Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

So this is already more powerful in all aspects over the first generation netbooks.

At the end of this decade will cellphones be as powerful as today's average integrated desktop computer?

Can you imagine a server rack of cellphone sized computers (the drives will all be external SSD by then of course).

A single-core Atom will still beat these in single threaded performance. Multi-threaded performance is a different story, but I would still not expect an outright win for these Snapdragons. However, Adreno 220 is clearly superior to the GMA 950 crap bundled with most Atoms.

I wouldn't be too sure of that. And these were BEFORE a 1.5ghz ARM chip.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_pEfSMUbljUA/S9yFTQn2xoI/AAAAAAAAAD...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_pEfSMUbljUA/TIJceUBPyCI/AAAAAAAAAE...

Coremark isn't a good benchmark. I have been benchmarking Snapdragons and Atoms myself on a variety of integer and floating point codes. I will publish them sometime soon but Atom-based netbooks came ahead of the Snapdragon based systems I had access to. I suspect this is partially because you have more memory bandwidth available in netbooks compared to mobile devices.

edit: Also, I do expect results to change quite a bit when the Krait architecture comes into play for Qualcomm.

Ah interesting - I look forward to your benchmarks!

might be that cellphones will be as powerful as todays computers by the end of the decade, but the average computer will also have moved forward alot so its still unlikely you will see racks of cellphone sized servers. But for private use if they are enough for what you need, maybe.

While not exactly cellphone-sized, blade servers are quite small compared to conventional servers. I would be surprised if server manufacturers aren't keeping a keen eye on ARM CPUs.

Dells Fortuna[1] concept server is a nice example of an extreme end of blade servers, and it's already few years old. "six servers per rack unit (U) or 252 servers in a 42U rack."

[1] http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com