MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - "Boy, could I use an Ice Cream Sandwich!"

hpulley · 12-13-2011, 07:35 PM

First, you cannot compare x86 to ARM, CISC to RISC for clock cycles. Apples to oranges really.

Next even in the ARM family most chips like the iMX51 are really System On a Chip so it is hard to compare clock rates simply without knowing the rest of the support packages.

Nearly twenty years ago I did graduate work on a compiler to improve the performance of software written in C on TMS320 family processors in mobile phones that had laughable amounts of memory compared to now. They would have sold their souls to the devil for 512MB RAM back then! The iMX51 has 32KB and 256KB cache when we didn't have that much memory at all! 32GB microSD flash would have been unimaginable.

At the time I begged industry to consider using a high level C-like language compiled to object code with an optimizing compiler but they preferred hand coded assembly language. Today most apps are written in Java, turned into byte code, again this would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. To have an operating system like Android ona mobile device is still amazing.

These would have been considered supercomputers not that long ago and what do we use them for? Angry Birds and Cut the Rope! Fun for sure but all the animation, graphics, swooshing effects cost processing power.

12-13-2011, 07:35 PM	#14
hpulley Addict Posts: 288 Karma: 29760 Join Date: Nov 2011 Location: Ontario, Canada Device: Kobo Vox, Playbook32	First, you cannot compare x86 to ARM, CISC to RISC for clock cycles. Apples to oranges really. Next even in the ARM family most chips like the iMX51 are really System On a Chip so it is hard to compare clock rates simply without knowing the rest of the support packages. Nearly twenty years ago I did graduate work on a compiler to improve the performance of software written in C on TMS320 family processors in mobile phones that had laughable amounts of memory compared to now. They would have sold their souls to the devil for 512MB RAM back then! The iMX51 has 32KB and 256KB cache when we didn't have that much memory at all! 32GB microSD flash would have been unimaginable. At the time I begged industry to consider using a high level C-like language compiled to object code with an optimizing compiler but they preferred hand coded assembly language. Today most apps are written in Java, turned into byte code, again this would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. To have an operating system like Android ona mobile device is still amazing. These would have been considered supercomputers not that long ago and what do we use them for? Angry Birds and Cut the Rope! Fun for sure but all the animation, graphics, swooshing effects cost processing power.