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OLPC Set To Dump x86 For Arm Chips In XO 2
angry tapir writes with this excerpt from Good Gear Guide: "One Laptop Per Child is set to dump x86 processors, instead opting to put low-power Arm-based processors in its next-generation XO-2 laptop with the aim of improving battery life. The nonprofit is 'almost' committed to putting the Arm-based chip in the next-generation XO-2 laptop, which is due for release in 18 months, according to Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC. The XO-1 laptop currently ships with Advanced Micro Devices' aging Geode chip, which is based on an x86 design."
The whole excuse people use for running Windows is it runs their applications. Seeing as how they're all for x86, porting Windows itself is only 1% of the issue.
So you'd get all of the disadvantages of Windows, while simultaneously loosing the only real advantage it has, plentiful software. Smart.
This is basically a weakness of proprietary software in general...
We've had x86_64 for what, 6 years now? Windows XP got ported pretty fast, but driver support is still awful since most hardware vendors haven't bothered to port their drivers. And true 64-bit app support is even worse.
On the other hand, the Linux kernel got ported to x86_64 shortly before the physical processors were actually available. I was running a full-blown Debian distro on it a couple months later. All the apps were open-source and the kernel makes great efforts to design device drivers for portability, and so for distro maintainers it was largely a matter of just recompiling the packages.
What lags behind in 64-bit support under Linux? Surprise, surprise, it's closed-source stuff like Flash and video drivers.
Closed-source software develops a massive amount of inertia against architecture changes. With open-source, as soon as one developer decides to recompile for the new architecture, maybe tweaks the code a bit, you're off and running.
My bicyles
I've seen surprisingly few pure .NET desktop applications on Windows. Most use P/Invoke and/or COM interop in more than one place, often to call some third-party C++ library.
Even a 400MHz Pentium2 will run circles around those 1GHz ARM CPUs.
Nowhere near true. Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 has similar performance to the Pentium-M.
That's the point, really, isn't it? ARM chips need special hardware DSPs for just about ANYTHING you want to do.
No, but it's more power efficient. A 1.5GHz Pentium M can't decode 720p H.264 without dropping frames, while the DSP on a typical A8-based SoC can handle it easily in around 200mW. Doing the same thing on something like an Atom CPU would take around 2-4W. You're talking at least an order of magnitude power difference for doing the same task, which in a mobile device is very important.
Yes, because most people don't do anything computationally intensive with their netbooks
Exactly, and for the things that are computationally-intensive it makes more sense to have dedicated silicon that can handle it in a fraction of the power consumption. That's why most of the shipping ARM SoCs have a DSP and a GPU on die.
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