OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => Distros, Development, and Model Specific Forums => Archived Forums => PocketPenguin => Topic started by: Ferret-Simpson on December 28, 2006, 03:36:11 pm
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I hate x86. You all know this. I despise 32 bit.
You want a heavy power CPU for the laptop?
64 bit PowerPC chips starting in 2 and 4 cores next year. www.PAsemi.com
They're also designing 16 core versions.
And yes, this is all following the Power per watt mobile technology trend for new CPU's.
DBHI, Go play.
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however they are desiners, they dont make chips they expect you to do that
freescale and IBM seem to have the best chips with other companies doing better bridge / IO chips. just take a look at gensai
they do say more performance per watt but most of the examples i have seen about that is super computers using the Alt Vec unit which up until now has been in a luege of its own compared to SSE, how it compares now i dont know but i do know intel closed the gap but are using the "brute force" aproch to do so
i think in a copule of years we will see AMDs NUMA arcitecture pay off and intel changing its tune compared to the FSB aproch, should be intresting
however if you want low power you just cant beat ARM, howevre they dont really have any "heavy hitters" in terms of performance but rely more on coprocessors, that said a coprosser is a very easy thing to hook up compared to other chips and dosent even have to be built into the design (care for a 387 coprocessor chip hooked up to your Z)
there is even hooks in the instruction set so that coprocessor usage is transperent (it looks like <opcode> <coproccesor number> <data 1> <data 2>) as you can see its fairly flexible as it dosent specify the data sent, only the communication path. hence why there are so many diffrent arm varients (that and ARM is also a fabless manufacturer, they deal in IP)
one clasic example of this is the iwmmxt or wmmx, the mmx of the xscale. its actually a coprocessor and could be added to any arm chip if you wantnded it too.
well gone enough off topic. when it comes to a laptop design you have to really ask yourself what do i need it for. if you anser games then a x86 would be hard to beat (even a scaled up arm (ie 3GHz arm) would not match it, when you get to that sort of performance level arm dosent really compete) if its moives, a bit of compiling and webserfing then the new dual iMX3 design i am thinkning about would be great
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if the PP has good connectivity options, you use a connection to your remote computing engine to do all the hard work... "distcc" for example to do any compilation.
as soon you wind up the processing power you suffer heat problems and reduced battery life. so long as the PP can play VGA quality full motion video, then I think that's sufficient power... oh yeah, and crack a 128 bit wep key in less than 20 minutes
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yeah, thats true. i have been thinking of the best distro to use on this thing and would you belive gentoo makes it somewhere high on the list because its source bassed. debian does as well for those wanting a bit of balance
i wonder if its worth just reusing the main distros or sticking to the ones we have here, they do have thier disatvantages