Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

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Intel processors are major power hogs and there's no way they can make them significantly better.

This simply isn't true - or at least it ignores half the issue.

For their performance, Intel chips aren't powerhogs. A i5 uses a lot more power than a Tegra2/A5, but is a lot more powerful.

An Atom use a bit more power than Tegra2/A5, but is a bit more powerful.

Intel is pushing Atom down into ARM territory in terms of power usage, and ARM is moving up towards Atom - and, to the surprise of no one who knows what they are talking about - the power usage at the same level of performance is roughly the same.

Arstechnica had an excellent article about this back when NVidia started talking about their desktop ARM push: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-t...

A good quote:

It's also the case that as ARM moves up the performance ladder, it will necessarily start to drop in terms of power efficiency. Again, there is no magic pixie dust here, and the impact of the ISA alone on power consumption in processors that draw many tens of watts is negligible. A multicore ARM chip and a multicore Xeon chip that give similar performance on compute-intensive workloads will have similar power profiles; to believe otherwise is to believe in magical little ARM performance elves.

Intel isn't out of this game by a long shot. For example (Intel powered) Chromebooks perform roughly as well as an iPad in terms of battery life. There is little evidence that an ARM powered Airbook would do any better if it offered similar levels of performance (unless you believe in the magical ARM performance elves mentioned above).

The biggest concern Intel has is that moving down market, shrinking products and lowering margins almost never works in any industry when a disruptive competitor is moving upmarket into the same space (Innovator's Delimma).

If Intel could move down market successfully don't you think we would have seen a reasonable IA facsimile of an iPhone or an iPad after all these years?

Soon everyone on earth, except perhaps the bottom billion poorest, with have Internet access via ARM and Intel will peak at the top 2-3 billion. That's what scares the hell out of them.

ARM,as a mobile optimized architecture, will never compete on performance grounds with IA. IA is the push rod V8 of computing and ARM is the hybrid.

If Intel could move down market successfully don't you think we would have seen a reasonable IA facsimile of an iPhone or an iPad after all these years?

No, chip design doesn't work that quickly. Intel has accelerated their development program for Atom[1], but at the moment Intel doesn't have a processor that competes at the power usage of current smart phones. Atom is supposed to get there in 2012 - they are usually pretty reliable (see Intel's Tick/Tock strategy[2]), but we'll see.

They are planning to do 22nm Atoms in 2013, and 14nm in 2014. TSMC is supposed to start shipping ARM on 28nm in Q4 2011[3], but historically they are usually late. TSMC is allegedly planning a 20nm fab, but it is unclear how far off that is.

Nokia (remember them?) was signed up to do smartphones on Atom in 2012, but then they switched to WinMo (which is ARM only).

I personally don't think they'll do well in smartphone, but tablets is a whole other market.

ARM,as a mobile optimized architecture, will never compete on performance grounds with IA

That's not what nVidia think[4]. There are 32/64bit issues with ARM, but beyond that there is little in the architecture itself that means it can't compete with IA.

[1] http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4216089/Intel-rewrit...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock

[3] http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20110201212245_TS...

[4] http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/nvidia-announces-project-...

The problem for Intel is not so much that they can't make a competitive chip, but that they can't make one at margins that will sustain their fabs.

I think it's premature to say that.

Intel has the best fabs in the world, and they can make chips as cheaply as anyone.

It is possible that at some point in the future Intel's margins won't sustain the continual investment in new fabs. That's a fair way off at the moment though.

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