Re:Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops
by m0zg on Saturday October 02, 2021 @07:35PM
(#28733158)
> All these CPUs will be Arm compatible
At base ISA level perhaps. But there will also be extensions for AI, DSP, media encoding, etc which will be incompatible. You nominally wouldn't have to use those, but the CPU will be nothing special without all that. This problem is already quite pervasive in the ARM ecosystem, and it'll get worse over time. There's no way around this. In a power-sensitive environment the only realistic way out currently is specialized co-processing and ISA extensions.
Re:Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops
by klelatti on Saturday October 02, 2021 @09:05PM
(#28733656)
You’re getting completely confused between ISA extensions (very rare) and other functionality on the SoC such as GPUs which are obviously universal and very diverse.
At base ISA level perhaps. But there will also be extensions for AI, DSP, media encoding, etc which will be incompatible. You nominally wouldn't have to use those, but the CPU will be nothing special without all that. This problem is already quite pervasive in the ARM ecosystem, and it'll get worse over time. There's no way around this. In a power-sensitive environment the only realistic way out currently is specialized co-processing and ISA extensions.