On 20 February 2014 11:25, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
The ARM instruction set doesn't seem that reduced. There's the Thumb instructions, SIMD, Jazelle, and lots of other complications.
FYI, Jazelle's deprecated by ThumbeEE as at v7.
And ThumbEE was in turn deprecated by ARM v8. I don't know if anyone ever used Jazelle or ThumbEE much?
Even though it's difficult to compare CPUs I think that showing a 3D game performing well is an indication that the device has adequate CPU performance for most workstation tasks.
In a general sense, yes.
But AFAIK graphics is heavily FPU-bound (floats) where systems tasks are heavily ALU-bound (integers). So modulo GUI desktopy bits, you probably want specint rather than specfp.
Look at the Raspberry Pi -- it can do high-res video decoding just fine, but that is no indication that it is at all fast at general stuff. (It's so not, despite what anyone tells you). I've used multi-core ARMv7 systems and they're pretty useable at the sort of speeds that Chromebook runs at, so I reckon it would probably be OK for the target purpose of xterm windows and some light browsing in Chrome. But as others have pointed out.. it's going to be a fight to run Linux on it, and I suspect as much as it'd be good to have an ARM laptop I just won't want to be spending the time to make it work reliably. T -- Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world