Smartphones and D

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 31.01.2011 12:04, schrieb dennis luehring:
>> 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.
>
> but they work on 64bit:
> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9197298/Arm_readies_processing_cores_for_64_bit_computing
>
>

Hmm I didn't know about that. I thought I read some months ago that 
porting ARM to 64bit is almost impossible.

As a side note, a comment on the article:
"However, it's easy to imagine a service such as Amazon's EC2 offering 
virtualized Linux instances without the user being aware that it's an 
ARM setup, and these could be cheaper than equivalent x86 instances 
(perhaps even making for a "budget EC2" service)."
This is BS, because the user is *directly* using EC2 VMs (can use his 
own binaries etc), so he *will* care if it runs x86 or ARM. And I don't 
think anyone would want to emulate x86 on ARM...

Cheers,
- Daniel