg for high end stuff.
Could ARM actually try to pull this off? It seems they have plans to release a "quad core" but that's not until 2009/10 and well, quad cores aren't so interesting.
Anyways, just musing. I really want a good computer that's cheap, power and runs low power without burning the house down and allows for new exciting paradigms that aren't limited by old legacy junk.
Right now Intel seems to driving the market at this moment, after they learned from their very costly mistakes with the "NetBurst" architecture.
I think they *get it* about the need to go with massively general multicore cpus.
But I think they're vulnerable.
The Atom is an interesting processor design. Going back to low power and simplicity. But based on some articles I've read the x86 can't efficiently be replicated on a die because of the vast real estate overhead of the x86 decoders. But intel has doggedly decided that they will do x86 multicore.
So the opportunity is: use an architecture which has a very good & easily executed instruction set which allows for vastly wide replication on silicon.
I guess IBM could do this but they really don't seem interested in going after a general consumer market. they're hapy with providing cores for gaming consoles or charging an arm & a leg for high end stuff.
Could ARM actually try to pull this off? It seems they have plans to release a "quad core" but that's not until 2009/10 and well, quad cores aren't so interesting.
Anyways, just musing. I really want a good computer that's cheap, power and runs low power without burning the house down and allows for new exciting paradigms that aren't limited by old legacy junk.
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