Re: News : ARM Trying to Buy AmperComputing

On Thu, 17 Jan 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 16/01/2025 10:58, D wrote:

This is the truth! I've seen it in a few laptops. But I don't know if they
are energy efficient enough to make a huge difference. I get about 14 hours
or so from my 1.5 year old laptop. If arm would bump that to 25 I'd
seriously consider one! But last time I had a look, 1.5 years ago, the
battery time on arm laptops was far from impressive.

>
There is some limit in terms of how much charge needs to get moved around
how many transistors of at least a given size that relates ultimate MIPS per
watt to a figure independent of architecture.
>
The original ARM used very few transistors and an extremely well optimised
instruction set to get the performance that it did at such low power.
>
Arguably it is now in the same ballpark as a late model INTEL *86 or even
RISC chip.

>
This would correspond well with what I see in the market. It's a shame.
I'd like to see a cpu focused on low power consumption since laptops don't
need all the power they have today for regular day to day use. I'd much
rather have a slow laptop that lasts me 30-40 hours, than a monster that
runs out of power after 8 hours.

>
ARM SoCs for "ultra-low power" exist for things like smart watches,
laptop makers just don't use them. Note that the big screen on a
laptop is a major power draw too, although a very niche product
using a large eInk display with some of the new partial-update and
colour features might be useful for some people.

Very interesting. Thank you for the information. As for eInk I haven't (yet) seen one that would be able to keep up with videos. If such a thing exists, it would be awesome!
When I buy laptops I always try to get the lowest resolution I can, as well as to avoid touch screen, in order to increase the battery life.

Finding the minimum-power ARM chip able to run Linux would be an
interesting exercise. I gather Linux requires a minimum set of ARM
extensions, as well as an MMU, which may exclude many of the SoC
options intended for embedded applications. Software is as much of
the problem as hardware.

I wonder if linux + modern work such as spreadsheets and audio/video calls would be possible on those minimum-power ARM chips or if they are too slow?