In the light of recent discussions, I thought this article would be of
interest:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5492118276.html

See also: http://laptoping.com/intel-atom-benchmark.html which
shows Atom/Silverthorne is less than half the speed of a Celeron-M...

So the quad core ARM Cortex is 2x smaller, uses 1.5x less power and is twice
as fast according to the competition's benchmark results? Impressive.

Indeed. Intel's benchmarks claim that a 1.6GHz Atom is only 4-6.5 times faster
than a single-issue 400MHz ARM11. Cortex-A8 and A9 are twice as fast as
ARM11, so by Intel's own admission the latest ARM cores are 1.25-2x as fast as
Atom at the same frequency... (which is what I predicted a while ago). If you
compare the SIMD capabilities then ARM's advantage increases even further.

So with a quad core Cortex-A9 at 800MHz you would get 2.5-4x the performance
of a single core Atom at 1.6GHz while still using less power...

How much cheaper is the ARM?

ARM's are definitely much cheaper, but it is hard to compare like with like. Eg.
OMAP is a "single-chip smart phone". It includes everything you need, a memory
controller, LCD controller, graphics accelerator, sound, CMOS camera interace,
on-board memory, etc. Samsung sells similar phone chips with many MBytes
of flash and DRAM in the same package.

The Atom is needs additional chips for all of this, which increases the cost, board
size and power consumption.

I think Intel are really sticking their necks out by making statements like:

"Thus, the average power consumption of Atom is lower" -
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english...080403/149992/

That's pure marketing spin and then some...

Atom's lowest idle power is 100mW!!! - this is in the deepest sleep mode doing
absolutely nothing! That drains most batteries rather quickly... Compare this with
the idle power of ARMs which is typically well below 1mW.

Moorestown is the Intel Corporation's code name for successor to the Menlow platform designed for mobile Internet devices. Current proposals call for it to use one tenth the idle power of Silverthorne and to hit the market in 2009-2010.

Moorestown consists of a system on a chip, code-named “Lincroft”, which integrates the 45nm processor, graphics, memory controller and video encode/decode onto a single chip and an I/O hub codenamed “Langwell”, which supports a range of I/O ports to connect with wireless, storage, and display components in addition to incorporating several board level functions

Originally Posted by thecursedfly

If it weren't for the fact that they require to recompile/adapt every OS and application, ARMs would be perfect for netbooks..
Maybe Maemo can soon get in the netbook market too?

Originally Posted by allnameswereout

I'd say we either compare existing devices or admit we are speculating about future products. If the latter, still must be done carefully.

...the A8 has about a 2x advantage over the Atom N270. In other words, it delivers about the same performance at half the clock speed. And one-fifth the power.

Originally Posted by asys3

He said nothing is better than true x86 experience - alle these emulations cost performance and are not that what people want - especially they don't want anything else on an ARM plattform.