ARM Aims to Deliver Core i5 Like Performance at Less Than 5 Watts | Hacker News Reader

ARM Aims to Deliver Core i5 Like Performance at Less Than 5 Watts

phoronix.com

33 pointsjhack6 comments

With ARM making chromebooks more powerful and therefore a better notebook alternative (and also Microsoft working on Windows for Chromebooks) and the security issues with Intel CPU's (which hit cloud provider especially hard) and AMD launching a line up which is competitive again the next 5 years are going to be....interesting....for Intel.

I think you are right about Chromebooks and the connectivity will be tempting. Microsoft with the approx. 40% x86 emulation penalty will be a couple of years later.

That's impressive, but I don't really have any use for a 5 Watt CPU. I've literally just pulled the trigger on moving to a 15inch MBP because of the 47 watt TDP of the parts. The challenge for ARM is crawling up to 45W, 65W, 90W, 150W performance. Hitting performance targets at the 5W is great for Mobile CPUs, but it sort of belies the fact that they're not ready to play in the real laptop market yet. Looks like it'll be chromebooks for the foreseeable future. I certainly don't see Apple being able to offer anything compelling with this.

I don't really understand this comment. You seem to be measuring CPU performance in watts. It's not a lightbulb - you can't directly infer anything about performance from power draw (otherwise the Pentium 4 would still be a top performer today). That's kinda the entire point of what they're saying - they think they can beat Intel efficiency.

What's more, performance in laptops is limited largely by thermal dissipation these days (Macbooks are outliers due to metal unibody construction). This means that any efficiency gain is also a performance multiplier. 3 times as efficient means for times as many cores for a given thermal envelope.

You would absolutely have a use for a 5 watt CPU, if it performed like a 15 watt CPU.

I personally value battery life over raw performance. My job involves coding small chunks that run in larger batch processes that run on the server. So I don't really care if running an edge case takes 1 second or 10 on my machine.

I wonder how ARM is achieving more performance per watt than Intel(assuming the claim is true). Is the architecture just better, or what?

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