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ARM processor support?

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inanitydefined

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any plans to add ARM processor support? i dont use x86 hardware anymore, too much power consumtion for what i need it to do. Also would help a lot, we all plug our cellphones in to charge overnight and most people with smartphones have wifi.... could add substantially to this projects computing power
 

inanitydefined

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thrasher, you're some kind of my hero. i know that arm processors currently lack the brute force of x86 processors but everypne and their mom has an arm powered device these days. every little bit helps. besides with the rateof advancement it wont be long til ARM catches up. ARM cortex a15 are already outrunning atom processors quite easily
 

Thrasher

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right the problem is twofold though - this falls back to say like the pentium vs the celeron debate even at clock cycle per clock cycle the celeron just cant perform on the level of a pentium when power is needed.
and then theres the fact we need to actually use our phones and devices, with something like this grinding away constantly the battery would have to stay on the charger permanently and the device would be sluggeshly slow at best, and they arent really made to dissipate the kind of heat number crunching like this would generate.
 

inanitydefined

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A stack of a hundred Rasberry Pies might do the trick, and they are dirt cheap.
im currently following the parallella project. looks interesting. if i ever decide i need a "desktop" again ill probably end up with a bunch of rk3066 SOCs. i recently had a chance to play with a tablet powered by one of these and it was extremely powerful, especially for the price.
nearly as powerful as a quad core tegra 3 but much worse battery drain... rockchip is working on that though, their next chips will be 28nm
 
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Shogun1024

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Fastest ARM chips are comparable to Intel's slowest Atom chips - Liliputing

Then compare the fastest Atom, which is the Z510 by benchmarks with a composite score of 1669 to a "Flagship" Pentium 4 4.0 gHz with a score of 1675, theoretically it would work, BUT your talking days on end at 100% utilization for a uniprocessor fold. These benchmarks are from passmark.org if anyone is interested. Also as a hacker/rooter of Android devices I will say these guys do NOT have the cooling capabilities to operate at 100% for hours much less days. Especially not cost effective in my opinion when say an AMD fx-8350 scores over 9000 stock and I've benched an overclocked one at near 14k, and that's a $190 processor. We may get there some day but I don't think we are there yet. Unless Stanford designed specific packets for mobile devices that is.

And a more relivant comparison of the new A15 in the Chromebook. Twice as fast as the A9 in most respects.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1333151/phoronix-arm-cortex-a15-vs-nvidia-tegra-3-vs-intel-x86
 
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Shogun1024

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You can buy complete ARM systems for $25 though.
I bet a hundred of those could do some serious WU.

True, just not viable "currently" in common form factor ARM devices. In my opinion. Something like the parallella project is not mainstream and a far cry from current mobile devices. Trust me I'm definitely not down playing ARM architecture, I love it, it's just not ready to dethrone the x86 for sheer power, but it wasn't designed to. It was initially about energy conservation, where x86 is trying to catch up on that front. The IO scheduling and OOM controllers for ARM are far superior in design, it's the next big thing in computing I think.
 

inanitydefined

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Its true that current ARM processors cannot even come close to top tier x86 in all out muscle.
but when you look at mips per watt that picture reverses. Add to that the much more rapid growth of ARM technology vs x86 and the fact that ARM architecture is much easier to build in multicore setups and the new ARMv8 instruction set and I think ARM will be taking over. Of course by that time quantum computers will probably be running for the hot rod computer space
 

Thrasher

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while i see the necessity and the benefits of arm, developement i cannot see current cpu infrastructure changing much, yea we could def stand to lose the outdated X86 instruction set as AMD's current X64 design had become the norm now, but beyond netbooks and lowend systems arm will have a lot of redesigning to go through to be acceptable for power apllications as its main benefit was light power usage and electricity draw.

I cannot imagine server farms at industrial light and magic being run by anything but zeons for a while.
for that matter graphics designers, autocad users, video editing and gaming. just couldnt be powered by the current direction of ARM, cruise the net and play angrybirds? sure. While it is true a lot of the graphical elements are uploaded to the video cards this is only for the rendering and calculations to create the image. the CPU still churns through the data & AI and other elements. and is apparent on a netbook when watching a youtube video and opening other programs or trying too hard to multitask.

And if they can design an ARM CPU to have top end horsepower it defeats the whole purpose of the arm movement in the first place, whereas it may still be labeled an ARM device but would end up having the same horse power we have today.
 

inanitydefined

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