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A comment on The End of x86?. Parent comment

Re:The End of x86? by rbanffy on Thursday October 21, 2010 @08:02PM (#1817991)
Intel's x86 killed the RISC workstation with Windows compatibility and price per MIPS. Intel then matched and surpassed AMD on AMD64 counting on its own size and on the complexity of building a very fast 64-bit x86.

All factors, Windows compatibility excepted, are on ARM's side this time. Of course Intel has survived bad situations before, but this time I am not betting on them.

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Re:The End of x86? by nl on Thursday October 21, 2010 @08:48PM (#1818125)
Which factors exactly on ARM's side?

I can think of only two:

1) Power usage on low end chips. ARM will be ahead of x86 on platforms below the smartphone for the foreseeable future, and on smartphones for another generation (2-3 years)

2) Manufactures can customize ARM to build SOCs. I can't see Intel allowing complete customization like that, but I'd expect them to ship some competitive SOCs themselves.

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Re:The End of x86? by rbanffy on Friday October 22, 2010 @08:03AM (#1819340)
It's simpler for ARM to adopt performance enhancements that make the core more complex than for Intel to adopt simplifications that make their cores more power efficient without losing performance.
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