jeff (no@way.com) on 9/27/09 wrote:
>
>I don't. I understand its disruptiveness in the market, I
>was wondering more of the technical aspects of the A9.

Why do you glorify doing something new and stupid, when
doing good things well is what people really should
be admiring.

Now, I have to admit that I want to wait and see at how well
Cortex-A9 actually performs in real life, and maybe I'll
be disappointed. But the fact is, your kind of "why should
I be excited about the technology" is kind of stupid.

Doing something "new" is way overrated, while doing
something really well and making it available widely in
the market seems to be continually underrated.

Put another way: that "1% innovation" is overrated, while
the "99% perspiration" is sadly underrated. You really
should give them the same weight that Edison gave them:
anybody can have ideas, it's actually executing on them
that is the hard part.

The same way I'll take a basic boring x86 chip that just
does everything really well over some new "innovative"
architecture, I'll damn well take a well-executed Tomasulo
uarch over some fancy exciting new idea. The likelihood is
that the fancy new clever thing isn't actually that good
in practice.

So rather than be excited about things like transactional
processing etc, people should view them with a very healthy
dose of distrust. Hype is just that - hype. Why get so
excited about something that hasn't proven itself.

The fact that Tomasulo is 40 years old doesn't make it bad
or uninteresting. Quite the reverse. It makes it all the
more disappointing that you still have idiotic people out
there that try to do in-order crap, and even design their
whole architecture around in-orderness, when people have
known how to do better for so long.

Will Cortex-A9 beat the highest end? Obviously not. But I
suspect it will be reasonably competitive even in a very
small and low-power envelope, and be easy to design around
due to be compatible with older designs and likely not have
any horrible fragilities.

That should impress people. The people who create entirely
new architectures because they can't be bothered to do
things well - those people should be shunned.

Linus