ARM-Powered Linux Laptops Unveiled At Computex

Charbax writes "At Computex in Taipei on June 2-6th, several companies unveiled ARM-powered laptops that are cheaper ($99 to $199), last much longer on a regular 3-cell battery (8-15 hours) and can still add cool new features such as a built-in HDMI 720p or 1080p output, 3D acceleration, connected standby and more. The ARM Linux laptops shown as working prototypes at Computex will run Ubuntu 9.10 (optimized for ARM), Google Android, Xandros OS for ARM, or some Red Flag Linux type of OS. In this video, the Director of Mobile Computing at ARM, is giving us all the latest details on the status for the support of full Flash (with all actionscripts), the optimizations of the web browser (accelerating rendering/scrolling using the GPU/DSP), the stuff that Google is working on to adapt Android 2.0 Donut release for laptop screens and interfaces and more. At Computex I also filmed an interview with the Nvidia team working on Tegra laptops, the Qualcomm people working on Snapdragon devices and the Freescale people doing their awesomely thin ARM laptops in cooperation with manufacturers such as Pegatron as well."

Comments

Price?

[siloko]

Nowhere in the article does it mention $99. The quote is "Some of the ARM-based systems will sell for as little as $199." Now $199 is pretty cheap but that is a starting price and will unlikely be the mean let alone allowing for $99 units. The summary is misleading.

Re:Price?

[adam1101]

And many people that don't care about "using their old programs or data" because they never owned a computer before.

They will care about being able to use existing Chinese apps and games, which are pretty much all Windows-only. I don't know if you've actually been in China, but Windows is even more entrenched there than it is in the West.

For them Linux is perfect (they won't have to pirate MS Office.)

For them Windows is much better, because all the Chinese software that everybody around them is already using will work, and they don't give a hoot about piracy. In fact, lots of them don't even have a concept of "software piracy". Software is just something you copy from someone else, or buy from the street vendor for a dollar.

Re:Here, we obey the laws of physics

[TheRaven64]

implies either a monochrome e-ink display or something with enough backlighting to overcome skylight - which is where your battery life is disappearing to.

Or a transflective TFT. They're fairly common in small devices, relying on a backlight in low-light conditions but being reflective (front-lit) in bright sunlight. Because they don't use the backlight in direct sunlight, the battery lasts longer when they are front-lit.

Re:$99 huh

[blind biker]

The Eee PC and similar netbooks don't have a CD/DVD drive, either, and yet they sold millions. I don't think people are quite as interested in "that cd you just bought from walmart".

Re:Will they run Linux? RTFA dude, they do!

[Tubal-Cain]

Get Wine on there ASAP and you're away for a good number of Win apps too...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that Wine doesn't translate across architectures. Any windows apps you hope to run on Wine would need to be compiled for Wine from source. So all ARM/Wine apps will either:

• Be compiled for a Windows ARM port. But switching to ARM would be a good opportunity for Microsoft to make a clean break of backwards compatibility, perhaps with an entirely new OS line. Perhaps one called 'Chairs'?
• Be an open source app compiled in ARM. Seeing as most open source apps are already ported to Linux, using Wine on ARM would have novelty value only.

Re:ARM floodgates blown?

[drinkypoo]

HTC has been making phones with Qualcomm chips for a while, I just got myself a refurb HTC Fuze when I sold my soul to AT&T (I live in GSM land, and they own it all here now, literally.) It's also the Sprint-sold HTC Touch Pro. 528 Mhz Qualcomm chip, VGA display, respectable 3d acceleration, halfway decent touch. "A $500 value" free with a two year torture session. In real-world reviewed testing they manage five days of standby time and you get maybe six to eight hours of use... on a 1350mAh battery! (You can get power from any old USB connection with the included dongle, which also gives you headphone and headset connections.) That's a prior-generation version of this same idea, using am ARMv6 core (which runs ARMv4 binaries quite nicely, thankyouverymuch.)

I'm no Windows Mobile fanboy, the phone gets chunky here and there. There ARE some hacks you can make (I used "Advanced Config", which should work across all Raphael devices) to dramatically increase the responsiveness (caching mostly) and you can find a list on xda-developers raphael forums. Touch Flo 3D is no iPhone interface, and you get dropped to the Windows interface on a regular basis, but that's far less odious than it used to be and besides, it's possible to run Android on Touch Pro already. I would never have got this thing if I thought I'd be stuck with WinCE forever. Best acronym ever.

Re:No one can stop the x86 train...

[TheRaven64]

VIA ultra-low voltage chips

Oh, this made me laugh. The OMAP3 used in these laptops is considered power-hungry in ARM circles. It draws 250mW when using the ARM core (complete with FPU and vector unit), the DSP, the OpenGL 2 ES GPU, the 512 MB of flash and 256MB of RAM and the other integrated components in the package. In contrast, the best 'low power' x86 chips use 2W for just the CPU and need more power for the GPU and supporting chipset. When you factor everything in, the best x86 solutions need over an order of magnitude more power for the same level of performance. Even the Geode has an embarrassingly high power consumption (close to 7W for a complete system, excluding display), and it doesn't even come close to the performance of a 250mW ARM system.

Why phone vendors don't want to play with Redmond

[symbolset]

It's an interesting story.

Re:Will they run Linux?

[Theolojin]

Well, they're not going to run Windows any time soon. Good opportunity here. I hope the application availability is going to be good - as a Nokia Tablet user I've been running a variant of Linux on a ARM processor for some time now and I can't wait to get my hands on a ARM netbook.

For all the fun poked at Debian for having such lengthy release cycles, I, for one, am glad that ARM is a fully-supported architecture. (Part of the reason for the long release cycles is each supported platform must be ready for the release.) I could have essentially the same setup on my x86-based laptop as I could on an ARM-based laptop. In other words, application availability really isn't an issue when it comes to the ARM platform.

Re:Will they run Linux?

[bhtooefr]

The ARMs aren't THAT slow. If it's usable on an Atom, it'll probably be usable on a modern ARM.

And, here's the kicker... the ARMs have hardware DSPs that the Atoms don't, making them potentially much faster in certain situations, if software takes advantage of the DSP. (Granted, that does require modification.)

One thing that doesn't require modification to the code, it just requires the JVM to be modified, is Java acceleration - many ARM processors, including the ones under discussion, have Jazelle support, which means that they natively support a subset of Java bytecode. Seeing as "complete development environments" were mentioned... and Eclipse is written in Java...