Smartphones and D

[retard]

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:36:44 +0100, Daniel Gibson wrote:

> Am 30.01.2011 13:29, schrieb Michel Fortin:
>> On 2011-01-30 03:05:59 -0500, Gary Whatmore <no at spam.sp> said:
>>
>>> D's main focus currently is 32-bit x86 servers and desktop
>>> applications. This is where the big market has traditionally been. Not
>>> everyone has 64-bit hardware and I have my doubts about the size of
>>> the smartphone markets.
>>
>> I think the important point here is ARM, not smartphones.
>>
>> ARM processors will soon start to enter other markets, mainly the
>> server and laptop markets,
> 
> I'm not sure about these markets, because ARM is stuck to 32bit, 64bit
> ARM seems to be (almost?) impossible as far as I know.

It will take years before the 64-bit address space starts to make sense 
in portable systems.

While workstations for developers have bigger and completely different 
requirements, in general the most demanding applications for ordinary 
sixpack-joe are hd-video transcoding (which actually isn't memory 
intensive), image manipulation (this year's basic $100 models already 
sport a sensor of 14 megapixels => 45 MB per image layer), and 
surprisingly web browsing.

The ARM equipment support this by providing powerful co-processors and 
having a tiny (Thumb) instruction set. It's really hard to see where they 
would need more than 4 GB of RAM.. even according to Moore's law it will 
take at least 6 years for the top of the line products to use this much 
memory.