ARM as a primary architecture

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Fri Mar 23 02:42:45 UTC 2012


Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> Fair enough, but the trends are well established, and the data are for
> shipments so the actual deployed numbers are compounded (flat
> shipments translate to steady growth, linear or faster shipment growth
> means quadratic or maybe even exponential growth).

Quite the opposite, shipments are related to the first (discrete) derivative 
of active deployments, which will necessarily amplify the effects: if the 
number of shipments decreases, that just means that growth in deployments is 
slowing down, not that the number of deployments decreases.

But another thing you must not forget is that you cannot make direct 
deductions from the number of shipments to the number of deployments, 
because there's also the number of decommissionings (i.e. the device breaks, 
gets thrown away etc.). The derivative of the number of deployments is in 
fact the number of shipments minus the number of decommissionings.

I suspect that cell phones are simply replaced more often than computers 
right now, because smart phones have been improving much faster than 
computers lately (but that trend might be already reaching its limits now). 
For computers, Moore's law (on the number of transistors) just doesn't have 
as user-visible effects (clock speeds!) as it used to. But despite all this, 
computers are still the more powerful devices.

        Kevin Kofler



More information about the devel mailing list