This is amazing news. 14 nm is just a few atoms of width… At this level power-consumption is almost not an issue and devices will soon be able to run on body-heat, photovoltaic power or shaking.
“Samsung indicated that as part of its 14nm FinFET development process, the company and its ecosystem partners – ARM, Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys – taped out multiple test chips ranging from a full ARM Cortex-A7 processor implementation to a SRAM-based chip capable of operation near threshold voltage levels as well as an array of analog IP. The full ARM Cortex-A7 processor test chip tape-out represents a significant milestone for silicon manufacturing for the fabless ecosystem, Samsung said.
see Samsung delivers 14nm FinFET logic process and design infrastructure.
Besides trivial energy-consumption, this step allows ARM to compete head to head with Intel on performance should OEMs venture into the desktop/notebook markets for PCs. That started a couple of years ago and with the success of ARM for mobile computing should be huge in 2013. This will be the last nail in the coffin of Wintel.
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I’m hoping I can hold out with my current hardware until they start building motherboards with ARM chips. If that’s even the form factor they will be delivered in. I will need a computer that I can use as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
With the introduction of Graphene, supplanting silicon comes bendable and flexible screens.
Imagine a smartphone that wraps around your wrist like a bracelet.
How about a pair of glasses that works with just eye movement.
I see Linux on ARM, Apple is leaving x86 and moving to ARM as well.
$1000+ Ultrabooks are not selling and rightly so, in this down economy why spending that much money when you can get four devices that basically do that EXACT same thing.
http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2012/12/14/the-future-of-linux-on-arm-shines-in-the-3-7-kernel/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/why-might-apple-move-macs-to-arm-processors/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/arms-big-and-little-plans-to-go-beyond-smartphones/6960
I would not be writing Intel off yet. They certainly have top semiconductor designers with a wealth of fabrication knowledge and experience.
Note, however, that Intel’s latest most advanced products are all designed for Linux and most don’t can’t even run Microsoft 8. The new Intel releases are also thrifty with power consumption.
Better on power than ARM? Maybe, maybe not, but very close – too close to call right now.
ram wrote, “I would not be writing Intel off yet. They certainly have top semiconductor designers with a wealth of fabrication knowledge and experience.”
The world knows that ARM is adequate for most users. Why have a powerful CPU idling when an ARMed CPU could be running flat out with much less power consumption? If an Atom is sufficient, would you install Intel’s latest and greatest? Nope. That makes no sense. Intel’s best designers are handicapped by using x86. Imagine what they could do if instead of 4-6 x86 cores they could have 24 ARMed cores. Others are not so handicapped. This means Intel will lose share of CPUs globally. That’s obvious now on client machines but Intel hangs on for servers. I think that’s mostly an issue of software. Software optimized for Intel CPUs is obviously going to be sub-optimal for ARM. The folks promoting ARM on servers are likely to see to that shortly both by tweaking ARM and software for servers.