Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I would buy such a 9" smartbook and use it as ultraportable second laptop (as it can do OOo impress presentations it would be very useful too.) I can imagine other computer users in Europe and the US to buy such a machine as second (third) system. However, if the suppliers can keep prices under the $200, it will be an affordable system for "the masses" in China, India and South America that were unable to afford their own PC before. Somehow, prices for netbooks crept up with the addition of harddisks and Windows.
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
I don't understand who are going to sell these when Microsoft call them up and say "Oh, I see you're selling computers with [non-windows OS], that's interesting... Yeaaahh so... you know those rebates you get on Windows? Yeah, you can forget about those. Have a nice day"
Do they think they're safe because they're on ARM?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The most interesting part is that those devices have integrated CPU/GPU/Video Accel. on a single chip. Something that Intel, AMD and nVidia is pursuing for a long time, but these ARM based solutions from Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others are delivering now and the performance / power consumption ratio is already impressive.
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.
I looked at the pictures in the article and was crestfallen. I don't want some half assed useless handheld toy.. I want an ARM powered real, usable laptop with an 8.9-11.1" display, readable outdoors in daylight , with a real keyboard, that will be everything that all netbooks to date have emphatically not been. Something with true 20+ hour battery life while doing useful work. It should have WiFi and mobile broadband. An ARM would be more than powerful enough for taking notes, surfing, reading and replying to email, etc. Ubuntu 9.04 would be just perfect. I would pay real money for this. I thought the HP2133 would be it, but mine is going unused. You can barely read the display in a dark room, let alone daylight or even a bright office. The Lenovo X301 is about the closest I have come, but it is a long way from where it needs to be, and brutally expensive.
Submitter was trying to squeeze in yet another techvideoblog.com link.
As another Nokia Internet Tablet user, I look forward to a slightly larger size, but retaining 2+ days of battery use. 10" screens are too large.
Don't get me wrong, my N800 is good for highly portable needs (geocaching, mobile email, skype, lite blogging), all without a mandatory cell data plan, but there are times when a larger screen would be useful without adding weight. A Eee is too heavy and too large. A 7" screen with a built-in keyboard that I can touch type on and GPS included would be really nice. Some external connections - monitor, keyboard, USB, 100base-tx would be really nice too. Those missing things hurt N800/N810 adoption, IMHO.
No need to support video editing or any other high powered processing. Just lite word processing, spreadsheets, web surfing, email, plus all the things the N800 does already.
Of course, RiscOS is a tailor-made OS for ARM processors. That really is a very lightweight and simple OS and while it doesn't have the applications available that a Linux distro does, it might make an interesting port for this sort of platform.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
implies either a monochrome e-ink display or something with enough backlighting to overcome skylight - which is where your battery life is disappearing to. Even LED lit displays are not going to give you what you want. OLED may one day get there, but is two technical breakthroughs short.
Even at 100% conversion rates - which are not likely to be attainable - I doubt you would get 20+ hours from a 3 cell battery on a 10 inch screen. A very rough calculation shows that you would need about 2W just to light a daylight readable display at 100% conversion. A 3 cell battery is around 22WH. That means that it could run the display alone for only around 11 hours.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
From one of the linked articles...
"He acknowledged two concerns for smartbooks are the lack of native support for Adobe Flash on ARM and the fragmentation of Linux application environments. However, he said solutions to both issues are in the works." Emphasis in bold mine.
And further,
"One of the downsides of Linux is the fragmented nature of it," he said. "That's why so many designers are excited about Google's Android, because it's managed by a single entity," he added."
Now, these are folks doing very serious work with Linux. Many Slashdoters have said the same things only to be branded as trolls. I can see a future for Android if Google continues to do a good job.
I agree with the sentiment but this a a trade show and the designs on offer are by "industrial designers from the Savannah College of Art and Design". I am not saying they won't come to market . . . well, to chuck in a gratuitous car reference - how many of those concept cars that we see at motor shows actually make it to mass production?
Why do you need an Adjustable Rate Mortgage to power it?
So they're happy to have a single entity that focus on a subset of hardware with a consistent API and a development force behind it. Where have I heard that before? Let's see, it's run by a mercurial egomaniac...
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
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".
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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:
Fragmentation may be an issue, but trying to fix fragmentation by making a one-shot wonder isn't going to make it less fragmented, it's only going to make it more so.
Especially because it -is- Linux... I'm sure there's still people out there that are using e9 and xfce (for their own reasons).
I myself am not disappointed with the fragmented nature of things. It gives me choice. I got tired of toying with GNOME, so I moved to KDE.
Both of them have good applications, and yes, there are some applications that I'd still use over the 'native' counterparts, because they're just that much better. That's not a problem (to me) either.
Android is lighter and all; which is a significant plus. Providing an alternative to the heavyweights (like X) is a good thing! However, as another alternative, it's only going to fragment the landscape that much more. (i.e. can I run Android apps on my linux netbook? yes, but only if you run a container app).
And then, I have to ask: would you still want to use that KDE or GNOME app on your android netbook? Would you want it to be -capable- of running GNOME or KDE apps? (at worst, this means running a minimalized X server on top of Android).
The only solution to being able to run those apps at all would mean getting a high-end smartbook. This would include things like more ram, some sort of hard drive (I'd go with SSD here), and things like that.
And in the meantime, the general public would have to deal with a limited application environment. Which... isn't a big problem, provided it can at least do the basics.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
From your posting and the quotes you refer to, I'm guessing the issue you seem to be having is the availability of proprietary software on Linux.
From my perspective, I couldn't care less about proprietary software. I've got linux. I've got Debian Linux. I've got 24,000+ software packages ready to go on ARM. What do I need proprietary software for? What's the smartbook for? Reading e-mail, web browsing, watching a video, maybe doing a presentation. Where's the need for proprietary software? I already have google for online searching, maps, e-mail. What need is there for proprietary software?
If you're a proprietary software developer why not save yourself some grief and pain and write your software for the iphone. Apple would be happy to review your software for its suitability to its platform. I'm also sure that if you write software for Microsoft's platforms and it's wildly successful there's a pretty good chance of being bought out by Microsoft on their terms, and if the terms aren't good enough for Microsoft they might just take your good idea and make their own inferior copy of it.
If you really want to write proprietary software for Linux, then I would encourage you to write web based software where you own the server and your clients interact with your server using a standards compliant browser. That way it doesn't matter what OS the client is running, and you don't have to deal with support issues.
> I don't understand who are going to sell these when Microsoft call them up and say...
Notice who is doing this. Mobile phone carriers, mobile chipset makers, etc. are the driving force behind this effort. They came together and did Symbian because they understood letting Windows in would end up with them in the PC situation where Microsoft is the one making the bulk of the profit. So if Microsoft had the ability to hurt them I'd think they would have crushed them like bugs already.
Remember also that Chinese contract manufacturers live in a totally different world where Microsoft has no influence. Get consumer electronics instead of PC makers to do the end marketing and again, Microsoft can't hurt them. That just leaves the retailers. Yes Microsoft owns a while isle in Best Buy so they might keep these guys out of there for an Xmas or two. And frankly Best Buy will fear them on their own for their ability to turn a $500 laptop purchase into a $200 netbook sale. Until the wireless carriers put them in the part of Best Buy THEY own bubdles with a 3G contract. And what of Walmart, Walgreens, etc. These puppies are cheap and heading down. Sooner or later they show up as impulse purchase items at Big Lots in blister packs. How much leverage does Microsoft have with any of those markets?
Democrat delenda est
You could run it in an X86 emulator, but the number of tuples you would burn sort of defeats the purpose of using ARM.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Linux fonts and the Linux interface in general (I use Gnome) have really improved. In fact, many cross-platform apps like Firefox and OpenOffice don't show any appreciable difference between the Linux version and the Windows version.
Example:
I gave my mother-in-law a used laptop early last year, Gateway Solo 5300 700mhz with half a gig of RAM and Ubuntu 7.10
It was the first computer she ever actually owned. She had only used Windows machines up to that point.
She teaches at her hometown high school and uses her computer for email, browsing the web, editing Word documents and playing Mahjong.
I never once had her call for help, and she was able to do everything that she needed.
About 3 months ago the machine went dead, most likely a motherboard problem.
She had me find her a decent laptop on eBay, gave me a budget of $250. I roped in a 1 ghz Thinkpad for around 190 bucks and she requested that I set it up with Ubuntu. So I graduated her up to Ubuntu 8.04, handed her the machine, and haven't had a support call yet.
Unless you are an avid gamer, or your job/hobby requires esoteric software that only runs on Windows, Linux is ready for the desktop. Your 60 year old mother-in-law could even use it.
These things have been hyped on trade shows for over a year now. Call me when they actually have something a consumer can buy in a store.
Does this count.. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=261613
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
It's an interesting story.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I have an Asus Eee 100 0HE. It ships sans optical drive, and that was one reason why I wanted it. Considerable power savings, and really, most folks who have a netbook have another more powerful machine. Just rip and encode from CD/DVD to a file and enjoy. This netbook has a 160GB drive which is quite capable of holding a good bit of my FLAC files or H.264 videos.
Then again, I'm biased against optical media. Once you've managed to archive all of your music and movies to files on a disk (or more likely an array of them), you'll wish everything were just a file.
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.
You have got to be kidding me. This is ridiculous. If this is what x86 compatibility costs in terms of power consumption, then this is a killer feature. If ARM laptops will get an order of magnitude more runtime on battery power, compared to their x86 counter-parts then Microsoft shareholders are going to be very disappointed in the coming year.
The kicker is that display, mass storage, and wireless power start to predominate as you drop well below 10 watts in terms of total system power. These other components have a long way to go. Until then, the CPU could take 0.01 watts and battery life would still be a big disappointment.
I stopped reading after the printer lie.
Linus supports (other than Lexmark, I hear, but I've never even seen one of their printers here in the UK) more printers than windows these days, and without the need to download 10s of megabytes of extra driver and add-on crap from the manufacturer.
You're an idiot.
This is completely baseless. See point #1 here: http://bec-systems.com/site/326/intel-atom-vs-ti-omap3
In fact ATOM uses anywhere from the same amount of power in the best case, to much less than an order of magnitude in the worse...
And even if it were an order of magnitude difference in power consumption as you claim, you're utterly wrong that ARM will outperform x86 solutions. The claim has been made forever by interested parties, and it's never been true. ARM has never been designed for performance equivalent to even the lowest-end x86 CPUs, and ATOM CPUs easily outperform OMAP3 packages, just not as much as they historically always have.
And I must admire how you single-out Geode... Comparing an extremely, EXTREMELY OLD x86 CPU design based on much older tech and vastly larger fab processes (from 10 years ago), with a practically brand-new ARM solution. Just going out of your way to make the comparison as unfair as possible?
The "excluding display" comment makes it obvious you in-fact know the problem with your claim, but continue to pretend that it doesn't exist...
Cutting the power consumption of the CPU any further than Geode/ATOM has, just doesn't have a market... Not because it's not possible, but simply because other factors begin to dominate. The display is a huge one. Even if you can cut your CPU power consumption by 50%, you're only cutting overall system power consumption by perhaps 10%. The display obviously dominates, and there's no sign of any near-future technology that will substantially reduce that power requirement by a significant amount.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
the status for the support of full Flash (with all actionscripts)
Gnash is getting extremely close to being a drop-in Free Software replacement for the Adobe Flash Player. In the linked videos, the ARM director of mobile computing was talking about how the ARM folks were working with Adobe to get Adobe Flash running on the ARM processors, but Gnash has already had ARM support for years. If they're demoing Ubuntu -- a Free Software OS -- on these machines, then why not use a Free Software program to play Flash programs on them? Why not invest their time and energy in the Free Software project?
Rob Savoye (lead dev for Gnash) wrote a bit on this topic on the gnash-dev mailing list:
Jason Guiditta wrote:
> Just saw this...article...bsquared porting flash lite to run on an upcoming dell
> netbook.
Yes, I'm familiar with Bsquared. They're porting the Adobe v10 to
embedded platforms, basically getting rid of Flash Lite, which has
always been somewhat limited. I've talked to several company's also
talking to Bsquared.
> ...This seems like a perfect opportunity to get some
> funding for gnash, since it is already designed to run on so many
> platforms. If a big company like Dell is willing to pay to get flash
> well-supported on their netbook, why could that player not be gnash?
We'd need a contact at a sufficiently high level. Of the companies I
know using BSquared's promised flashplayer for ARM, MIPS, etc... have
decided they'd rather spend hundreds of thousands of $$$ for the
Bsquared solution, than give much smaller amounts to Gnash, which
already runs on the ARM and Android. Big companies that prefer
proprietary software seems to prefer to give business to each other,
regardless pf the much higher price tag. Of the few machines I've played
with the Bsquared plugin on, it usually hung the browser in seconds, and
many other stability problems. But I guess they'll get it right
eventually...
I also talked to Google about Gnash for Android several times, but
they don't appear to be interested in the slightest. Unfortunately, the
only people willing to support Gnash with any funding are people that
believe strongly in free software solutions already. To those people, I
can't thank you enough!
- rob -
Free Software can be a great benefit to the hardware folks like ARM, and can be great for a mobile platform like Android, but it's sad that these groups don't seem to take any interest in what the Free Software community is offering. That's why it's so important for people to donate time, code, and/or money to projects like Gnash. Software Freedom isn't going to just happen without people like you and me stepping up and getting stuff done.
coding is life
What that article is forgetting is chipset power, which is 2.3 W for the Poulsbo, which is more expensive and requires a more expensive (although 2 W instead of 2.5 W) CPU. So, 4.3 W there.
But, most netbooks run the cheaper Atom N270 and 945GSE, which is... 2.5 W for the CPU, 6 W for the northbridge, and 3.3 W for the southbridge. Total platform power consumption, 11.8 W.