Wilco (Wilco.Dijkstra@ntlworld.com) on 9/16/09 wrote:
---------------------------
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/sep/16/mobilephones-netbooks
>http://www.arm.com/news/25922.html
>
>This is a hardened 40nm dual core Cortex-A9 in power and speed optimized variants:
>
>2GHz - 1.9W
>800MHz - 0.5W
>
>I think this refutes the claim in another thread that an OoO core needs more power
>and must be lower clocked than an in-order core at the same process node.
>
>Wilco

Sort of, off topic, but it's still about ARM ISA application processor, so not so much off topic.

http://www.marvell.com/press/pressNewsDisplay.do?releaseID=1329

AFAIR, PXA920 core is an offspring of mid 90s Digital StrongArm CPU with relatively minor tweaks made by Intel Arizona. This processor line always was one of the less power efficient ARM cores on the market and by now it's probably the least efficient of them all. In the past, at least, it was one of the best performers but by now several ARM cores are faster and at least Cortex-A and Qualcomm Scorpion are very significantly faster. Besides, if I am not mistaken, PXA920 has no support for Thumb2 nor for Neon nor for VFP.
So why of all ARM products China Mobile picked one which is hot, slow and incompatible core? Is uncore part so much better than everybody else?