I watched a documentary about the ARM chip. It was very enlitening. Frankly I have been enamoured with the chip going way back. Something my father told me about marketing and monopolies… funding the underdog… Want MS Word to progress… fund Wordperfect. Want Windows to progress… fund OS/2.

One of my earliest college classes was CPU design. We used preadboards and sinple 6500 processors. But it was fun… and simple. From the documentary Intel and AMD are huge complicated and consume tons of heat. I’m no longer familiar with the instructionz sets but the idea of cross compiling etc is very mature. And the CPU structure is supported well enough.

Just look at what Apple, Lenovo, and almost every chromebook manufacturer has done. We are cycling back to the time when efficient code is better then faster processors. Arm, however, still seems to have headroom in the performance and heat. What even more interesting is that ARM seems able to package their cores in so many different ways… including many hundreds of cores in just one package.

One problem that remains is that marketing and manufacturing cannot improve their time to market.