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Shifting Apps To ARM Chips Could Save Laptop Batteries
An anonymous reader writes "When is an Intel PC not an Intel PC? When it moves applications such as Internet browsing and email on to an ARM processor because it can get longer battery life. And according to a story at EE Times, this hybrid Intel-ARM processor approach is being taken by PC makers as prominent as Dell. The problem for Intel: Why would you switch out of 'all-day' mode and use the Intel processor? The problem for ARM: lacking support from Microsoft for Windows; the applications it runs for the PC have to do so under Linux."
Not a problem for everyone. I've already got an ARM-based Linux running on a NSLU32 NAS head - 32Mb RAM, 32 Mb flash. If I could get a lightweight laptop with a modern ARM chip, I would be over the moon.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
And this is how Linux will win. Not with a bang but a whimper. Embedded appliances, dedicated purpose applications, and multi-platform compatibility.
Firefox, Thunderbird, and (hopefully) soon KDE.
MS users who don't know any better, will win this for us.
Geeks like us have already dominated the server-side of the Linux equation, now fools will win the desktop for us.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Or... you could just switch to linux.
Nah, too easy.
Reminds me of the days when Acorn Computers were around with their RISCPC - A machine that was ARM powered, but you could also attach an x86 processor.
This is so 1990's!
Frankly I would love an ARM based notebook except for just a few issues.
1. Flash. Like it or not Flash is everywhere and I have not seen a Linux ARM version.
2. Java. I need it and JavaFX could be a nice alternative to Silverlight/Moonlight.
I see Flash as the big issue for most people. I would love to see ARM back on the "desktop" even if it is on the laptop. A ARM with a good GPU really would be a nice netbook system.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Funny...I read the story and was going to ask on this thread, "Where could I get an ARM-based laptop to run Linux on?" All day on a battery would be fantastic.
Constitutionally Correct
So what we're talking about here is a Linux running on a decent ARM SoC most of the time... which I agree with, it's enough for the common case.
If we need performance for any reason we switch on an attached x86 and run that performance application (which of course is an x86 binary).
Or we run a VM on the x86 into which we put Windows, for compatibility.
Or we create a Mac OS X like fat binary system for Linux that includes both ARM and x86 variants, but imagine the pain in switching between the two! I think it's far far easier to make a quad-core ARM Cortex chip to get some performance for the ARM binaries than to switch them to x86 with all that pain if they need performance.
Of course eventually you drop the x86, connect the x86-attached GPU to the ARM and move on from there.
Qualcomm has an ARM based processor (several links about it posted here). From the performance/power point of view I think these ARM based approaches is the future for mobile computing. I can see a big Linux future for it in small do-it-all always one home "IT" infrastructure.
Think Deeply.
Would such a system actually use ARM Linux? The reason I ask is that the ARM processor is commonly used PDAs and therefore has Windows CE (or whatever they call it now).
So I wouldn't be surprised if M$ just renamed it Windows 7 Green Edition and rolled it out for such netbooks. Joe Public would be all oooh it runs powerpoint and word and IE and they'd be happy.
I'm wondering if, the the overall scheme of things, the price we pay for the x86-ness of Intel and AMD's CPUs is that high. All their CPUs are basically RISC things, with a very optimized x86 compatibility layer running on top. Is that layer that expensive performance-wise ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The display uses far more power than the CPU, so the benefit of adding a second low-power CPU will only be realized with a different display technology that has much lower power consumption for a static image.
When traveling, most of the time, I really do want a long battery life and don't need much compute power. But when I arrive at my destination, give a presentation, and demo some software, then I want compute power.
So, as far as I'm concerned, having a high power and a low power CPU sharing the same keyboard, screen, drive, and power supply is actually very much what I want. I hope it becomes standard.
I love all the BSA "Blow the Whistle" ads you've got up. Slashdot has got to be the most.. BSA/**AA hostile site out there. Way to go Taco, you sellout hack!
It's actually great. An ARM-based PC would not only be Windows-free, it would be Windows-proof.
Not really. There is still Windows CE, but one can dream...
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
No point in running a VM. Too slow on arm, which generally are sub GHz, closer to half that. And even then, the processor is but a small part of the power suckers on a device. It doesn't matter if the CPU uses 0.5 W versus say 2 W of an Atom if the whole device is running 10 watts (9.5 vs 10 watts is not worth the expense and complexity of this).
I rest my case. (Case dismissed)
An anonymous reader writes:
"When is an Intel PC not an Intel PC? When it moves applications such as word processing on to a piece of paper because it can get longer battery life. And according to a story at EE Times, this hybrid Intel-Paper approach is being taken by PC makers as prominent as Dell. The problem for Intel: Why would you switch out of 'all-day' mode and use the Intel processor? The problem for paper: lacking support from Microsoft for Windows; the applications it runs for the PC have to do so under pen or pencil."
Don't ARMs also run BSD ? It would seem that Apple might have a solution for their laptops, if they decided to go that way.
Shouldn't that be, Microsoft doesn't produce a cross-platform OS ..
I think I'd get one of these Alpha 400 MIPS netbooks although I'd prefer more memory.
This sort of problem takes me back to those carefree days when Windows supported processors dramatically different from those made by Intel. It used to support applications written for other operating systems, too (well, OS/2.) Gone are those halcyon days of HAL openness.
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
Uh, er, I'm reading /. on my N800 now. And later, I'm going to youtube to watch flash content there.
mplayer has been ported to the N800/N810 platform.
The big drawback to these portable platforms are:
- screen size - er 800x480 resolution and about 4" across
- keyboard options - bluetooth is working
- mouse
- general USB peripherals (usb does work)
For what it is, mine runs apps fine. I'll be using the GPS later today on a hike. Tomorrow I'll use skype to chat with my business partners. Normal internet surfing, listening to mp3s, and rss feeds work fantastic.
It isn't a full PC, so editing gnu spreadsheets - while possible - isn't practical. Neither are video or graphics editing. There's a huge list of apps that were ported - all free. Search for "Maemo" as that's the gui toolkit. Underneath, it runs linux.
Battery life is fairly good. 9 days of standby, I normally get about 2 days of regular use between charges.
The best thing is the price has recently dropped to around $220. Don't buy a GPS or an iTouch. Get a Nokia N810 general purpose device.
os/2 v1, which was sort of like a glorifed quarterdeck xm. Can use say 80286, 16-bit words, 64 KB segments, and "what passes as state of the art in russia today"? There you go, man, I fixed it for you.
The problem for ARM: lacking support from Microsoft for Windows; the applications it runs for the PC have to do so under Linux.
A hundred ARM-compatible operating systems just cried out in pain.
This reminds me of the DEC Rainbow (8086 and Z80) or Commodore 128 (8502 + Z80) or even the Acorn BBC with ARM-addon.
So who still thinks the Anonymous Coward is a n00b?
Freescale and Pegatron showed a prototype at CES:
http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009/01/meet-pegatron-199-arm-based-netbook.html
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Windows CE, maybe, but that has far less capabilities (and applications) than Linux on ARM does.
Citation needed that popular Pocket PC applications are few and far between.
And WINE doesn't support Windows CE anyway.
Yet.
I think I'd get one of these Alpha 400 MIPS netbooks
That looks like similar CPU specs and price to Sony's PSP. But from the name only, is it a MIPS CPU or an Alpha CPU? I wonder if HP (owner of Digital) isn't already having its legal department draft a cease-and-desist for the maker of these netbooks.
If there was ARM Windows, this would not exist. The Intel CPU is now an added cost so that users can have their familiar windows interface, and a powerful processor when plugged in.
Now, consider the case of a dual ARM CPU box. Longer battery life, no x86 premium (cheaper). You can turn the additional CPU on or off if you're on battery or not.
Since you're asking vendors to support arm, it makes no difference now that they have to support two CPUs and three OSs.
After we subtract everything we have the added cost of supporting windows vs user's familiarity with it. Whatever the cost is - $100, $50 (includes license, plus value of battery life) has to be greater than learning a new OS. Given that there is KDE4.2 and Vista, and the majority of people are still on XP, if you have to learn a new system, its a good way to et your foor in the door of being cheaper.
I am not sure how they plan to accomplish this hybridization - the ARM cpu needs its own OS and a communications API (via shared mem, usb?), with features (software function calls) it can provide. Or, they can put a linux client OS, and use a vmware or other client to access the ARM on a special internal network. If that is the case, then why not make it all ARM, since vendors now need to support Linux/ARM?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
All your problems HAVE happened to people trying linux.
That one single person gets ALL of them is not merely unfortunate, it smacks of deception.
Why didn't Intel use its own Xscale architecture. I thought this was the equivalent to ARM for embedded systems, and it is owned by them.
Basically, in 1991 I was an Acorn geek and had a good knowledge of ARM assembler. I'd had a A310 (an ARM2 I believe) and I'd just upgraded to a RISCPC (with the ARM3 and the FPU I think) for university, while also learning *nix in the Sun lab.
While browsing comp.sys.os I found a post from some bloke called Linus who was offering a *nix kernel that could be compiled for x86 and we started having an email chat with him about how I'd go about porting it to the ARM hardware. I took it know further when all he asked for was $20 or so as, frankly, I was a student (so had little cash) and I didn't know how to get a bankers cheque in USD.
And that, my son, is why I didn't surf a wave of Linux on ARM...
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
The N810 has GPS, but the N800 doesn't.
If this technology saves just one battery, then it's worth it.
Won't someone please think of the batteries!
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
It would make more sense to move to an architecture where you have something like a traditional Intel or AMD CPU, where the cores would just shut down when not in use, etc...
Having two CPUs of different architecture is ridiculous. How are you going to make that seamless? For example, how are you going to access memory from the ARM? The memory controller is in the Intel/AMD CPU. If the AMD/Intel CPU is powered down, so is the memory controller. If the memory controller is powered down, the ram won't get refreshed.
So you'll basically need an off-chip memory controller. If you do that, then all of a sudden you have even more headaches, such as trying to synchronize the caches on each core of the Intel/AMD cpu, etc. (And this is overlooking the instruction disparity)
If you are talking about having a separate operating environment/desktop/etc completely separate from the main environment, that is going to be awkward for a lot of users, as many will expect seamless integration and data sharing, etc.
Also, don't fool yourself and think that just because your hybrid is running an ARM that you will magically get all-day battery life. The CPU is not the only power drain on the system. You also have the wireless radio, the LCD display, and the graphics processor, etc.
Adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) caused much of financial meltdown in the housing market.
"Have you used Windows Mobile? That's something I reserve for inflicting on only my worst enemies and only as a last resort. It's the Jack Bauer option of OSs."
That is an insult to Jack Bauer. He is competent and works 24 hours a day.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
"Have you used Windows Mobile? That's something I reserve for inflicting on only my worst enemies and only as a last resort. It's the Jack Bauer option of OSs."
That is an insult to Jack Bauer. He is competent and works 24 hours a day.
But only one day a year.
But he only works 1 day a year.
No, there really aren't many completely new ideas in computing.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You can bet that if ARM gains an arm-hold into the consumer space that Microsoft will either move to kill it - or provide applications and an OS alternative to Linux for it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Microsoft Windows support for ARM is almost meaningless. What counts is all the crappy binary-only apps that people want to run - you know, the reason they're stuck on Windows in the first place. NT used to run on Alpha, MIPS and SPARC, but without support from application vendors the ports were stillborn. (OK, I have a copy of Microsoft Word 6.0 for Alpha somewhere, and you can still get some random free software like Info-ZIP and Putty built for it, but essentially it's a toy.)
Compare with Apple, which made it pretty easy for vendors to ship 'fat binaries' and did emulation of the older chip to give a pretty smooth transition from m68k to PowerPC and from PowerPC to i386. That's not really an option here, because emulating a Pentium in software on an ARM chip isn't going to do much good for performance or power consumption.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
WINE is just Win32 for POSIXy platforms. It's not able to rewrite x86 binary for ARM.
Indeed, *wine* doesn't do it itself. But nothing prevents you from running a separate layer to do the translation.
QEMU has a Linux-on-Linux mode, where it doesn't emulate a full blown virtual PC, it only runs the application targeting a foreign architectures inside the emulator and passes along the calls to the actual native OS and libraries.
Darwine has been doing exactly this to run x86 Win32 application on PPC Mac OS X using a combination of Wine and QEMU. It should be possible to build a similar stack to run x86 Win32 application on ARM Linux.
But don't expect much performance from it on an ARM netbook. It will probably OK to run a couple of simple tools. It won't probably work with games or other more resource intensive application.
But gamers aren't the machine's main audience anyway, the ARM netbooks are targetted at people who just want Web, Email & Chat, with the longest possible battery life.
Although, you probably could get better Win32 performance (at the cost of battery life) with dual-chip machine (like DELL Lattitude ON) or using accelerator boards if the ARM netbooks has some standard connector (like Xpress card).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
According to TFA, ARM and Adobe have collaborated and an ARM version of Flash 10 should appear any time soon.
Nonetheless, your argument is still valid :
Flash is a proprietary piece of shit.
I really hope that Gnash will manage to become a nice alternative, the way XPDF and its (poppler-based) descendant replace Adobe Acrobat for PDF on Linux.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why ARM? Wouldn't it be easier to use atom instead so that the same x86 software can run in both power modes? Considering all other power consuming components of a laptop, using ARM instead of atom would not significantly reduce the total power consumption of the system.
had two processors, and two operating systems.....
This hybrid approach is destined to fail when someone will realize that a laptop with just the ARM-half of the hybrid will consume half the power sacrificing 10% of functionality (a problem that can be solved with software development -> not impossible). Not to mention that the interconnection between shared peripherals and the two processors generates a lot of product cost overhead. A lion with eagle wings can't fly, it can just glide. I want a sub-notebook running Cortex-A9. Don't make me wait too long.
Working to work less.
What's the current state of OLED?
OLED display have been spotted in the wild (sony, available since 2007). They are ultra thin, size 11".
But they still cost an arm and a leg. And OLED currently still has a shorter life time.
But as production ramps up, price will probably fall down. After a couple of year, OLED will probably cheap enough for netbooks.
Electronic paper?
Still suffers from really slow refresh rate. Good for e-book. Bad for anything which needs higher refresh rate.
The good thing, with eink is that, when not refreshing, it costs exactly 0 W. (Under sunlight. Otherwise, you still have to light it up somehow).
Maybe that display from the XO?
The first gen XO uses a normal LCD screen, but with a LED backlight that doesn't use coloured filters, but prism that split the light to generate the colours.
Thus having a better efficiency. Also works in B&W under sun light.
Currently, XO-type display are the best compromise in quality and price.
OLEDs are going to be the next-big-thing once 11" displays stop costing prices in the thousand dollar range.
Beside, given the power consumption of ATOM's chipset, a whole Intel-based solution still has a much more higher power drain than an ARM based one (which has everything into a single SoC - and can even embed RAM in the same CPU package).
So even if ATOM vs. ARM differences aren't big, Intel netbook vs. ARM netbook still makes a difference.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There you see one of the other reasons why Flash schould be free (as in Gnash for example).
The main reason is still that it is the platform with the single largest installer base.
I have been remastering my own custom linux distro based on PClinuxos for many months now for use in my office (my own server distro and my own desktop distro). The writing is on the wall, that as things like remasterme become more user friendly more people and more companies will start producing customs linux distros exactly for what they need. MS would have a hard time following that act.
It is ways off on a large scale, but not that far away. Imagine ordering your new notebook, you start it up, it asks you some questions, it download the software, and builds you your own custom distro.
Living in Chile
I have an iPAQ hx4700; it has a 624 MHz ARM-compatible XScale PXA270(?) CPU in it. There seems to be TONS of software available that runs on it, from the esoteric and highly specialized to the utterly mundane to the outright silly... pretty much a parallel of what's available for anything else. The ONLY real differences are the slower clock speed and, perhaps most significant, the limited display resolution of virtually all devices in which it's used (the hx4700 has a 640x480 display handicapped down to 320x240). The operating system is Windows Mobile, which may not be the "Windows" found on the desktop, but it certainly COULD be if there was motivation to do it. I can also install Familiar Linux and I think a couple other small distros, as well.
So there you go: throw some $$$ at developing some faster versions and install them in devices with reasonable displays, and I don't see any reason why they can't at least augment x86 CPUs if not outright replace them. At the least, they can provide further impetus to the energy-efficient segment of the industry.
Remember, back in the 80386 days, when you could get a separate math co-processor for the CPU? That seems to be the direction the pendulum is swinging. The OS would run on, say, an ARM CPU. To run x86 code, it would fire up the Intel co-processor. Specialized computations could be offloaded to a GPU for performance.
The Transmeta folks were trying to solve the same problem, I think. Now, instead of rewriting x86 code on the fly, we'll get a real x86 co-processor.
Intel laptops are a dime a dozen while non Intel laptops do not exist. OK there are a few like the soon to be delivered Pandora but it is suspiciously few. There is a market for non Intel laptops but it is not being filled. Why is that? Almost seems like a conspiracy to me. The i.MX51 should be the CPU that finally breaks the Intel/M$ stranglehold. A netbook with an i.MX51 and a builtin 3G modem would be sweet
Yeah, but he spends the rest of the year describing everything he did on that one day to ad-nauseam, and he always makes it sound like he saved the world.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Heh, this got me thinking, there was already an ARM Laptop in 1992:
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Pics/A4A1.jpg
and the post I referred to above was something like this one:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1122971&cid=26803605
but I'm sure it was comp.sys.os...
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
Are you, amn108, planning to sponsor this FOSS work? This sort of thing could take several man years to implement...
Skepticism aside,
someone did it before... with win ce at least.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/BMOE-46XPTL.html
but it's scheduled downtime so that still counts as 100% availability
Jack Bauer == Santa Claus?