Hacker News Reader

> Actually ARM SOC faces some serious issues about increasing performance. Especially with memory on chip. None of the ARM fabs are able to produce at the size needed to get further speed increases easily. Intel on the other hand is still driving their size down.

Didn't apple just announce their A7 chip (64bit, double registers, etc), supposedly based on the arm8? Rumor is that it is 20nm process with TSMC as the fab.

View on HN

TSMC isn't supposed to hit 20nm wide production until later in 2014 last I heard. Haven't seen anything about Apple using those chips, but that could be the case. Expect most of the performance gain to be from increased memory instead of actual CPU.

But it isn't just a matter of raw size. The performance you are getting out of it at a given size is an issue too.

ARM may take the world of smartphones by storm, but it really hasn't made significant inroads into areas where performance matters.

Much in the same way that mobile/social gaming didn't displace "hardcore" gaming, ARM hasn't displaced Intel. It just found another audience with different priorities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com