If you thought there was pressure on chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC) up until now - with Nvidia and AMD leaning on the fab to crank out more GPUs and in the case of AMD, more hybrid CPU-GPUs - wait until the army of designers and sellers catch wind of its 28nm Cortex-A9 ARM RISC processors. TSMC has …

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Tuesday 8th May 2012 09:51 GMT Anonymous Coward

grammar nazi here

As El Reg previously reported, Apple has just did a similar shrink of its A5 processor, manufactured by Samsung Electronics in its Austin, Texas wafer baker.

Apple has just did?

Really?

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1. Tuesday 8th May 2012 22:24 GMT diodesign
  
  Re: grammar nazi here
  
  Oops :( Fixed. Thanks.
  
  C.
  
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Tuesday 8th May 2012 10:01 GMT Tom 7

Can I have one please

on a motherboard without some 'only runs MS' crap to kill it off?

While it would go well in a micro-server I see no reason for my desktop to guzzle power and I can easily find a use for lots of ARM cores.

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Tuesday 8th May 2012 11:26 GMT ez2x

Operating conditions != power

Same operating conditions simply means the same voltage (and possibly other environmental conditions such as ambient temperature) but does not say anything about power consumption.

That may be higher, lower or the same. I'd bet on higher.

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Tuesday 8th May 2012 18:51 GMT Gordan

I guess RedSleeve Enterprise Linux came out just in time, then - ARM clone-port of the favourite enterprise Linux before even the the upstream vendor did it.

Now we just need those ARM servers to actually become available (it is debatable whether ZT's $20K for an 8-machine ARM cluster-in-a-box is deemed "available").

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Wednesday 9th May 2012 00:27 GMT Anonymous Coward

Article is a bit misleading

Yes, Apple is using a shrunk version of its A5 in some of the iPad 2s now rolling off production lines, and when tested those show 16-29% better battery life. However, the article really ought to point out that the screen is the dominant power user in a tablet, so the power savings realized via the shrunk A5 is in fact way better than 16-29%.

If there were some benchmarks run with the screen shut off, in airplane mode, etc. to minimize as much as possible the non-CPU related power usage factors, we'd have a better idea of the improvement from this shrink.

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