I'm sorry - your numbers are *way* high for the Intel server. If you use a Mac Mini, headless, then you'll be at 0.01kw/h when idle, peaking at 0.085kw/h at max. Given any regular server will spend 90%+ of its time idle, then your true Intel number is probably $10-15.

Any server you build yourself will have similar power characteristics to the Mac Mini.

You should still go for ARM, because it's more fun, but don't fool yourself into thinking you'll be saving money.

I'm sorry, this is simply not true.

Both ARM and Intel are hostages to their history.

If ARM is to produce a chip that is competitive with Intel in desktop applications, then it will need to (a) improve its performance at native multi-tasking, (b) improve its FPU, (c) develope hyperthreading, out-of-order execution, speculative branchong, (d) add support for things such as virtualisation extensions.

Can it do these things? Yes, of course it can. Can it do these things without adding complexity and transistors? No, it cannot. ARM can become compeititive with Intel in desktop, but only by becoming more like Intel. Those extra transistors? They add die size (i.e. cost), and they add drain (i.e., reduce battery life).

Now Intel, can it produce a super low power chip, running the x86 instruction set, that is usable in smartphones, etc? Yes, but if it wants to do this, it will have to shred transistors, and shredding transistors means shedding performance and features. In other words, it will no longer offer any specific performance advantages.

It is *possible* that Intel's process technology lead means that it can produce a competitve mobile chip before ARM produces a competitive laptop/desktop chip. But it's also largely a moot point. Unless there is a compelling reason for handset manufacturers to choose Intel, then it will be an irrelevent share of the market.

The same is true for Windows 8 on ARM. No legacy software support, and no meaningful cost advantage (Intel Atoms start at $20/chip, about the same as a Tegra 2.) Plus, of course, the architecture of the box around ARM (on the PC side) is not set in place yet.

Unless something very surprising happens, we will see ARM taking overall share, because smartphones and tablets are growing as a percentage of the computing market, at the expense of desktops and laptops. But it is unlikely that ARM will take a meaningful share of the PC market or Intel of the smartphone one.

Well: there's a surprise. Summary says: Tesla announces business model has failed and bankrupcy imminent.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Tesla's stock is up in an down market. The company is trading comfortably above its six month average price. The company, IIRC, always said that there would only be 2,500 Roadsters made...

Next year, the Model S will launch. The company has thousands of preorders, with people having put real money down.

The Model S may, of course, fail miserably. But the absurd FUD in the summary is ridiculous.

I too loved my N900 - a genuinely remarkable phone. I'm using an HTC Sensation now, which is wonderful is some ways, but I will always love the N900.

No: you don't get it.

A Ponzi scheme involves earlier investors being paid by later investors.

The whole point of bitcoins is that their number is mathematically limited. They may - or may not - have value depending on whether people attribute value to them. Their number increases, but slowly (the very opposite of a Ponzi scheme).

In a Ponzi scheme, a central promoter tells people their investment is worth x. On the contrary, with Bitcoins, the only value they have is what someone else will pay for them. And the fact that their number is mathematically limited means people *may* attribute value to them.

Now: there is clearly a demand for a currency which allows electronic, anonymous transfers. And there is clearly demand for a currency, where the government cannot devalue its real worth by printing as many as they want.

But, there is a corollary. And that is that, unbacked by the government, and being basically illiquid, you are making an enormous bet that other people will in the future choose to attribute a value to a very large number.

I am much, much less sceptical of bitcoins than many on here. But that does not mean I own any. I'm not that brave...

Bitcoins may well be worthless, but they are in no respect a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes have to grow geometrically to continue in existence, which is why they quickly get destroyed after a few iterations. Bitcoins in circulation, on the other hand, grow at an increasingly slow pace. Similarly, Ponzi schemes have a 'promoter'.

The whole purpose of the bitcoin ecosystem is that it is something electronically transferrable (anonymously), yet fundamentally limited in its number.

Now: they could easily be a complete fraud - with the number of bitcoins in circulation being far more than claimed. However, if the claims for the limitation of their number in circulation are true, then they could easily become a store of value, in that any fiat currency (or indeed gold itself), has value because choose to believe it.

Or to put it another way: if people wish to assign bitcoins value, they can. Likewise, they can choose not to.

In fact, it would be very simple: he'd say "hmmmm... I wonder if there's any other way to get lower power consumption PCs, that continue to run all the existing software, and don't require new skills, and which run on proven technology. hang on! there's this Atom chip, x86 compatible with a TDP of c. 10Watts! I can achieve 95% of the savings without betting my career on unproven technology that might be ditched by Microsoft down the line. (As they did with Windows support for DEC Alpha, for example)"

...makes out

There are many, many makers of ARM based 'application processors' and the like: Texas Instruments, Samsung, Apple, ST Microelectronics, nVidia to name but a few. In addition, some people - like Qualcomm with their Snapdragon processor - have licensed the instruction set from ARM, but then have basically built their own core around that.

The nice thing about ARM is that - if you are looking to embed processing power - you can license a core (or two), design them into your own chip and then make it. Said chip can also include a USB controller, or a wireless baseband, or whatever. Intel will not sell you an x86 core for you to design into your own chip; ARM will.

Now: before this thread descends into meaningless ARM versus Intel rivalry, can I point out that the two architectures are optimized for entirely different situations. To say ARM is better than Intel, is like saying a bicycle is better than a ship - it's not a meaningful comparison. If you want to embed processing functionality, or you want low-power (particularly low standby power), then you need ARM. If you need raw processing power, optimised to run desktop or server operating systems, then you'll be wanting x86.

And the reason why x86 is so power hungry? It's because it's on big bits of silicon. And why's it on big bits of silicon? Because it support hyper-threading, out-of-order executon, has hardware virtualisation extensions, has extensive branch prediction, and tonnes of on chip cache.

There is no reason why ARM cannot offer all of these things too (and their Eagle design goes some way to do this). But if you want to do this, then your chip is going to get bigger, and more expensive, and more power hungry.

Over the next five years, we are going to continue to see mobility become more important: and that means more and more ARM cores, and a diminution of the importance of the traditional PC market. ARM has a very bright future - but, I suspect, it will probably have a great deal of trouble getting into the traditional PC space.

Ah-ha (replying to myself...), I see the A15 'Eagle' will have virtualization support. I wonder if they can keep it lean (and power sippling), while adding features.

If they can, things could get very interesting.

Oh absolutely: ARM is a long-term winner at the expense of Intel (and others).

More and more computing tasks will happen on devices like tablets and phones, and these will be powered by ARM-cores, Android and iOS. Less and less will be done by Windows on Intel.

My point is that it is surprisingly difficult for ARM to penetrate the existing Intel desktop and server markets.

Well, the data center is an interesting one: right now a lot of admins are virtualizing lightly loaded servers to achieve just those power savings.

That's going to be a tough call on ARM. The reason Intel has such a lot of 'cruff' is because it's filled with specific optimizations for its target markets. In this case, virtualization. The reason ARM is beautiful and lean is because it lacks those optimizations. To get an ARM chip that's great at virtualization, you run the risk of ending up with a big piece of silicon - and then suddenly it's a very expensive solution.

I look forward to seeing the next generation ARM chips; I knew Sophie (nee Roger) Wilson and Roger Wilson when I was at Cambridge. I really hope they do well. But I have also seen a lot of very interesting chip designs (Transmeta anyone? Or DEC Alpha) fail in the desktop market because Intel's products (and the associated compilers and ecosystem) are actually very, very good.

ARM11 has around 85-88% branch prediction accuracy; the A8 is supposed to improve this to 95%, although I haven't seen any independent verification of that.

I'm very intrigued by Project Denver, although I suspect the main benefit to developers will be DMA between GPUs and the CPU.

ARM chips are improving enormously, and there's no doubt that the ARM9 instruction set is significantly more elegant than Intel.

However, I'd be a little cautious about assuming that Intel/x86 will be threatened any time soon.

I run Debian on a TI OMAP @ 800Mhz. It started as an experiment to see if I could transition my desktop to ARM. It ended as a VPN router sitting on my network (performing the extremely useful service of fooling certain US VOD sites as to my geographic location...).

ARM chips are highly optimized for one particular feature set: extremely low-power mobile computing.
Intel chips are highly optimized for another: Windows/Linux on the desktop.

Almost all x86 has extremely sophisticated branch prediction to minimize calls to (slow) DRAM. ARM9 has pretty simple branch prediction. You will have far, far more cache misses on an ARM9 chip than on x86. So, to maintain performance for a given clock speed, you'll need to add on-die cache. Which starts getting pretty expensive. And the branch prediction on Intel is specifically geared around the way Windows (and to a lesser extent Linix) works. Unless Windows is completely re-written, or ARM ceases to be a low-cost chip, it's hard to see how ARM can offer equivilent performance at the same clock-speed as x86. For this reason (as well as the fact that ARM Windows will lack any kind of compatibility layer), I am pretty pessimistic about Windows on ARM - or indeed, ARM penetrating the desktop market.

And I am equally pessimistic about Intel succesfully getting into phones and tablets. When running at low loads, ARM chips are extraordinarily efficient. Intel has made a big fuss about its HUGI ("Hurry Up and Get Idle") efforts. But, of course, this is incredibly misleading. Most of the time an ARM core is doing something... just not very much. Will consumers accept a phone or tablet with 50% less battery life (or worse) for an Intel Inside logo? I think not.

  Of course, ARM has another advantage (which is also, tangentially, a disadvantage). ARM does not make its own processors - it licenses its core designs to nVidia/Samsung/TI/Qualcomm/etc. This means that we can see an incredibly diversity of ARM-based products. Qualcomm can offer ARM cores with integrated 3G baseband. nVidia can add a couple of graphics processors, and call it Tegra 2. This means that ARM cores can be used in more applications, and more flexibly.

But it also means that ARM cores will be at least one line-width generation behind Intel. Intel has a very efficient design and *internally* build structure, with the best process technology in the industry. Which means 32nm Intel chips battle 42nm ARM ones. It was this process disadvantage that did for AMD, and it means that ARM will struggle against Intel in desktop. It is tough to compete on cost when someone else has a 50% higher transistor density for the same cost.

Wrapping up: ARM is fantastically well positioned for the fast growing tablet and smartphone markets; and Intel has a surprisingly defensible position in desktop/server chips.

Unfortunately, your data is wrong. The biggest Android maker is HTC (who account for 30-40% of the total Android market, although Samsung is catching up). Their bestselling phone in 2010 was the Desire. (Hardly a low-end product.)

In fact, HTC's low(er) end devices like the Wildfire, have sold relatively poorly. That doesn't mean there isn't a substantial low-end Android user-base: there obviously is, and ZTE and co. are keen to benefit from it. But currently, the high end is pretty much a wash (in terms of total unit numbers) between iPhone 4 on the one hand, and HTC Desire/Desire HD/Samsung Galaxy S/Droid 2.

I've googled and can't find this car.

Source please?