ARM as a primary architecture

[Kevin Kofler]

Peter Robinson wrote:
> But as you said yourself in an earlier thread a lot of compilation
> isn't massively parallel so massive amount of cores for building isn't
> necessarily as much a win as pure GHz. On that front the current A15
> gen which is arriving now easily does the 2.5 - 3 ghz that the intel
> platforms do (yes, I know they go to 3.6 but they're not regularly
> used primarily due to heat) and most of the recent wins on Intel
> architecture has been for media related things through various SSE
> versions and other offload functions for things like crypto all of
> which aren't massively used in standard compilation and all of which
> have similar functionality on ARM platforms.

Speed is not GHz alone, but:
  clock frequency (GHz)
/ cycles per instruction (a)
/ instructions needed to do the job (b)

ARM being a RISC architecture, it does great on (a), but not so great on 
(b), and without knowing the exact factors, comparing GHz to GHz is 
comparing apples to oranges.

        Kevin Kofler