Pemalite said:
zarx said:
And before anyone asks an ARM Cortex-A15 based CPU is pretty comparable to Jaguar in terms of features, but much more power effeciant. And I dare say an 8 core A15 CPU at 2.5GHz (The highest reference spec) would probably outperform an 8 core 1.6/2Ghz Jaguar based one by a large margin. Plus the nature of the ARM licensing means that they are cheap and highly customisable.
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More to the point ARM is competitive with Intel Atom's "Medfield", the new Atom's will be faster than ARM when intel moves Atom to an OOO design, Jaguar should put both to shame in the CPU department in terms of IPC.
To put it into perspective though, only recently has ARM surpassed Atom which is a 5 year old CPU design in terms of performance, an Intel Pentium M (Which was the basis for the Core 2 Duo) is roughly twice as fast as Atom in terms of IPC at the same clock.
However, with that said, they're all pretty poor performers which-ever way you cut the cake, they're all chips that go into low-powered devices like Netbooks, Tablets and Phones, it's what Desktop PC's had in terms of performance per-thread over a decade ago.
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The focus of ARM has always been power effeciancy above all else, and their primary market is phones rather than tablets and netbooks like Atom. It's only recently that ARM is starting to get into the server space and the rise of tablets that they have been pushing more raw computing power. While SIMD performance has always been pretty poor on ARM (A15 is a significant improvement over A9, but Jaguar is a lot better) their IPC performance is actually not bad at all compaired to current competition. 4.01 DMIPS/MHz with a few tweaks http://www.itproportal.com/2011/03/14/exclusive-arm-cortex-a15-40-cent-faster-cortex-a9/ vs 3.125 For Bobcat (Jaguar is said to have 15% higher IPC) and embarrassingly enough 3.78 for Bulldozer lol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#cite_note-42. And I know DMIPS is an outdated metric but still.
But yea performance on Jaguar, Atom and A15 is all pretty awful vs a modern desktop CPU no matter how you look at it even with 8 cores.
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