Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 6th Jan 2009 09:36 UTC, submitted by caffeine deprived
It seems that after Intel, just about every chip maker wants a piece of the netbook pie. AMD is an obvious competitor, but VIA is also eyeing the little notebooks. However, more exotic options like the Chinese Loongson chips and ARM's Cortex A-8 and A-9 chips are also among the contenders. We can now add a new contender: Freescale.
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Member since:
2006-01-11
The PowerPC heritage comes from high end workstations, shrinked into embedded devices (like their engine control chips).
The ARM is quite the contrary, a cheapo RISC, powering more than 70% (in volume) of the 32bits processor market. They need to rise the performance to keep Intel out of their mobile business.
I have doubts that an superovercharged ARM will keep being a very low power platform : Adding superscalar units, a decent FPU, a deep pipeline for high frequencies, register renames, hyperthreading, or OOO execution will eat gobs of power, and may erase the avantage against the desperately bogus x86 but produced and tuned in the leading edge Intel fabs.
I'm convinced that the PowerPC, SPARC, or MIPS are more adaptable than ARM for high performance platforms, but, look at what they've done to the 8086 which was born as a 16bits evolution of a 8bits CPU (8080).