Well, this can't be a good sign. Samsung has told CNET that the company will not be launching its Windows RT tablet in the United States, citing a lack of demand and consumer confusion. After I spent an afternoon in my country's largest electronics retailer, it's hard not to agree with Samsung.
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Member since:2007-04-18
ARM doesn't have a machine architecture standard such as x86 has (IBM PC), so no wonder there is little to no homebrew when compared to x86. At a fundamental level, from a software perspective, every PC looks the same. There's a BIOS mapped at a certain address which has certain standard functions you can invoke, every PC has a standard ISA and (later) PCI bus interface that is largely probed in the same way, etc. ARM lacks that. Even a single ARM CPU model can be implemented and firmware-coded to wildly different behavior (which is why bootloaders and firmware blobs are often times highly vendor-specific).
IBM's (and their clone maker's) contribution is easily taken for granted, but it was by no means a small thing in the industry.
Member since:2006-02-15
Indeed. Standardization is one thing ARM really, really needs in order to become a more attractive a choice in general, and only once standardization is achieved will it really be viable for proper enthusiast-use.
I could certainly imagine a future where e.g. the SoC and its RAM are just soldered-on to a motherboard and enthusiasts buy the bundle as-is as that would certainly ease things for the manufacturers and vendors, but for that to happen there must be a proper spec for booting the devices in a standard way and for accessing their resources. Also, it would require the manufacturers to actually start providing up-to-date drivers for their systems.
Alas, given the almost complete lack of interest from the SoC-manufacturers towards enthusiast-/desktop-markets and even actually-working software such a future is likely FAR away.
Member since:2012-06-22
A $50 dual-core Sandy Bridge Celeron will beat a $1000 Core 2 Duo from 5 years ago. What bastards they are selling for me that much power for the price of dinner at Applebee's.
In theory I could buy it but I couldn't run my software on it so there really is no savings for me, now is there?
Bashing Intel over prices is just freaking silly. If you want to see market without competition then have a look at the US cable market. Intel not only competes with AMD and Intel but also with their existing cpus. It's not like cable TV where you have to pay for it every month and when you stop paying your hands are empty.
Member since:2006-02-15
Member since:
2006-02-15
Well, that nets you a low-end Celeron processor with very, very poor GPU and no extras. For less than $50 you could in theory buy a quad-core ARM-processor with a more powerful GPU, integrated DSP capable of hardware encoding and decoding a handful of different codecs, usually there's WIFI/bluetooth/SATA/etc. integrated -- think of lower cost for the motherboard thanks to fewer needed components -- and lower thermal output.
Of course, they're not directly comparable, but generally ARM SoCs net you a lot more features and speed than a similarly-priced Intel-processor. On the other hand, ARM-vendors do not sell their SoCs to individual people and there are no motherboards to slap them on to, so I wonder how much of the asking price for the Intel-processors come from all the logistics and packaging needed to sell to end-users -- I doubt it's an entirely negligible amount.