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."

Comments

Re:Good but..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Flash 7 is already available for Linux Arm(see Nokia N770, and possibly Chumby), but it is an OEM licenced embedded thing, not just a download(if you look, Adobe is quite clear on the fact that desktop/laptop flash is free as in beer; but embedded flash very much isn't). Adobe seems to have plans to improve Flash on newer Arm chips, so I suspect that this issue will improve with time.

Re:Not a problem

[EvilRyry]

WINE is just Win32 for POSIXy platforms. It's not able to rewrite x86 binary for ARM. You could perhaps take Windows software compiled for an ARM processor and run it, but that kind of defeats the point of using Linux for portability in the first place. KVM/Xen also do not rewrite binary for other architectures. QEMU could do it, but performance and battery life would drop dramatically.

Re:Good but..

[ozmanjusri]

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.

Then put your name down for one of these.

ARM licensed Java from Sun years ago, and include hardware acceleration for Java apps via Jazelle. In addition, Adobe have said they will have a version Flash 10 for ARM sometime this year. So get your wallet out.

At $199, these netbooks won't cost you and arm and a leg...

Re:Apple / BSD

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Apple has shown no interest in playing the netbook game; but the iPod touch and iPhone are already (mostly) OSX on ARM.

Re:Not a problem

[Janek Kozicki]

yep, Pandora fills this niche. 0.3kg, ARM, 10h battery, runs ubuntu just normally. But it's very small, only a 4.3" screen 800x480. About the size of DS. http://openpandora.org/

It's just a startup now, people did preorders (by preordering it means that you are trusting them ;) and it will be delivered about March or April. I expect that by the end of the year they will be selling it in online shops in a usual way.

It's a perfect UMPC for me, a really "mobile" PC, smaller than my wallet, actually.

Darwine already does this

[DrYak]

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).