ARM is a dead end

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been pointed to a news item about a (apparently the first) x86 (Atom)
> based smartphone:
> http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/14/orange-san-diego-review/
>
> So even smartphones are going x86 now. It looks like x86 is going to defeat
> ARM just like it defeated all the previous attempts at changing the
> instruction set, even Intel's own IA-64. The fastest x86 CPUs are still
> worlds faster than the fastest ARM CPUs. This new smartphone's single-core
> Atom is competitive in speed with other smartphones' multi-core ARMs.
>
> So I would urge Fedora not to waste our time on a low-end architecture
> filling a temporary niche which will become obsolete as demand for
> performance increases. We should rather support only one primary
> architecture (x86, i.e.: x86_64, and legacy i686 as long as there's a need
> for it) and support it well, as we have done since we finally got rid of the
> legacy PPC burden. Niche architectures are exactly what secondary
> architectures are for.

Phones have never been a target for Fedora ARM so the point you make
is completely irrelevant and doesn't change any of our aims or goals.
Intel has been producing Atom processors aimed at phones for a couple
of generations of processor now.

Peter