BBC News - CES 2011: Microsoft shows Windows running on Arm chips

[Peter Korsten]

Op 7-1-2011 18:37, Jay Vaughan schreef:

> It would be beautiful if the ARM cores were able to emulate, at least, a moderately decent x86 .. I'm sure it won't be long until its right proper feasible.

Why bother? There are few industries where the products are as 
disposable as they are in the software industry. And the ones you really 
want to keep... well, often they already run on multiple platforms.

> I only use really older-generation Intel and PPC cpu's at work, I wish we'd pushed ARM a little further, its got a lot more going for it, but we can't get too carried away, and plus there are tons of good reasons to stick with PowerPC in our industrial realm, alas ..

I don't even know what we use. Dell blade servers with Intel chips, 
presumably, almost all virtualised, most of them running Solaris 10 and 
then a bunch of Linux installations, plus the odd Windows installation.

We may have some old Sparc boxes sitting about (one is right under my 
desk), but they are all scheduled to go out. Spare parts are a 
consideration.

> At home, I just love sitting in front of my 6-core AMD box so much, it has loads of ram (16g), and it was cheap ..  My aging Macbook has some dodgy Intel thingy in it, but I don't think its as nice as your i7 .. and for some reason, on OSX, I don't care too much what the processor is ..

Mine is in this list:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

It's the Core i7 960, and there's only one AMD chip higher up in the 
list (the Opteron 6176 SE). When it comes to price/performance ratio, I 
think it's just at the tipping point where a bit more performance gets a 
lot more expensive. (Actually, the 6-core 970 is close, but I figured 
that spending an extra €300 would not be worth it.)

It IS a very nice chip, but now the rest of the components have become 
slow, notably the hard disc (should get a 256 GB SSD for that) and the 
graphics card. The Nvidia GTX-580 has been winking at me for quite some 
time now. But all this adds another €1000 to the price of the system.

Some people call me mad, spending so much on PC gaming when there are 
powerful consoles about. But I just like PC gaming, and games tend to be 
cheaper, or get on special offer much quicker.

Anyway, one thing I'm looking at, though, is getting little dedicated 
boxes (invariably running Linux) that do one thing, and do it well. 
Network video recording (for surveillance), for example, and I'm 
interested in getting a networked satellite receiver. You can get 
PCI/PCI-e cards for this and put them in a PC, but you'd need a pretty 
powerful one.

But those plans do presume winning the lottery first. :)

- Peter