Dell Considering ARM-Based Smartbooks

wonkavader sends us this quote from an article in PCWorld: "In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks ... Smartbooks with Arm chips have inherent advantages over x86 chips like Atom, such as lower power consumption and longer battery life, according to Finch. The chips are also becoming more powerful, as indicated by the growing number of applications on smartphones, he said. 'I think it's natural and reasonable for us to begin looking at them as they begin scaling their processors up.'"

Comments

Uh-huh.

[XanC]

And what reason do we have to believe this isn't a just negotiating tactic against Microsoft?

Re:Uh-huh.

[DigiShaman]

These are rough times with shitty sales. I'm sure Dell is just trying to stay afloat by what ever means. The days of exclusive deals between the industry giants is hold for now at least.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Tubal-Cain]

"Just"? Negotiating tactic is most certainly at least the consolation prize, but they seem to be doing well with their Ubuntu systems.

It seems to me that this is more a case of not keeping all of one's eggs in the MS-x86 basket. Using Linux now gives them a head start in developing a polished interface over their competitors and experience in migrating platforms.
Using ARM now gives them time to work the kinks out of the hardware integration so their ARM laptops can be more stable than the competition's when everyone else starts jumping on the bandwagon.

Re:Uh-huh.

[drizek]

Because it will sell, and the margins could be high. I imagine something like this would be popular in "developing markets" as well.

Re:Uh-huh.

[binarylarry]

Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft Software+Hardware.

You think Dell is just going to see back and watch that happen and not have a plan B?

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is almost certainly related to Google announcing Chrome OS, which is slated to be able to run on ARM.

Re:Uh-huh.

[simula]

I have been raptly awaiting Pegatron's $200 arm netbook with an 8 hour runtime:
from January
from July

If Dell is willing to ship what is practically the same device, then this competition can be nothing but good for everyone who wants one.

Re:Uh-huh.

[doctormetal]

ehh? Microsoft has an OS that is suited for such devices. Either windows embedded CE or Windows Embedded nav ready.
Or even the CE derivative Windows mobile.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsembedded/dd630116.aspx

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I get your point, but if you think the CE family is even a contender in netbook type devices, you're way off mark...

Re:Uh-huh.

[Lennie]

Ubuntu, which Dell already ships for x86 also has an ARM-port for their upcoming release

Re:Uh-huh.

[thetoadwarrior]

Windows Mobile isn't even a contender for phones.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to explain to the customer why Microsoft Windows doesn't want to run any Windows applications? ;-)

Re:Uh-huh.

[bhtooefr]

Not only that, they already have some experience with ARM - some of the Latitudes have an optional instant-on environment that uses an ARM instead of the x86, IIRC.

Re:Uh-huh.

[secondhand_Buddah]

I honestly don't think Microsoft are this stupid. Getting into the hardware game will give them absolutely no advantage. If anything, it will isolate them from their strongest allies who will definitely begin to step up a unified Linux agenda if MS were to make such a mistake.

Re:Uh-huh.

[John Hasler]

> Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft
> Software+Hardware.

We can only hope they are that stupid.

Re:Uh-huh.

[gtall]

Such a witty put-down...you really showed us! I feel so baaaaad...

Re:Uh-huh.

[TheRaven64]

Architecturally, the CE 6 kernel is quite similar to the NT family, but without any of the legacy cruft. 5 and earlier had a microkernel-like design, but in a completely-missing-the-point way which made it easy for privileged servers to break each other. It would probably be relatively easy to port the Windows userland to CE. While earlier versions of CE were obviously cut down, and obviously trying new techniques, the CE 6 kernel looks like it's following the same design concepts as the NT kernel with a (very slightly) different set of user requirements. I'm not sure how much code you'd actually need to change to port the userland; almost nothing on NT makes system calls directly, they go via a small stub DLL (which has allowed system calls to change over versions of NT easily), and any code that wanted to run on 9x will only make calls to the higher-level DLLs that call this DLL, so porting this to something equivalent to CE's core.dll would probably be quite easy.

Re:Uh-huh.

[squiggleslash]

Because the ground's shifted.

I don't doubt sabre rattling will help, but I doubt Dell is anything like as interested as it used to be in exclusive contracts. Being forced to ship Windows with every PC just to get a rate of $50 per Windows box instead of $60 (you think Microsoft would charge any OEM full price, especially one with Dell's marketshare?) makes little or no sense given the current situation.

And what is the current situation? The current situation is that consumers are no longer locked to Windows. They are willing to consider alternatives. They've proven that with the Mac.

Now, if this were five years ago, then yeah, GNU/Linux wasn't ideal at that time and honestly needed either to be part of a corporate roll-out with a decent system administration group to support it, or to be sold to technically inclined users. But this is 2009. Ubuntu's GNOME is easily the second easiest to use and cleanest environment after Mac OS X, with Windows Vista a distant third, and XP coming below that, and Vista isn't even something people want.

So you can sell GNU/Linux to ordinary users. The only things keeping most people from switching are the same as for Mac OS X - proprietary lock-in. Anyone who doesn't care about that, who doesn't have some must-have app that must absolutely run on their Netbook, can switch now, and there are massive advantages in them doing so.

From Dell's point of view, if Microsoft wants to come to them and say "Well, sorry, but if you're going to stick Ubuntu on your netbooks and actually make netbooks incapable of running Windows, then we're going to jack up the license fees for the copies of Windows you do sell", then Dell can smugly laugh. "Go right ahead", they'll say. "We'll pass on the costs to our customers, or we'll pre-install more "demos" to make up the cost difference. Sure, a minority will switch to HP, but the rest are going to end up either sucking it up, or buying a netbook where we don't have to pay anyone a cent. And, guess what, Ubuntu's so much nicer than Windows, and always going to be cheaper, so we think for many of our customers, the switch will be permanent. So, Microsoft, what are you going to do? Are you really going to make us charge people more for Windows and encourage them to look at Ubuntu?"

[Cue idiots who'll miss the point and post a complaint about how Ubuntu's worse because they spent two days trying to get some obscure sound card to work or because they prefer KDE or... it doesn't matter. You're in the minority. Oh and hardware compatibility isn't going to be an issue anyway.]

Re:Uh-huh.

[dhasenan]

Easy or not, it'll take six to twelve months for Microsoft to make a decision, and two years to release it. ARM netbooks will be a huge win for Linux.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I once saw a copy of windows 2000 running on a quad-core ARM chip. It was a few years ago, but pretty cool nonetheless.

I would be very surprised if MS wasn't able to build all recent versions of windows for the ARM.

(Posting as AC for obvious reasons)

Re:Uh-huh.

[TheRaven64]

What makes you think they aren't doing it already, in much the same way Apple had an unreleased x86 port of OS X for almost a decade, and just not releasing it because there is not yet a market for it?

Re:Uh-huh.

[Culture20]

I have been raptly awaiting Pegatron's $200 arm netbook with an 8 hour runtime:

I'll buy anything from Megatron.

Re:Uh-huh.

[illumin8]

I honestly don't think Microsoft are this stupid. Getting into the hardware game will give them absolutely no advantage. If anything, it will isolate them from their strongest allies who will definitely begin to step up a unified Linux agenda if MS were to make such a mistake.

This is not speculation. Maybe you've heard of the Zune HD? The Zune HD is using a new Nvidia Tegra chip and is designed to be a competitor for iPod touch and iPhone. One of the things Microsoft is advertising is "the full internet experience." Just like Apple is going to use iPhone OS and ARM chips for their tablet, Microsoft will probably use Nvidia Tegra, which is mostly a couple ARM cores with some Video and Audio processing cores as their platform for future computing products.

Apple and Microsoft have both realized that people do not need desktop power in a portable computing device. As long as it can do decent web browsing, run javascript apps, listen to music, watch video, and read email, what more do people need to do?

Re:Uh-huh.

[0100010001010011]

And Apple is getting 7 hour run times out of their normal laptops.

Then again they actually spent the R&D money to come up with something better. Everyone keeps talking about needing innovations in batteries for Hybrids, Electrics, Laptops, Cell Phones and Apple actually did it.

I haven't heard of any other similar new designs recently (other than, we promise, it's coming soon, we just have to test it real world).

Re:Uh-huh.

[electrosoccertux]

I just bought an Acer Aspire One AO751h.

It has 6-8h (wlan/no wlan, depending on brightness). it's got an Atom z520 and the GMA500 graphics chip (very low power) which has PowerVR which can accelerate 1080p videos. There's some driver issues ATM (jumping through hoops with special settings in KMPlayer) but h264, AVC1 play great. VC.1 plays as well, but I have use DXVA checker to get it to play without dropping frames-- showing that the capability is in the hardware, just needs some driver work.

It weighs 3lbs, has a 11.6" screen (1366x768) and a full-sized keyboard. It's the perfect size for a netbook; the 10.1" screens don't have enough vertical viewing resolution and you end up scrolling up/down all the time in Excel spreadsheets and Firefox/Chrome, especially if you roll with the taskbar on the bottom like most people. 768vert is 28% more viewing area vertically compared with the 10.1" models.

With Win7 on it and 2GB RAM, it flies; I love it.
There's really no need to wait.

Re:Uh-huh.

[iamhassi]

"And Apple is getting 7 hour run times out of their normal laptops."

Great, let me know when I can buy a Apple laptop with a 7 hr battery for $200.

Re:Uh-huh.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well, I do remember a little MS side project that probably hasn't done sales of gaming PCs any good; but I suspect you are right with respect to boring business boxes and servers.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Auntie Virus]

"Then again they actually spent the R&D money to come up with something better. Everyone keeps talking about needing innovations in batteries for Hybrids, Electrics, Laptops, Cell Phones and Apple actually did it."

Really? Apple actually came up with a new or improved battery technology? DO tell. Usually they just buy from Sony et al. And they REALLY get 7 hours? Colour me skeptical.

Re:Uh-huh.

[jo42]

In about 3 or 4 years when current Macbook Pros are up on eBay...

Re:Uh-huh.

[FlyingBishop]

Except the battery will be all but dead...

Re:Uh-huh.

[Hurricane78]

Doesn't meant there isn't a PHB, PHBy enough to make MS do it anyway. ^^

Re:Uh-huh.

[beej]

Really? Apple actually came up with a new or improved battery technology? DO tell. Usually they just buy from Sony et al.
And they REALLY get 7 hours? Colour me skeptical.

I don't know where they got it, but that's what I hear. I have a maybe 7-month old MacBook Pro and that thing can't make it though a movie without draining the battery. So make sure you get a new one.

However, a better battery is a better battery, and Apple should be given credit for putting one in a laptop, even if the rest of it is ...

Re:Uh-huh.

[Will.Woodhull]

Microsoft has been a strongly visionary company from its inception.

That vision has been to empower the individual by providing him with the computing resources that previously were only available to corporations, institutions, and governments. In the 1980s, this was unquestionably a Good Thing.

Now the challenges that Microsoft's vision addressed have been met: you can easily acquire ownership of more computing power than was available to more than 95% of the corporations and institutions of the 1980s. We have all moved beyond the need for Microsoft's defining vision. Microsoft championed personal empowerment for us, and has won an incredibly important victory, and we now enjoy much better lives for that. Thank you, Microsoft.

The new challenges have to do with how to build collaborative computing systems where individuals move in and out of groups who are working on large, long term problems that are only of short term interest to most of those involved. The average length of employment at any one business has dropped markedly in the last decade; FOSS is built on the concept of contributors coming and going at whim while the project continues to evolve; wikis are using a similar approach in devoloping knowledge systems. Maybe these collaborative endeavors are not always successful, but even the failures are proving to be a better value to the world than what they have replaced, that had been made with the best technologies of the 1980s and 1990s.

So, how can a person's contribution be efficiently packaged so his other collaborators can easily put it to use? How can this be done while preserving the contributor's ownership of his piece, so that he can take that part with him when he leaves the project? How can five people, none of whom share a common native language, construct a technical document in English using Google Docs and web resources, or some similar approach? These are the problems we currently face. They do not revolve around individual empowerment; they revolve around the interface between powerful individuals and long term group efforts.

Microsoft cannot help with this work. Microsoft is at best like a knight of old: highly skilled in the specialized techniques of horse warfare using lance and sword, to champion a cause that was once critically important but is now a part of history. These skills do not transfer to today's problems, any more than the skills of that magnificent knight of old have any value on today's mechanized battlefields.

Whether Microsoft is evil is a question that no longer matters. It is now clear that Microsoft is irrelevant to today's problems. We've seen this kind of thing before, for instance when Netscape's approach to the Internet became irrelevant, the Netscape code base was taken apart and the good parts were put back together into Firefox. Microsoft needs to go through a similar transformation: it needs a new shape, created from a new and relevant vision, and it needs to fit all its good pieces into that new shape.

That will probably use up most of the corporate resources that Microsoft has withheld from its stockholders over the last 30-odd years. But it does have those resources. So it could remake itself, if it can find another visionary as powerful as Bill Gates whose vision is actually relevant to today's challenges.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Locutus]

they are already experienced at using ARM because they already ship GNU/Linux on ARM in their computers with the quickboot bios called "Latitude ON". It's an ARM processor and memory on the mobo along with the x86 chips and boots Montavista Linux. So I would say that they are already experienced at this to know how well it does work and would like to capitalize on that ability. As stated, it also takes Microsoft out of the picture regarding existing contracts and changes the ways Microsoft can pressure them to do what Microsoft wants them to do in the design and software packaging whatever that may be.

IIRC, on those laptops with "Latitude ON", when running on the ARM subsection, that laptops have runtimes counted in days, not single digit hours. And they can play video, do web access, email etc so Dell is in a position to lead or help lead in this sector. Their work with Ubuntu on x86 is another major plus for them and with ARM Inc working with Ubuntu on the ARM platform, that's a strong partnership( Dell, Canonical, ARM ).

This is an important one to follow and it would be great to see something from Dell this year.

LoB

Re:Uh-huh.

[iamhassi]

and he's wrong. The MacBook is over 3 yrs old now and it's still $650+ on ebay.

He's dreaming if he thinks he can get a $1100 Mac for $200 after 3 years.

Re:Uh-huh.

[binarylarry]

Netscape didn't lose because they couldn't compete, they lost because Microsoft used it's monopoly position to fuck them over.

I don't want to see Microsoft die off, it'd be a shame to see only Mac and Linux out there.

A nice fairly close split in the market would be great for advancing computers.

Re:Uh-huh.

[LaskoVortex]

You just marginalized yourself.

Re:Uh-huh.

[John Hansen]

I hear all-too-frequently in the business world that "if the rest of the world is going with Microsoft, why do anything different?"

Just for that attitude alone, it would be a huge wakeup call to the rest of the world if Microsoft died off. For starters, it would show all the MBAs out there just how little they really know about business, namely, the part about "don't put all your eggs in one basket."

Re:Uh-huh.

[CAIMLAS]

As much as I'd like to believe that, this coincides too closely with W7 coming out for that to be a realistic assessment, I think.

Hardware integration isn't really a problem: for the most part, they could pick one of the many ARM dev kits available and rebuilt Ubuntu (or whatever) for it - ARM has been around the block a couple of times, and is arguably more stable as an architecture than x86.

For a mass-consumer device, there are just too many things missing on the ARM architecture for wide adoption. The problem is software, not hardware. A suitable, supported Flash implementation would be the first thing on that list. Getting all of the main, useful Firefox extensions to work on ARM would likely be a big requirement as well. The inability to run any common Windows software, even with WINE (or Mono), is also likely to be a problem.

Re:Uh-huh.

[HiThere]

They're aiming at the NetBook market-space, so much of that wouldn't be a problem. Flash might be a problem, but they may have an answer (either a deal with Adobe or an enhanced version of gnash or some such). I think you can forget WINE & Mono. This is a netbook, after all. Not a full fledged computer. By the time the chips get powerful enough to make the fancy stuff practical it could be ported. (Though I *do* hope that Mono gets left behind, and I suspect that WINE is impossible without a vm.)

I suspect that most of the FireFox extensions wouldn't require much more than recompilation.

So I don't see the same problems that you do. But it still might just be a bargaining chip.

Re:Uh-huh.

[0100010001010011]

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features.html#batteryvideo

Going to 'built in' isn't going to add 100% more capacity (3.5 h to 7 h). From the tech presentations I've seen, they use coiled lithium instead of flat in the battery.

Built right into each of the new MacBook Pro notebooks is a breakthrough battery that lasts dramatically longer and does so without increasing the size or weight of MacBook Pro. On a single charge, the battery in the new MacBook Pro lasts up to 7 hours (8 hours on the 17-inch MacBook Pro) and can be recharged up to 1000 times. Thatâ(TM)s compared with only 200 to 300 times for typical notebooks. Advanced chemistry and Adaptive Charging allows the battery to maintain charging capabilities longer and determines the optimal way to charge the batteryâ(TM)s cells. Because the battery lasts up to five years, MacBook Pro uses just one battery in the same time a typical notebook uses three. That makes for less waste. And that, in turn, makes for one environmentally friendly battery.

Re:Uh-huh.

[falconwolf]

And what reason do we have to believe this isn't a just negotiating tactic against Microsoft?

Because there's nothing to stop Microsoft from releasing a version of Windows for Smartbooks. MS released one for phones and XP for netbooks so they can do it with smartbooks. That is if they don't do anything to try to stop them.

Falcon

Re:Uh-huh.

[falconwolf]

And Apple is getting 7 hour run times out of their normal laptops.

Citation needed.

Apple claims MacBook Airs have a battery life of 5 hours, and that's the longest of a MacBooks. I might get 4 hours on my MacBook Pro but not much more. I know because when the battery charge goes down too far the laptop automatically goes to sleep and will not wake up until it is plugged in or the battery is swapped with another, I've had it happen to me a few tymes. The first tyme I about panicked because I thought it had died, but when I plugged it in it woke up.

Falcon

Re:Uh-huh.

[falconwolf]

In about 3 or 4 years when current Macbook Pros are up on eBay...

Actually MacBook hold their value pretty well on eBay. eBay has them listed as having relatively high prices. Right now a 17" 2.33 GHz Core Duo is listed above $1200. That's more than 2 year old, I'm typing this on a 17" 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo that's 2 years old.

Actually that's what I plan on doing when I get a new one, I'll scrub the disk and do a clean install of OS X, then auction it on eBay. Not half but I expect to get at least a 1/3 of the cost of the new one.

Falcon

Re:Uh-huh.

[AnyoneEB]

The inability to run any common Windows software, even with WINE (or Mono), is also likely to be a problem.

One of the major advantages of a managed code language like C# or Java is that it is compiled for the VM which can be ported to any platform. Running native Windows applications would require an emulator, which would probably not be very fast but the software does exist. A .NET or Java application should run on ARM without modification as long as it does not use closed-source native libraries. Of course, the JIT compiler needs to be platform-specific, and I am not sure how much Mono focuses on their ARM port. LLVM and other portable intermediate bytecode projects may help there.

Re:Uh-huh.

[0100010001010011]

Their fucking website.
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/features.html

Shit people, look stuff up. I'm not going to cite every thing in my posts.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine can only run Windows programs compiled for the host platform (so open-source Windows programs could be recompiled and linked against the Wine library). On the other hand, Mono already supports ARM. Just like Java, .NET applications target a VM, so they are portable unless the explicitly link to native libraries.

I suspect that most of the FireFox extensions wouldn't require much more than recompilation.

Firefox extensions are mostly in XUL and Javascript, so they already run fine on platforms other than x86.

Re:Uh-huh.

[tftp]

Who then Falcon should believe - Apple marketing or his own lying eyes? Even Apple is cautious, they say "up to 7-8 hours", this means "definitely not longer than 7-8 hours". A battery that dies in 30 minutes will match this claim. There is not a word on Apple's Web site about guaranteed battery life.

Re:Uh-huh.

[0100010001010011]

And I'm willing to bet that he has the OLD MacBook Pro, ones that had 4 hour battery lives.

Especially when he says "battery is swapped with another". The 7-8 hour ones aren't hot swappable.

So once again. Learn to fucking read.

If you don't believe Apple, how about AnandTech? Are they an 'approved 3rd party'?

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3580

The wireless web browsing test uses the 802.11n connection to browse a series of 20 web pages varying in size, spending 20 seconds on each page (I timed how long it takes me to read a page on Digg and came up with 36 seconds; I standardized on 20 seconds for the test to make things a little more stressful). The test continues to loop all while playing MP3s in iTunes ...
Eight, freakin, hours. I couldn't believe it. In my lightest test, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted eight hours and eight minutes. That's with the screen at half brightness (completely usable) and no funny optimizations. The notebook is just playing music and surfing through a lot of my old reviews. There's no way this could be right. Maybe my test was too light?

I strung together 8 reviews on AnandTech and put them each on a single page, images and all. I then scoured the web for big, animated Flash ads and added anywhere from 1 - 4 ads per page; all Flash. Each page is designed to forward to the next after 10 seconds and the loop continues indefinitely. On each machine I opened three Safari windows and pointed them at the first page in the sequence. In the background, once more, I had iTunes playing MP3s. ...
Six and a half hours, out of a 5.5 lbs notebook. For comparison, the older MacBook Pro could only manage 3 hours and 17 minutes in the same test. The new notebook lasted almost twice as long. Mathematically, this doesn't make sense. There's only a 46% increase in battery capacity, there shouldnâ(TM)t be a ~100% increase in battery life...ever.

For this benchmark I'm downloading 10GB worth of files from the net (constant writes to the drive), browsing the web (same test as the first one) and watching the first two episodes of Firefly encoded in a 480p XviD format (Quicktime is set to loop the content until the system dies)...
The older MacBook Pro managed 3.25 hours in this test. The new one? Just under 5

Re:Uh-huh.

[doctormetal]

They are talking about smartbooks, not netbooks.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Phoghat]

When pigs fly out of my arse

Re:Uh-huh.

[sglines]

If they really wanted to stay afloat they'd provide at least minimal tech support. Right now their tech support is just about worthless: You have a broken install on a NEW machine. Call Microsoft or PAY us to help you fix it. That's NOT acceptable so after 20 years of Dell equipment (including managing a datacenter with hundreds of Dell servers) - I'm all HP from here on out ... until they screw up.

Re:Uh-huh.

[lsatenstein]

Duh, did you not mean Intel? ARM and Microsoft are at right angles to each other.

Re:Uh-huh.

[badkarmadayaccount]

Though this might be relevant somehow:
OpenGraphics

This just in...

[MrMage]

Lower power consumption leads to longer battery life.

In all seriousness though, I once had someone tell me as I was looking into programming in assembly that I should learn an ARM-Based syntax. It still hasn't paid off completely yet, but this is a step in the right direction.

Re:This just in...

[lyml]

Why on earth would you program RISC machine assembly. The instruction set is made to be compiled from a higher level language.

Your friend might have been a bit mislead.

Re:This just in...

[amorsen]

The tradeoff supposedly was that RISC would give you less powerful instructions which were easier for the CPU to decode, but then it was expected that it would be more difficult for compilers or humans to write the instructions. It didn't turn out that way. E.g. x86 comes from the time of constrained 8-bit processors, and back then there were no wasteful niceties in the instruction encoding. Most of the worst nastiness is gone as of x86_64, and assemblers hide some of the rest from you.

If you want to program CISC, at least go for M68k/ColdFire, but you won't find many user-programmable devices with ColdFire anymore. ARM is everywhere. My personal favourite is SPARC, and SPARC machines are relatively easy to come by.

Re:This just in...

[Rockoon]

Lower power consumption leads to longer battery life.

I'm not sure that you understand how things work.

Lower power consumption leads to smaller cheaper batteries with the same capacity, a fact which manufacturers will surely take advantage of to increase profits. As long as competition exists which uses less efficient CPU's, thats the way its going to be.

Re:This just in...

[lobiusmoop]

Agreed. I'm looking forward to getting something like the Gecko Edubook which can run on cheap AA batteries instead of an expensive custom Li-Ion battery.

Re:This just in...

[ZosX]

I think the custom lithium ion would be a lot cheaper and more convenient than 4 hours you get off of 8 AAs. Kind of reminds me of the game gear.

Re:This just in...

[pslam]

All instruction sets are like that. RISC or not makes no difference.

The key difference with ARM is it's almost beautiful to look at: it's (mostly) orthogonal, has a regular but very powerful syntax, and it's easy to see the data dependencies. I'd say hand-coding ARM assembly is easier than any other processor I've done it on (and that's lots).

I agree with his friend, and would go further to say anyone who's serious about programming should learn at least one assembly syntax to know what's going on under the hood, and ARM is the best to try.

Re:This just in...

[pslam]

Smaller batteries also means smaller devices, a fact that many manufacturers have been taking advantage of for a long time. For example, almost every mobile phone out there is ARM powered.

Re:This just in...

[Zontar The Mindless]

Have you priced Li batteries recently?

I think the cost/size/weight/availability differential plus a common battery charger would make AAs the hands-down winner.

Re:This just in...

[TheRaven64]

Describing ARM assembly as RISC is barely true. It's RISC in the sense that it's largely orthogonal (i.e. there is only one [sensible] way to do anything) but it's a very rich instruction set. For example, every ARM instruction can be predicated and execute conditionally on the value of a condition register. There is no dedicated shift instruction, just a barrel shifter which can be applied to the result of any instruction, meaning that constant multiplies which can be implemented by a single add-shift combination can be a single add instruction on ARM. Oh, and you definitely don't know your history. The ARM ISA was designed at Acorn as a chip to replace the 6502 in their computers. It was intended to be programmed in assembly language initially (the first OS was and so were many programs) with a BASIC interpreter as the high-level language option. Compilers came several years later.

Re:This just in...

[squiggleslash]

Four to six hours for a Netbook battery isn't particularly impressive any more. As far as the "common charger" comment goes, virtually all Netbooks and laptops include a built in battery charger. You don't generally take the battery out to charge it.

The only advantage I can see of this box is that if you're really lacking an AC power source you can always pop into a store and buy some AAs. That's a nice to have, and I think it'd be great if Netbook manufacturers would make, say, an empty battery you could insert your own cells into, but I'd rather my laptops ran off the custom, compact, batteries they use today as their primary energy storage mechanism than what we see here.

Re:This just in...

[iamhassi]

"I'm looking forward to getting something like the Gecko Edubook [laptopshop.co.uk] which can run on cheap AA batteries instead of an expensive custom Li-Ion battery."

that is amazing, but it looks like their wonderful intro video was filmed in a hotel room which doesn't exactly give me much faith in the company or the product. Looks like a cheap chinese laptop, wonder if they're just a reseller because I don't think they're developing laptops in hotel rooms.

Regardless I really like the AA battery idea. I can always have a fresh set charging and replacing all 8 NiMH batteries is less than $20 vs $100+ for a regular laptop with the same battery life, and I'm sure in a pinch it'll run on regular AA batteries. Would be great for students, law enforcement, the military... practically anyone on the go.

Wonder if it reads the battery life properly? AA's don't have all the sophisticated battery monitoring hardware that is built into laptop batteries.

Re:This just in...

[CAIMLAS]

There are several 'nice things' about being able to use common (lithium) AA cells that you can't get with a battery pack.

* You can swap out batteries indefinitely, provided you've got the cells. Yes, you can do this with battery packs, but...
* Battery packs are not universally available, whereas AA cells are. Pick them up anywhere. And you can substitute alkaline cells in a pinch.
* With an ARM, just power it down and replace the batteries, and you're back up and going in 5s. Might not even have to 'power down' at all if you've got a 'backup battery'.
* With AA cells, you are not bound by a "MAD" type situation, where if the battery pack dies/runs out (out of device warranty/support) you're SOL and stuck buying an expensive pack (look at the Asus Eee 701 battery options, if you doubt). Likewise, if the device dies, you don't end up with an otherwise-unusable battery pack: you've just got AA cells you can use elsewhere.

Re:This just in...

[mzs]

I don't know if I would call ARM asm beautiful to look at. Possibly it's nicer to look at than x86, but by the time of the 386 there were practically no more examples left of instructions that were not orthogonal. Sure the byte code for some of those might have been four times as long as the original 8086 version that used AX only, but you hardly ever look at that.

There are lots of annoying little things with ARM. In the area of the instruction set itself, there is the whole issue of what happens when you load a 32-bit word that is unaligned. That depends on the mode you are in, but it usually does some crazy rotation, but that is actually useful to make use of. This also leads to strange alignment relative to everything else out there if you want the same code to be able to fill a structure say. Then there is the whole loading of constants using LDR which is not a real instruction, the assembler does what ever craziness it can manage to get a constant. If your code is PIC that basically means loading from memory, if it is noPIC then it might do crazy pc relative stuff. Oh and what about thumb mode, very non-orthogonal.

Then ARM has the whole issues of all the differences. When they have TLBs and caches they tend to be alien (DACR ASID and PID) though the newest ARM cores are becoming more conventional. The same thing is there with regards to floating point. There have been lots of various ways that it was done.

Re:This just in...

[pslam]

These are extreme fringe complaints.

There are lots of annoying little things with ARM. In the area of the instruction set itself, there is the whole issue of what happens when you load a 32-bit word that is unaligned. That depends on the mode you are in, but it usually does some crazy rotation, but that is actually useful to make use of. This also leads to strange alignment relative to everything else out there if you want the same code to be able to fill a structure say. Then there is the whole loading of constants using LDR which is not a real instruction, the assembler does what ever craziness it can manage to get a constant. If your code is PIC that basically means loading from memory, if it is noPIC then it might do crazy pc relative stuff. Oh and what about thumb mode, very non-orthogonal.

It's not ARM being different to everything else, it's x86 being different to everything else. Unaligned loads are unsupported by most architectures and for good reason - they complicate the pipeline. This is something you normally wouldn't encounter when hand-coding assembly, or if you would at least be expected to know about if you were. It's not a hard problem to work around, either. How is thumb mode very non-orthogonal? Are you looking at a different processor?

The "crazy constant loading" is a nice feature. When you go "ldr r0, =0x12345678" what you're actually telling the assembler to do is "ldr r0, [pc, #some_offset]" and putting that constant within 4KB of the current location. It's a short-hand you would, again, be expected to know if you're coding ARM assembly. It's not like it's doing something totally unexpected. The only funky one is "adr r0, some_location" where 'adr' translates into one or more instructions to load a pc-relative address, usually "add r0, pc, #offset". Again, hardly a surprising result, and one of very few examples of additional short-hand syntax.

Then ARM has the whole issues of all the differences. When they have TLBs and caches they tend to be alien (DACR ASID and PID) though the newest ARM cores are becoming more conventional. The same thing is there with regards to floating point. There have been lots of various ways that it was done.

These are system programming issues. You should see what x86 gets up to these days. Only WinCE 5 uses most of the weirder features (which Microsoft wanted adding for their own fucked up idea on how to do an OS) and nobody else does. Userland programmers do not see these issues. Floating point? Yes, there's many variants. The reason? It's not standard-issue on most ARMs, and if you're hand-coding floating point, then fucking hell you're probably hand-coding for an exact variant, so no surprises what you find.

Re:This just in...

[mzs]

Man I wish I had seen that there had been a reply to my comment earlier. I do embedded/realtime at work. Most of it happens to be on PPC and 68K of various vintage. Then I do work on various ARM and x86 but fewer installations. So this was definitely not a case of x86 is different than everything else and esoteric things not used.

I almost always align things even on systems that do not trap, simply because it is mire efficient, portable, and the compiler does it automatically. What I was referring to with regards to ARM and the way compilers align for it is that the structures become aligned differently than PPC (and power), x86, 68K, SPARC, and MIPS (yes I have used all of those minimally 32-bit cpus for work at least once) in a way that is unexpected at first.

say you have this struct: { int8_t a; int16_t b; int16_t; }

How does it get layed-out on PPC and x86:

a0bbcc

How does it get laid-out in ARM:

a0bbcc00

That was the problem I was referring to.

The thing about ldr is that in my case only the kernel was at first non relocatable, I wanted to have a few tasks (porting 68K pSOS code) and just wanted them to be PIC and loaded where ever so I could have the same kind of scheme where I used to have where some installations would have different number and sorts of task running depending on configuration.

Then the DACR and friends stuff came up since again I wanted to have tasks like in pSOS but have some memory protection as well. It was such a mess I gave-up and I ended-up having one task sharing the kernel and I did my own round robin scheduling of code it different object files instead of separate tasks and a bit more in the ISRs than I would have liked to make it work.

Then when latter ARMs came out I was very glad that I had since all of the DACR stuff have changed. That largely does not happen on PPC or x86, at least not ever in an area that affected me.

MS will adapt. Eventually.

[Tubal-Cain]

MS might not be selling any ARM-compatible systems at the moment (embedded OSs aside), but I would bet they have experimental ARM builds of everything they've produced in the past 5 years.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[palumbor]

I think you have microsoft confused with apple.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[Anonymous Coward]

The very applications that keep a lot of people running Windows instead of e.g. Linux also keep Windows firmly locked to x86.
Take away the third-party closed source applications/games, and suddenly Windows is looking pretty crappy even to your average consumer.
Apple handled this with emulation, but they were moving to a faster chip.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, but, no one really wants to run a bleeding edge game on an arm netbook. It wouldn't work for anyone, even if it was compiled for arm. They do not have to worry about games on netbooks. Most applications need very little to be transitioned from windows desktop to a windows mobile environment on a non x86 cpu. Or at least that was the case six years ago.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[LoRdTAW]

Not every game needs to be bleeding edge to attract players. There are plenty of simple casual games that have a much larger market than the "core" gamer market that will run perfectly fine on a netbook (or what ever the hell they are calling them now). The idea is to focus on game play and mechanics rather than eye candy.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[rtfa-troll]

Probably they do have experimental builds, but there's very little point in MS actually making products from them. The reason why you want Windows is because Windows apps run on Windows. They also have to produce ARM builds of all of the software that people need. They can do that for their own stuff, but most Windows software is not produced by MS. It's important to remember that when you get Ubuntu, you get a whole load more software than on a plain Windows box and even most of the software not included comes with source code so it's relatively easy for someone to port it to the new architecture. Not to mention that Windows Mobile has done real damage to the Windows brand by looking so much worse than Symbian phones, let alone Android or the iPhone. They can't afford to keep repeating that.

The Intel Atom is produced specifically to make an i386 platform which competes with the ARM. MS would do much better to commit to that kind of platform. The power consumption is "good enough" and they don't risk splitting their market share.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[thetoadwarrior]

There is a lot more than games that tie people to windows, som eof which come from 3rd parties which may have no interest in porting the new version of Windows..

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[bhtooefr]

What MS could do is change the executable format for Windows 8, to allow for fat binaries, and then make their compilers always compile to x86/Itanium/ARM fat binaries.

(Speaking of that, that's why MS was pushing .NET so hard, because Itanium was supposed to be the future, and MS didn't want to get left behind by CPU architecture changes - hence trying to move everything to interpreted bytecode.)

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[MemoryDragon]

That is the main issue, you cannot really move away from x86 to the better alternatives because one thing Intel nowadays does right, they deliver speed. There was a time until the mid 90s when all Intel processors even speedwise were absolute crap, but that has changed, there arent too many processors faster than what x86 has to offer nowadays.

The only way I see that you can get away from x86 will be once a processor can hit the scene which can do x86 emulation as fast or faster than native x86 can.
Microsoft probably would love to unknot the tie they have with Intel to gain more independence but they cannot.
Intel pretty much is aware of that, and that is probably one of the reasons why they invest so much into linux as well, if things break apart they at least have another offering.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure this is completely relevant. There are three things that keep people on Windows:

1. Microsoft Office. Obviously, Microsoft can port this.
2. That one legacy program that you just can't do without. This is rarely CPU-bound, so running it in emulation (with gdi.dll and so on running native) is an option - it may go from using 5% of your CPU to using 50%, but who cares?
3. Modern games. The processor-intensive ones won't run on ARM or Atom, so not really an issue.

.NET applications, similarly, should run no more slowly on ARM than they do on x86. If there's an ARM port of Windows shipping and Microsoft's developer tools let you build an ARM version with a single click, then it's likely that third-party developers will start shipping ARM binaries too. This is especially true of open source projects like FireFox, where CPU dependencies have been eliminated by porting to other architectures on non-Windows operating systems. Porting between ARM and x86 isn't that hard anyway; they're both wrong-endian, so any code that doesn't use inline assembly should be fine (the compiler will work around different alignment requirements; using packed structures is slow on both).

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[TheRaven64]

I don't know if you were paying attention, but most users stopped caring about speed ten years ago. When computers hit 10MHz, they were fast enough for a few people. When they hit 100MHz, they were fast enough for a few more. At 1GHz, they were fast enough for a large segment of the market. A lot of the non-geeks I know stopped complaining that their computer was too slow around then. Unless you do large compile jobs, video editing, or playing recent games, an ARM chip is fast enough for what you do.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[TheRaven64]

Doesn't PE already support fat binaries? Each segment containing executable code contains the architecture that it is intended for, so it seems like it ought to.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[BrentH]

If Microsoft were to change the executable format, they'd certainly only allowing for .Net shizzle, as that's their cross-architecture (format). Basically it would mean simply disabling backwards compatbility with win32 executables. But this would be a huge catch22, because the sole reason Windows is what it is, is this backwards compatibility. It's what keeps people and businesses tied to Windows. If they'd remove that, they'd level te playingfield, all by themselves, which is absolutely the last thing they will ever do.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

There are plenty of simple casual games that have a much larger market than the "core" gamer market that will run perfectly fine on a netbook (or what ever the hell they are calling them now). The idea is to focus on game play and mechanics rather than eye candy

A lot of times people equate "I play this game" with "has a much larger market". The unfortunate truth seems to be that the highest numbers of the purchasing public are interested in the eye candy.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone I know complains their 3 GHz quad core computers are too slow. That's just how computers are though, see, it's technical but it's made by really smart people, so it must be good. Besides the newer models don't have all the porn popups, at least until the matrix hacks them then you gotta buy a new one.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[HiThere]

Lots of people are seduced by eye-candy. But those same people are often very price sensitive. And sometimes they NEED a computer that will run off batteries for a long time.

The thing I'm dubious about is that Wi-Fi access is common enough that there's a large market for something that requires web access to function reasonably. If it doesn't have, say, OpenOffice (or equivalent) installed, then I'm not sure who they're selling it to. I suppose there's no reason they couldn't have OpenOffice installed, but they never seem to advertise it, and I'm not sure how heavy an application that is in CPU usage.
AbiWord, perhaps? And some light spreadsheet...perhaps GnuMeric?

So it all seems doable, but it's not clear that this is the direction they're heading. (Still, if Ubuntu's installed, the only question is "Will this [light] app work reasonably with the given screen size?".)

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[corerunner]

Tell that to the millions of people addicted to the simple Flash games on Facebook. Or do you not count those because you don't play them?

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[bhtooefr]

PE doesn't. Now, I think you could have a .NET CLR (or just x86, and emulate on non-x86 platforms, this would just be a stub) stub that called the image for the correct architecture, within the PE format, but I believe it'd need the other images to be in separate files.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Absolutely true, but sorta irrelevant to the "what's keeping users on windows" topic. Have you ever heard anyone say they can't switch to linux because of a casual game? I haven't. When I have showed people linux, they've always been impressed with the greater variety of simple games most distros come with. In any case, the simpler the game, the easier it would be to clone/port into linux.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

"Addicted to" != "paying customer". How long would those addictions remaining if they had to pay for the games in question? In the context of market they don't add up to much at all -- unless your business plan involves giving away your games for free.

Re:MS will adapt. Eventually.

[corerunner]

It isn't the same purcahsing model as your typical FPS, but they still generate income. Whether it's through advertising or by allowing people to buy their way up in the game (with real money or by completing marketing offers), they all bring money in. There's also a much larger base of players for these types of games. I'm not saying they're the same by any means, but to discount them completely is just ignorant.

Well...

[timeOday]

At least now Microsoft can't object to Linux sales on the claim people are wiping them to install bootleg Windows - not on an ARM.

Re:Well...

[shutdown -p now]

Aw, c'mon, don't be so naive. Everyone knows that on ARM, they're wiping Linux to install bootleg WinCE! ~

Re:Well...

[rolfwind]

At least now Microsoft can't object to Linux sales on the claim people are wiping them to install bootleg Windows - not on an ARM.

Windows Mobile runs on ARM although I'm not sure how many apps are ported to it.

But it's not really worth debating that angle of the point if that is what MS puts forth. It would only validate the smug assertion by Microsoft that Windows is the only OS worth putting on the hard drive. Sort of like how the music industry convinced the Canadian government to put a tax on all CD-Rs (DVDs too?) in their arrogant presumption that people only burned ill-gotten music on them. (Now hopefully Microsoft doesn't go for a hard drive tax in the future in a similiar sense...)

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't wipe, but they can still install VirtualBox. Ha!

Re:Well...

[TheRaven64]

Damn straight. They're wiping Linux to install bootleg RiscOS.

Re:Well...

[electrosoccertux]

That's because running Windows Vista costs you both an ARM and a LEG to get a computer that can run it. Can't do it with just one.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a bootleg instead of the leg?

but will it run

[RLiegh]

...Windows?

Re:but will it run

[Mad Merlin]

No.

Re:but will it run

[CrossChris]

Windows?

Of course not - and who would want to except the brain-dead slack-jawed fools that still believe that "Windows came free with my computer". MS still haven't realised that Windows was superceded about 10 years ago. They can continue to make their interface ever shinier, but it's still the same old broken NT kernel underneath (and don't let the marketing hype about "completely new kernels" fool you!)

Game Over, Microsoft!

Re:but will it run

[Lennie]

Well, some embeddded version of Windows which has no applications available. But pretty much all Open Source applications that run on x86 Linux are available on ARM. Just take a look at the Debian repository. Even Ubuntu will have an ARM-port for their next release.

Re:but will it run

[Anonymous Coward]

oh boy -I bet you're a BIG hit at parties. Especially if they make the mistake of breakin out the old 360.

Re:but will it run

[value_added]

What? So no viruses?

If that's the case, then it would seem to that there's even less hope for the average Linux user to attract the notice of malware developers.

Re:but will it run

[Tenebrousedge]

Whenever I see someone criticizing someone else for being a nerd here, I just want to yell, ''THIS. IS. SLASHDOT!!'' and boot them off a cliff.

Half-crazed anti-microsoft rhetoric. It's how we (t)roll.

Re:but will it run

[Will.Woodhull]

...Windows?

Yes. Probably. Almost certainly.

Wine will port very nicely to Linux on ARM architecture. Wine already provides Platinum (i.e., runs straight out of the box) support for MS Office and most other business and productivity Windows software. Its support for games is good and continuing to improve.

I suspect that a lot of Linux based VMs will also port easily to ARM architecture.

Next year it may well become accepted that the best way to use Windows on portable devices is to do it under Linux. Or it might take a couple of years to get there.

Re:but will it run

[falconwolf]

...Windows?

I don't care if it runs Windows, I'm sick and tired of MS Bullshit.

Falcon

Re:but will it run

[sznupi]

It seems you should read up on what Wine and also virtual machines are and how they work...

Re:but will it run

[Will.Woodhull]

Um, yeah, you are right of course.

The Windows apps will need to use an i86 emulator as well as Wine. That won't be a big obstacle for FOSS packages, since recompiling for an i86 emulator isn't that difficult. Somebody will do it, others will find the bugs and develop the workarounds and all will be good in a few months.

But I've become so FOSS oriented that I tend to forget that proprietary Windows packages are not going to convert so easily. The pools of developers and testers are just too damn small and expensive for effective adaptation to a new environment. They won't be able to make the jump.

So probably ARM adopters will switch from MS Office and PhotoShop to native versions of OOo and The GIMP, and Wine and VM won't matter so much.

Not every dinosaur evolved into a bird. Most of them just bit the dust.

Google Chrome OS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is highly likely to be related to Google releasing the Chrome OS which is going to support ARM.

Re:Google Chrome OS

[Lennie]

Could be, could also be because Ubuntu's next release will have an ARM-release and they already ship Ubuntu.

ARM vs x86

[Pentium100]

ARM has an advantage such as lower power consumption, but it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs.

It will be the same situation like with PDAs ~10 years ago.

I want some program, it's available for PC, but not available for Psion.

With this ARM "smartbook", I'll still have to lug around a big laptop to be able to run those programs that the smartbook doesn't. I think that in this regard, I'd rather buy a Fujitsu U810 or equivalent.(17cm x15.5cm x 2.7cm but has Atom and is fully compatible with x86 programs; battery holds for >6 hours).

Re:ARM vs x86

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux. Arm-based netbook already out by Always Innovating:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm

Most people don't use netbooks for more than email/browsing. This is great for them.

Re:ARM vs x86

[operator_error]

but it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs

Not necessarily a problem at all. If the user chooses Ubuntu, then synaptec, ( or apt-get, aptitude, etc.) will install an application successfully with something that works, transparently.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Hymer]

"...but it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs."
You are missing the point, this is only an issue when using Windows and the point is to get rid of Windows.
There are already a huge amount of applications moved to other CPU architectures and many others need just to be recompiled.
Yes I do know that it may not be "just recompile" but the Linux community is much faster to adapt than Windows community.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Pentium100]

Is there a Mathcad (one program off the top of my head) equivalent for Linux and/or ARM?

Re:ARM vs x86

[Artraze]

While it is true that the ARM will not run programs compiled for the x86, that isn't a huge deal because such a smart book would only _ever_ run linux. How many binary only apps are even available, let alone important, on linux? (BTW, something like 90+% of applications shouldn't need any source level modification to run on an ARM arch.)

> With this ARM "smartbook", I'll still have to lug around a big laptop to be able to run those programs that the smartbook doesn't.

As a matter of curiosity, what would these programs be? Windows apps under Wine?

Re:ARM vs x86

[Anonymous Coward]

And who the fuck wants to run mathcad on a netbook? Seriously, dude. Mathcad? You're touched in the head. Mathcad = work. Netbook = internet.

Re:ARM vs x86

[moosesocks]

Wrong target market. These devices will likely be sold as "big iPhones"

There's a market for such a machine, as long as it's got a web browser, word processor, and a reasonable assortment of other apps available. I'd love to have a spare PC lying around...particularly one that's cheap enough to be slightly reckless with, and has extremely long battery life.

I'm not entirely convinced that the target market's huge, given that we already have our expensive/precious laptops and iPhones. However, the popularity of netbooks (particularly the relative popularity of Linux netbooks among non-geeks) has proven that there *is* a target market for these devices.

To make the market for these devices *really* take off, you'd need a damn good marketing campaign, and a decent (and standardized) desktop shell to go along with it. There are a number of halfway-decent linux netbook shells available already, although there's no real sense of standardization. If the major players could either team up, or if one distribution could capture the market by sheer awesomeness alone, these devices would become a whole lot more popular. (Think of how much more *useful* the iPhone became once Apple opened the platform to applications)

Re:ARM vs x86

[Hymer]

I don't know, I don't use Mathcad (you could as well have said iTunes or Photoshop) and I have no need for it, it was not the point.
Your options are:

• ask Microsoft to port to ARM (and hope Mathcad will be ported too)
• ask Mathsoft to port MathCAD to Linux (and hope they will port to i386 and ARM)
• try to see if there is a Linux application more or less equivalent to the Windows application you need (I've been thru this point many times)

...or you may buy an i386 compatible platform (Atom or Via) and run Windows or Linux + wine.

Re:ARM vs x86

[rtfa-troll]

You may find this link helpful

Re:ARM vs x86

[xororand]

ARM has an advantage such as lower power consumption, but it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs.

Why is this a problem? Just find a free software distribution that offers packages for ARM, like Debian. Problem solved... but... if you really depend on propietary x86 programs.... Doesn't that worry you at all?

Re:ARM vs x86

[ScytheBlade1]

Yes, and yes. It is the same system used to automatically download... an i386 binary as compared to an x86_64 binary. If your question was really "does Ubuntu even build for ARM" I have no idea, as I don't use Ubuntu anywhere.

Flash and Adobe Reader are both pretty terrible programs; infinitely more so when you move off of the holy consumer shrine known as Windows/x86. There is the gnash project (flash player), which can currently play youtube videos. There are also about a billion different PDF readers for linux.

No you won't get the same level of app support of Windows/x86. You get less support if you run Windows/x86_64. You get even less support when you run linux/x86, less when you run linux/x86_64, and then you take multiple steps back for linux/arm.

... for most closed source software. Most packages found in $DISTRO's repository will build fine under any arch - for example, Fedora builds the same RPM for i686, amd64, and PPC. There would be bugs to work out, sure, but it is possible. Quit your binary blob/app support fetish and your linux will work a bit better.

If you're tied to your binary blobs or windows solutions (for ANY reason), you can either just keep using windows or improve the situation yourself, your call.

Re:ARM vs x86

[mcrbids]

Not necessarily a problem at all. If the user chooses Ubuntu, then synaptec, ( or apt-get, aptitude, etc.) will install an application successfully with something that works, transparently.

Like Adobe's Flash?

I didn't think so.

Re:ARM vs x86

[kamatsu]

Debian has a complete ARM distribution including all of those things you describe. It wouldn't be hard for Ubuntu to shift their distribution efforts to ARM. In fact, it's just changing a few lines in a shell script.

Re:ARM vs x86

[kamatsu]

Exactly. Debian already distributes an ARM version of their entire distribution.

Re:ARM vs x86

[pantherace]

They shouldn't, but a lot of programmers have gotten used to tricks which work on x86.

Trust me, I've used (at various times) linux/alpha,sparc(64),arm,x86,x86-64,powerpc windows/alpha,x86,x86-64 solaris/x86,x86-64,sparc openvms/alpha.

The most consistent of those are the various Linux distributions, most mainline software has been whacked enough that it works. Though even there, sometimes people use those tricks, or they make assumptions about sizes, Netscape was a problem on alphas, on both Windows and Linux, because it assumed 32-bits on integers and a few other things, when they originally ported it... segfaults. Openoffice still may not compile on alphas, or other 64-bit systems (sparc64s as I recall used to run star/openoffice in 32-bit)

Currently, binaries I can think of are flash, nvidia, ati (Accelerated OpenGL was a pain in the past on many Linux systems), and that's mostly it that I've used for years, aside from some commercial games.

Re:ARM vs x86

[xororand]

Are you saying that Ubuntu has a way to automatically download an ARM version of FireFox and OpenOffice?

I don't know about Ubuntu but Debian most certainly has Firefox and OpenOffice packages for ARM that are ready to use.

Even then, what about Flash and Adobe Reader? How am I going to play my favorite YouTube videos and Facebook games?

Do you really want to use a proprietary browser plugin with a horrible security history like Adobe Flash, with _known_ vulnerabilities that have been unpatched for over 8 months?
With new open technologies like HTML5, Flash is becoming more and more obsolete anyway.
YouTube videos can be easily downloaded and played with mplayer. Gnash, a reverse-engineered libre replacement for Adobe Flash, gets better continuously. Many Flash applications already work with Gnash, like YouTube or the flash photo galleries generated by some Adobe applications.

The libre software situtation is much better when it comes to PDF, as PDF is, unlike Flash, an open standard. There are plenty of libre alternatives to Adobe Reader, most of them less bloated and way faster than the original. The FSF has launched a portal site for those.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Lennie]

Ubuntu will have an ARM-architecture for their new release: Karmic Koala

Their has been Flash on ARM for years, I'm sure Ubuntu talked to Adobe about having a good version for Ubuntu on ARM.

Actually, Flash is usually one of the very few, possible even the only one, non-Open Source-program you'd want to install on such a device.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Lennie]

Ubuntu will have an ARM-architecture for their new release: Karmic Koala, scheduled for release in October 2009

Re:ARM vs x86

[Lennie]

Why not ? Their has been a version of Flash for Linux on ARM for years already (see Nokia N810 for example).

Luckily it's provbably the only non-opensource-program you'd want to install on such a device anyway.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Lennie]

Drivers should be much less of an issue, because Linux is the gonna be the primary platform for these kinds of devices. The only binary-only you'd want to install is probably Flash which has had an ARM-build for years.

Re:ARM vs x86

[ZosX]

I don't know if ubuntu has an arm port, but debian does. Thought I'd clarify something though. With x86-64 you can run 32-bit apps seamlessly. You really don't give anything up. I've been running windows 7 64-bit and I have yet to come across a 32-bit application that will not run. Device drivers were the real issues with 64-bit XP, and now 64 bit drivers are pretty standard. There aren't many disadvantages to running a 64-bit OS. Just a small performance penalty. Like 5% or something. We really should thank AMD for coming out with the opterons back in the day. I shudder to think what would it be like if the Itanic didn't slide into the sea.

Re:ARM vs x86

[howlingmadhowie]

the only problem i can think of is wine itself. if i remember correctly, wine has lots of assembly code for x86 in it. it is really one of the very few free software projects to have this.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Lennie]

That's why it was possible for Ubuntu to say, our next release will have an ARM-port as well, which they are doing now.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Tubal-Cain]

At the bottom of Mathcad's Wikipedia page you'll find 9 open source options.

Re:ARM vs x86

[lyml]

Even if wine ran on arm it would be useless as the windows binaries you want to run are compiled for x86. In order to get the desired results you would have to run an x86 emulator.

Re:ARM vs x86

[thetoadwarrior]

Adobe and ARM Accelerate Flash and AIR for ARM Platforms

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200811/111708ARMAdobeFlash.html

Re:ARM vs x86

[Haeleth]

You are missing the point, this is only an issue when using Windows and the point is to get rid of Windows.

It's not quite that simple.

There are, for example, plenty of cases where people have been able to switch to Linux because they can still run $FAVOURITE_PROGRAM with Wine. And Wine is still tied to x86. I suspect emulating an x86 processor will be a bit beyond most ARM smartbooks.

There are also a lot of people who, like it or not, do use closed-source software on Linux. I have several closed-source programs installed on the very Linux netbook I'm typing this on. Will the vendors of those programs be happy to port them to ARM? They've already taken a risk just supporting the tiny x86 Linux market; the ARM Linux market is even smaller.

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of ARM smartbooks, and if Dell brings one out with Ubuntu on it, I will buy it without a moment's hesitation. I'm just pointing out that x86 is only irrelevant if you only ever use purely F/OSS software, and that isn't universal even among Linux fans.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Lennie]

Their is a pretty big chance that will happen, Ubuntu will have an ARM-port with their next release (Karmic Koala).

Re:ARM vs x86

[pslam]

And Debian has been distributing an ARM version for over a decade, now. It worries me how that fact is missing from reporting.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Bert64]

DEC ported Netscape to Alpha, and it was far more stable than other versions thanks to their work...
OpenOffice is available in a 64bit version for x86-64, and would probably compile on Alpha too. I have used Linux on most of the architectures it supports, and used to use an Alphastation as my primary workstation.

Sparc is a different story, unlike x86-64, sparc was designed from the beginning to have 64bit support in the future, such that even in 32bit mode you have access to the full array of registers and can still perform 64bit computations natively. Typically a sparc system will run a 64bit kernel so it can address all of its memory, and then run a 32bit userland for 99% of the applications, because 32bit uses less memory and usually performs better. 64bit is only used when absolutely necessary.

Video drivers won't be an issue on ARM based laptops, because whoever designs the machine will be primarily targeting linux and therefore ensure that whatever video hardware it has, supports linux. Like Apple building macs...
Flash is also already available for linux/arm (such as the nokia n800 tablets).
Commercial games aren't a big target for netbooks, so it's unlikely to be of much concern either.

Re:ARM vs x86

[bhtooefr]

I don't want to use the proprietary plugin, but I want to access content that requires that plugin.

And, no, scripts to grab the content manually are not an answer, I want to watch just any Flash video, including streaming ones that have a crapload of keepalives to make it very difficult to use a standalone client, you must use their Flash client. (*cough*UStream*cough*)

Re:ARM vs x86

[bhtooefr]

Well, on the ARM, you could run Linux + QEMU + WINE, or Linux + QEMU + Windows... but that'd be horribly slow.

Re:ARM vs x86

[maxwell demon]

Then add that functionality to the browser. There's absolutely no reason why the browser shouldn't be able to interpret PDF and SWF, just as it interprets HTML.

Re:ARM vs x86

[TheRaven64]

Adobe produces a Flash plugin for ARM Linux, but they do not distribute it to end users. I'm not sure exactly how they do distribute it, but I think they license it (including source code) to SoC manufacturers, who then tailor it towards their CPU and ship it to OEMs.

Re:ARM vs x86

[jimicus]

http://xkcd.com/619/

I think I need say no more.

Re:ARM vs x86

[jonaskoelker]

Luckily it's provbably the only non-opensource-program you'd want to install on such a device anyway.

Where's the proofb?

Re:ARM vs x86

[TheRaven64]

Both ARM and x86 are:

• Little endian (actually ARM is bi-endian, but is usually run in little-endian mode).
• ILP32.

x86 permits (but discourages because they are slow) unaligned loads and stores. ARM does not, but a compiler can work around this with a (slow) sequence of add shift and mask instructions (the shifts are free on ARM) so this isn't really a problem. Porting from x86 to ARM is largely just a matter of making sure you don't use any inline asm or CPU-specific intrinsics.

Of the three examples you list as binary-only, two are drivers so are irrelevant (they will either be ported or OEMs will use different hardware). One is Flash, and Adobe ships an ARM Linux plugin to OEMs already.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Anonymous Coward]

"(Think of how much more *useful* the iPhone became once Apple opened the platform to applications)"

I have been looking at Android Apps recently. To see how they stack up against iPhone Apps. There are a couple of nice apps. However, mostly, they are poor in comparison to their iPhone counterparts.

Android is open. Is it more useful? Nope.

I have been looking at the Android tools as well to see how they compare to Xcode. There are some advantages. But still a long way from Xcode. Again, it is open and not more useful.

Opening a platform means exactly that. It is open. And that's it. Openess does not in any way relate to usefulness.

Re:ARM vs x86

[JAlexoi]

And we will finally have fast Java GUI applications! (ARM Cortex-A8 has hardware acceleration for Java)

Re:ARM vs x86

[rbanffy]

There is no such thing as a Windows community as a counterpart to the Linux community. Windows is made by one and only one company. The other companies that write software that runs on top of Windows do so only because Windows is common and, from time to time, Microsoft decides to kill a couple as examples. Microsoft has been trying to kill Oracle for decades.

The Linux community is much more cooperative. Even closed-source software providers like, say, Oracle, do cooperate with the rest of a community that's formed by the groups around products.

Re:ARM vs x86

[rbanffy]

Netbook may be for "internet only" for the Windows crowd. My Linux sees a low-power long-battery-life dual-core computer that's fast enough to develop on.

When on my desk, hooked up on a dual-headed rig and with decent keyboard and mouse, it's a worthy computer.

So, if you need a quad-i7 to run your IDE, it's probably because you are running Visual Studio under Windows Vista. Nobody would want that crap on a netbook.

Re:ARM vs x86

[rbanffy]

A couple, I guess.

Mathematica runs on Linux. Should be trivial to port, but performance could suffer.

From the top of my head, and I know they are not MathCAD-clones, Sage and R come to mind, depending on what you are doing.

Re:ARM vs x86

[rbanffy]

"it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs"

This is Slashdot. Being Windows-proof is a feature, not a bug.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Pentium100]

Problem solved... but... if you really depend on propietary x86 programs.... Doesn't that worry you at all?

Why should it? I have the programs I need and have a few backups of them. If the company that makes them goes under I'll still have my install disks (and cracks if the program in question uses DRM that would not work if the company was bankrupt).

The fact that the program is open source does not really matter to me, because I cannot modify it. In that case the same can be said about the motherboard of a PC - just grab a soldering iron and modify whatever you want, you'll only void the warranty. But it's too complex (at least for me) to do that. I can fix a simpler device (or even replace bad caps on a motherboard) but not the complex ones. The same can be said about programs (at least in my case).
The fact that the program is open source does not mean that it will always be supported, updated etc. Just like when a company goes bankrupt and stops supporting whatever programs they made, an open source program can become abandoned with no one to maintain it.

Re:ARM vs x86

[Pentium100]

I would want to do that. In that case, I would not have to bring my normal sized laptop to do calculations that are

1) Complex enough so I can't use calc.exe or Wolfram alpha.
and
2) Simple enough so that I can enter them using a computer with a small screen.

Re:ARM vs x86

[level_headed_midwest]

Nokia got Flash 9 working on their ARM-powered, Linux-running N8x0 handhelds just fine, so it is certainly doable.

Re:ARM vs x86

[bhtooefr]

Except that it's not just "implement the spec," partially because, IIRC, "the spec" that's been released to the public is that of Flash 7, which nobody uses any more, and Flash 9 is considered the minimum.

Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does x86 inherently consume more power at the same performance level?

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[0123456]

Or does x86 inherently consume more power at the same performance level?

Difficult: ARM has traditionally had a very clean instruction set which eliminates a lot of the junk that an x86 requires in order to function, and it's much easier to take a chip designed for low power and increase the performance than to take a 100+W monster like an x86 and scale it down for low-power use. The modern 'x86', at least from Intel, is basically an x86 emulator wrapped around a RISC core.... the ARM effectively eliminates the emulator and just runs the RISC core.

If I remember correctly, the dual-core ARM chips I was working on a couple of years ago used about 1W of power to play 720p HD... an Atom has trouble doing that even with several times that power usage.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM systems usually use co-processors for things like decoding video. A heavy use of co-processors lets the already low-power CPU be idle even more often.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[faragon]

It is not the "x86 emulator", as it takes a tiny percent of the die, and 90-95% of instructions are decoded to one underlying RISC equivalent. Most power consumption is because of OoOE, huge pipelines, and huge caches. In my opinion OoOE processors are an aberration inteded to maximize serial code, by wasting 4 to 8x resources, as it is like having many processors executing future code paths "just in case" (misusage of instruction cache just to feed the OoOE jump prediction execution paths) while making a misuse of the system bus by loading data for instructions that will be discarded 1 of every 10 times (data cache misusage by fetching data for instructions that will be discarded in a major part). So in "advanced OoOE CPU" you're saturating the bus for computing worthless instructions. As example, in the area of a P4 CPU, you may had 8 to 16 MIPS or ARM in-order CPU cores, making much better usage of the shared cache, and with 4 to 8x more executed instructions/transistor, with efficient system bus usage.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...I thought that was the whole point of the Nvidia Ion? The GPU does the heavy lifting on video, and the CPU does the basic tasks. While I have no doubt that these little ARMs will find a niche, the question is how big of a niche. Folks have their iPhones for just basic web browsing kind of stuff, and the problem I've found whenever you're are talking about Netbooks is that geeks well...they think like geeks.

You know what my customers call Netbooks, which is important as that is how Joe and Jane average see them? They call them 'baby laptops" which is important. You see they think these baby laptops should run everything their big laptops do, only much slower of course, because they are babies. You say ARM and they are gonna have no fricking clue as to what you are talking about. They will go "oooh cute!" and pick one up and then get pissy when their printer won't print. After all, it is USB and there is a USB port right there!

So while I am sure that some geeks that know what ARM and x86 and Windows and Linux are might buy some of these, how many of those are out there? And can they buy enough to make this a niche worth pursuing? Who knows, I guess we will know when these things come out. Of course they have to watch the timing because Win7 is gonna be released soon, and the MSFT advertising is gonna be everywhere. And as anybody who has run Win7 can tell you, it is actually quite nice. So they either need these things out yesterday, or to wait until the Win7 hype dies down. That is unless they plan to keep this as strictly a geek toy you have to hunt for on their website. Because Joe and Jane won't have a clue what ARM is, they'll just see the Win7 commercials and want to know why they can't run that "new thing" on their baby laptop. And believe me, working retail? Customers don't like hearing the word no for ANY reason.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[Bert64]

The ARM design is also licensed out and companies embed the ARM cores with all kinds of other hardware, so what you were using to play 720p HD may well have been an ARM core with a hardware video decoder integrated.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[yupa]

You will be glad to learn that last arm cpu (cortex A9) do OoOE. Also newer arm got mixed 16/32 bits instruction with thumb2. And yes newer arm CPU eat lot's of more power that older generation (armv5), but there are more powerfull.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[faragon]

Yes, they do OoOE, but not with the insane amount of register renaming of the OoOE-x86/OoOE-PowerPC ones, nor with the same alternate execution depth. The ARM Cortex OoOE is a very power-wised balanced OoOE, however, and is just my opinion, completely unnecesary (you could put 3 in-order-execution cores instead of the 2 out-of-order-execution ones).

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[Hurricane78]

Only that their printer *will* actually print. With CUPS I found it to be less hassle to make a printer work on Linux than on Windows.

Tell me one thing that they would want to do, that is not limited because of performance.
Hardware on Linux: Works.
Browsing, music, movies, e-mail, chatting, instant messaging, etc: All works nicely, and out of the box.

If you think otherwise, that you haven't used any recent Ubuntu or similar distribution.

Additionally, the distribution will of course be adapted to the laptop, by Dell.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe someone should build an
architecture around this.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[hairyfeet]

Four words buddy: Lexmark all in one. The most popular printer here by a country mile. Hell I can walk down the hall of my apartment building and find a good half dozen or more of those suckers, and I had nothing whatsoever to do with their purchasing decisions. Then there is those USB Wifi and TV tuners (which good luck getting THOSE things to work in x86 Linux with all the chip changes they do with those things, much less ARM), those USB based cards you get from the phone companies now to let you hook up through their network, hell I could go on forever. And I have tried selling Ubuntu, the last one 9.04 I think? (I suck at version numbers) and found that around 20% of items sold in my local supercenter have support. The rest were paperweights. Not good from a sales standpoint.

You see, the problem is those things can be worked around if one researches and makes an informed decision. problem is, and from building, selling, and servicing PCs since the days of Win3.xx I can tell you this is the case with a good 85%+ of the computer buying public, they can't tell you jack shit about WHAT they got, much less anything like what Arch it runs on. Hell I still get "Windows something" when I ask a customer what kind of computer they have. Not the year, not Intel or AMD (because frankly they don't even have a clue there either) but just "Windows something". So the question is how bad is the return rates on these things gonna be, and will it be worth it to keep around.

Now I can see these things carving out a niche, especially in education where you don't want them actually running anything you don't want them to, hell these will probably be great there. Unless of course all the textbook manufacturers refuse to release in anything but some proprietary DRM laden format, which of course will be X86 Windows only. But your average Joe and Jane? Honestly can't tell the difference between Intel and AMD, much less have a clue that ARM is a niche arch that will only run a subset of Linux software compiled for it. Geeks just don't understand how totally clueless the average consumer is. When I ask a customer what kind of PC they want do you know what I get? "Big and fast, with a nice flatscreen!" that's it. So good luck trying to explain the ARM VS X86 to them. Me? If these things get cheap enough I might pick up a few and try to sell them to the local college kids. For a simple portable notepad with Internet it would work great. But I wouldn't try to sell them to Joe Public on a bet. Too many returns when their stuff don't work.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, who even cares if some idiot can't make his printer work? Chances are, you give these people a windows machine with the driver already installed, plug it all in yourself, and they *still* won't be able to get their printer to work, because they are morons.

People like that are the reason we can't have nice things.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[sznupi]

You seem to forget what those things are...

OK, there might be some some printer that doesn't work but...USB WiFi dongles? TV-tuners? You're talking here about 7 inch ultraportable ffs, that fits in a pocket (check form factor on Qualcomm site promoting the term "Smartbook"). They will have WiFi built-in. Heck, most will have 3G. The only USB TV tuner worth considering when they come out is DVB-H (or some other mobile TV standard, depending on the area). Though if you really want "big" TV, tuners for DVB-T seem quite standard...

People don't have a problem with realizing the purpose of such devices. More or less appliances. They understand X360. Or Dell Linux laptops, which have identical return rates with Windows ones (news straight from Dell; everything else you've heard is MS FUD)

Though at the end you go in the right direction - yes, those ARM smartbooks will carve a niche. They will do the same for netbooks what netbooks done to laptops.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[hairyfeet]

Uhh....did you actually read that article closely? Dell said "after figuring the returns on those that wanted Windows" and screwed up that the returns were similar. And the Dell situation is a whole different can of worms than retail. You don't just go to dell.com and trip over Linux ANYTHING- you have to go looking for it. And it is designed that way for a REASON, because average Joe doesn't know "Windows VS Linux" from a toaster oven.

And as for "what folks will actually use this for" I take it you haven't actually worked retail. Just because it would seem stupid or make no sense to YOU doesn't mean the customer won't want to do it. Hell I had a doctor that was still using a Win95 laptop LAST YEAR as his main machine!

Now imagine those kinds of folks running into these things at the Walmart. Now they are gonna see USB port on this thing, and they have been trained that "USB is good. USB always works" because since Win2K (and Win98 if you install the USB generic driver) that all you have to do is plug in anything USB and it works. Kinda like magic. if worse comes to worse you put in the CD (which I have had a few Netbook customers grace my door because they couldn't figure out how to put something on without a CD. never crossed their minds to use a USB stick) and "clicky clicky, next next next" and everything just magically works. Do you honestly think it will EVER cross their minds that this is an ARM CPU and it doesn't work the same as what they are used to? Nope.

It has a screen, and a keyboard, and most importantly LOOKS like a "baby laptop" so it should behave like one. That is why the Atom has been a hit, as it plays into that mindset. Everything works like a big laptop, only much slower which they understand is because it is a "baby" and babies are little. I have a feeling unless they are VERY specific in which niche markets they try to sell these things that the returns will kill them. It is like I have argued in the whole "Linux VS Windows" thing, that the problem is this: Geeks think like geeks and NOT like home users. Geeks know they will have to research hardware, geeks know that Linux is not Windows, geeks aren't afraid of CLI. None of that actually applies to home users. They think if it looks like a laptop, smells like a laptop, and feels like a laptop, well then it is a laptop and should act like one. Which to them means just like Windows they can pick anything up at the Wally World ( because many won't even shop online) and plug it in and it goes. Sorry, I don't make the customers, I just sell to them.

Re:Can you scale an x86 processor down?

[fm6]

If all you want is to shoot out text or postscript, then yeah, CUPS will work. There's more to printing than that.

Where I work, there are a lot of very fancy Xerox printers. You can access them through Solaris LPR (not CUPS, but the same kind of old-fashioned spooling) or you can access them directly via the Windows-only Xerox driver. With LPR, you get a printout. If you really know what you're doing, you can make the printout double-sided.

With the Xerox print driver, you can print out multiple copies, collated and stapled. You can send and receive faxes, and scan in documents. There are other features (like n-up printing) that you could do on LPR, but only if you're really good with Postscript filters; on Windows, you just have to find the right GUI screen.

Mind you, I'm not happy that Xerox doesn't provide a Linux version of this driver. But the fact remains that it's the only way to use this fancy, expensive piece of hardware to its full potential.

Ripe for adoption

[raybob]

I predict that these things are going to take off. Once people realize that they don't need a heavy OS like Windows in order to enjoy a portable platform that provides email & web browsing, any prejudice against will evaporate. Besides, most people won't even notice that Windows is missing.

One reason PDA's never took off is the man-machine interface. The keyboard is pretty much a must-have for an email & messaging platform. These things are going to be everywhere, especially with carriers eager to sell data plans subsidizing them.

Re:Ripe for adoption

[bemymonkey]

I don't think so. The whole point of a little netbook ("Oooooh, look at the cute little laptop!") is making your regular (lightweight) notebook apps portable. For the majority of consumers, that means they want to run exactly the same e-mail program, the same browser, the same IM program(s)... Realizing that they need to learn to use a completely different interface is going to be quite a shock. It was supposedly pretty much the same with the Ubuntu laptops certain manufacturers have been selling...

I don't really see the appeal in an ARM netbook. In fact, I wish my phone was x86 - the current standard Windows Mobile smartphone res of 800x480 is just fine for a stripped down XP or even Win7... hell, if they could just get the damned things up to 24 hours (or even 15 or so!) without a recharge, I'd be more than happy. If all you're interested in is ARM and long battery life, get a smartphone and a foldable bluetooth keyboard. Otherwise, get an x86-based netbook and be satisfied with the currently available 10 hours of battery life...

Re:Ripe for adoption

[Lennie]

I guess this is why this has such appeal to Linux-users. These devices do just that, run a Linux-distribution on a smaller device, the same way like they run on the bigger desktop-machines.

Re:Ripe for adoption

[Anonymous Coward]

they seem to handle adapting to cellphone/pdas without much trouble.. this isn't that different.

Re:Ripe for adoption

[Haeleth]

The whole point of a little netbook ("Oooooh, look at the cute little laptop!") is making your regular (lightweight) notebook apps portable. For the majority of consumers, that means they want to run exactly the same e-mail program, the same browser, the same IM program(s)...

For a significant number of people, that boils down to Firefox plus one of the numerous popular webmail providers and web-based chat clients. Sounds like a market to me ...

Re:Ripe for adoption

[bemymonkey]

Good point, but why stop there? Why not run Debian on an OpenMoko phone? You can even hook up a USB keyboard to the damned thing (the foldable ones fit in a jacket pocket easily), so why carry around the bulk of a netbook?

Re:Ripe for adoption

[bemymonkey]

But a cellphone is something you carry anyway, isn't it? ;)

A netbook is a whole new device - ideal for, say, people who use a desktop as their main computer and just need a light-weight little machine for the stuff they need to do on the move. If you've already got a laptop and/or a smartphone, well... a netbook probably won't get much use.

A Big Up Yours

[Nom du Keyboard]

Basically a big Up Yours to Intel and Microsoft.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[ipX]

Also a push into a potentially massive market -- almost-disposable commodity components running Linux. If they can pull it off without summoning teh wrath of steveb they will look like an innovator and at least strengthen their brand. But they might cut themselves out of the margin, I can't imagine these would sell for much (not likely to be the next iPod in terms of revenue).

Re:A Big Up Yours

[shutdown -p now]

If ARM-based netbooks become popular, you will see an ARM port of Win7 in a few months, with a thorough porting guide for applications, tools to check for potential problems, etc (most cross-architecture quirks were already ironed out when x64 and especially Itanium support were introduced).

People kinda miss the fact that most applications are just a recompile away from a different architecture, so long as OS is the same - and not just FOSS code. Yes, you cannot do the recompilation/porting yourself, so there is some disadvantage, but you can be sure that, if there's market, all products that are still being actively developed will be ported.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[ocularsinister]

Speaking as someone who is employed to maintain a nasty mess of a Windows application, I can guarantee you that a simple re-compile will not work in my case. Heck, the compiler is spitting out *lots* of warnings about code that will break under a x86_64 compile - I haven't tried a 64 bit compile, but I very much doubt it will work. Arm? Forget about it! And there is the problem - a lot of these vital Windows apps are badly maintained spaghetti code that, frankly, would not survive in the competitive world of FOSS - any sane developer would scratch the whole thing and start again. That's not a viable option for a business that is only interested in paying developers to do stuff that directly brings in cash.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[gsnedders]

The quirks were worked out long before that: Windows NT until 4.0 supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. 2000 (i.e., NT 5.0) supported Alpha until as late as after RC1.

Yet only one of these four architectures ever had decent support for Office: x86. (There was a single release of Office for the others including Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0, both 32-bit, and PowerPoint 4.0, as 16-bit.) Why? Office, especially PowerPoint and Access, both apparently contain a lot of x86 Assembly.

The other architectures died because nobody used them because the most useful program that ran on them was Calculator. Nobody ever bothered porting to it before. If they try again, will it be different? It will depend on how many people buy ARM-based netbooks, and how much software MS can get to run on them (and they will, de-facto, need emulation to get any decent marketshare, as people expect their old programs to run).

Re:A Big Up Yours

[TheRaven64]

Win64 is a bit weird, it's an IL32P64 architecture, which breaks a lot of C code aimed at x86 and full of assumptions like sizeof(long) >= sizeof(void*) (which is true on almost every other platform). ARM is a lot closer to IA32 than x86-64 is if you're coming from a C-like language. If you're not using inline assembly, it's probably easier to port from x86 to ARM than to x86-64. Int, long, and void* are all the same size, the alignment requirements are almost the same (a few things don't work on ARM, but they're things that are painfully slow on x86 anyway), and they're both little-endian.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[(H)elix1]

On the Office front, I've got a G4 (Mac) laptop with Microsoft Office. Power Point still runs on a PowerPC CPU.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[Anonymous Coward]

Porting is not always as simple as recompiling the OS. For Linux or BSD that were thought since years to run on many architectures, that is not a problem but I am not sure for Windows. Microsoft is so use to dictate the market than I don't think they had anything else on the radar than x86 architecture. For sure, if they loose market share because of ARM, they will find a way to port Windows 7.
Another problem for Microsoft and software industry is that you can't use you old windows XP and you old windows XP software on that kind of architecture. Microsoft legacy is of no use and you will have to buy brand new software specifically for that machine that won't work on your PC. Linux has a head start on that too since you upload and upgrade your software from a central repository transparently.

Finally ARM may be a more disrupting technology than Netbook since Microsoft reply may not be as simple a lowering the price of XP on that kind of machine. They may have to invest a lot of time and resources to this ARM port just to be able to sell a 3$ licence on that kind of machine. This is not with that kind of thing that they are going to generate benefits.

Welcome to the real world Microsoft where they is concurrence...

Re:A Big Up Yours

[JAlexoi]

I don't want to blast Microsoft here, but this is slashdot so...
Have you not seen the facts? Microsoft has to reinvent itself to work that fast, a few months is an impossible schedule to port Win7 to ARM. I may be mistaken, if WinCE shares enough code-base with Win7, witch I doubt, it will take at least one year. And imagine the outcry, if Microsoft does not test out Win7 well enough?

Re:A Big Up Yours

[gsnedders]

OK, it runs on PowerPC, but not on Windows on PowerPC I did actually think of that, intend to reword my comment to avoid that problem, and promptly forgot to do so. I imagine MS would prefer to ship an identical version of Office on all versions of Windows, as surprisingly enough Win32 APIs are the same on all, and likely it would be less effort than trying to port the Mac version to Windows.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[jabjoe]

Even if it is easy to recompile Windows application on a different process architecture, the option isn't there because all the applications are closed source. Each vendor of each application will decide which applications are worth porting. Aside the fact that many Linux applications are already compilable on different process architectures, it's all open, anything not already portable, can be made so without external involvement. No cost analysis, sales drones, cross company politics, etc etc. Win7 being ported to ARM would give you only a few apps. Win7 on a ARM netbook won't be half as useful to a power users as Linux on a ARM netbook, and a normal user will just be confused they can't install and use their Windows applications.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[Foolhardy]

Actually, there is a port of Office 97 to Alpha for NT3.51 and NT4. This site is dedicated to NT on Alpha and mentions some compat issues between running native Office and emulated x86 office.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that MS could port Windows to another arch that quickly. Heck, they can hardly get it running on x86, heheheh! Seriously, I've seen some of the sources for NT - what a mess!

Re:A Big Up Yours

[IGnatius T Foobar]

If ARM-based netbooks become popular, you will see an ARM port of Win7 in a few months

Not good enough. Even if applications can be ported, very few will. The perceived value of Windows is that a consumer can take any of the zillions of packaged PC-Windows applications out there, and install them on their Atom/WinXP netbook with no modifications. Perhaps the most popular apps will get ported, but that's not relevant -- there are already Linux alternatives to every major Windows application out there. How many potential Linux users do you know who were ready to make the switch but couldn't because of that one little obscure program that was only available for Windows? Happens a lot, right? Well that same silly little program that kept them from switching to Linux will also keep them from switching to an ARM-based Windows.

Personally I'm delighted to see the upcoming wave of "smartbooks." They'll be what netbooks were intended to be. Think "PDA with a larger screen and keyboard" -- not "really small laptop."

Re:A Big Up Yours

[shutdown -p now]

The quirks were worked out long before that: Windows NT until 4.0 supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. 2000 (i.e., NT 5.0) supported Alpha until as late as after RC1.

I know. I didn't mean OS quirks. I mean API quirks, and generally educating developers on how to write portable software (sizeof assumptions, alignment etc). This was mostly done in early 2000s - VC++2003 started giving warnings on problems with sizeof and alignment that it could detect, some API calls became deprecated, etc. So any code which compiles on VC++ today without warnings is likely portable to a large degree.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[shutdown -p now]

Win7 being ported to ARM would give you only a few apps. Win7 on a ARM netbook won't be half as useful to a power users as Linux on a ARM netbook

Are you so sure?

Flash. Office. That alone might be enough to tip the scales.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[SoupIsGood Food]

Microsoft's tried this already. Windows NT, which is the foundation for XP, Vista and 7, started out being compiled for high-end RISC workstations... Bill Gates' personal rig was a Sun Sparcstation 20 running betas of NT 3.5 for a year or two before they started shipping. Fujitsu tried to make a go of selling MIPS-based NT workstations with very little success, IBM had a few PowerPC NT boxes floating around, and DEC actually made some money on Alpha-based Windows workstations, and selling Alpha chips and mobos to third-party workstation vendors.

The non-x86 platforms were neglected into oblivion. Microsoft refused to supply the same level of service and support to their customers running anything that wasn't a bog-standard x86 PC. On the other hand, I firmly believe Linux's popularity and cutting-edge support of the Alpha platform is what got it a firm toe-hold in the industry - they proved they could not only keep up with the proprietary unix vendors on hardware, they could outdo Microsoft at a time when everyone was positive Windows would run everything else out of the marketplace.

Re:A Big Up Yours

[Anonymous Coward]

and you have how much real porting experience?

linux32 wrapper

[Zombie Ryushu]

I don't see why the linux32 wrapper could not be altered to work with ARM the way it does with 64 bit Linux. Wine and a few other things like Flash won't compile on anything other than x86_64. But my 64 bit Linux Box doesn't know that. I don't see why it could not be different on other architectures, Arc or PPC. Something doesn't work on ARM? Wrap it in linux32, problem solved.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine and a few other things like Flash won't compile on anything other than x86_64. But my 64 bit Linux Box doesn't know that.

Huh?

Re:linux32 wrapper

[kamatsu]

Firstly, debian already ported most of Linux software to ARM, software availability is not an issue anyway.

Secondly, x86_64 is an extension on x86. Linux32 is just a set of 32-bit libraries compiled against a 64-bit kernel, that allows you to run 32-bit apps, using features of the processor specifically designed to do this. ARM is a completely different architecture and such an approach is simply impossible. The only way to run other x86 applications on ARM are via virtualization, which frankly would be unusably slow on a netbook.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[mcelrath]

ARM is a different instruction set entirely. x86_64 vs. x86_32 differ only in some memory layout, but the binary instructions are 99% the same. So it's easy to write a wrapper. linux32 would not work. You also need an instruction set emulator (e.g. bochs), which would be quite slow.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[ZosX]

The 32-bit wrapper works because chips like the athlon64 and core can both run 32-bit apps natively in 64-bit mode since they can execute x86. I really don't know who modded this one insightful.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[Lennie]

Their has been an ARM-build of Flash for years, just look at Nokia N810 for example. But you have to remember these devices are meant for surfing the web, maybe some e-mail, some light office work, etc. So Flash is the only proprietary you'll probably need. Which is already available.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[BrentH]

You mean emulation [of the x86 instruction set]. This need not be necesarrily slow. Look how Apple's Rosetta performs. Apart from it not supporting any and all software, the stuff it does support it supports pretty well. I've played a few recent (for the time, when the Intels came out) PPC games, and I did not detect any slowness or bugs.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[TheRaven64]

The only way to run other x86 applications on ARM are via virtualization, which frankly would be unusably slow on a netbook.

You mean emulation, not virtualisation. It doesn't have to be slow. How much software these days is CPU-bound? And how much CPU time does it spend in the application binary, and how much in libraries? If you have the headers for a library, you can quite easily automatically generate a stub version that calls the real version outside an emulator. This is quite an old technique, and is one that Apple uses for running PowerPC binaries on x86. If you call any standard library function from PowerPC code, you call a stub which creates an x86 call frame from the emulated registers and calls it. This means that time spent in the graphics libraries, for example, is time running native, not emulated, code. Windows, for example, would run all of the DirectX and GDI libraries as native code and the application as emulated code.

Even without this level of integration, something like QEMU does quite well. It can run emulated Linux programs just trapping the system calls and substituting real ones. Every Linux GUI program communicates with the X server via sockets and shared memory, with an ABI-neutral layout. This means that an emulated program will still be using the native, accelerated, X11 implementation, including OpenGL.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[level_headed_midwest]

Yes, most software running on current 2.5-3 GHz dual-core and quad-core CPUs with a lot of SIMD and FPU power isn't CPU-bound. That probably won't be the case on a ~1 GHz single or dual-core ARM CPU. Anybody using a Web browser on a smartphone or PDA to browse typical websites today can tell you the little 400-800 MHz ARM CPU gets hammered pretty heavily.

Re:linux32 wrapper

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon google "debian ARM".

Re:linux32 wrapper

[badkarmadayaccount]

X86_64 is entirely different from x86. It might as well be SPARC. The only thing is, that it is usually built in CPUs that also support x86 at native speed.Thing is, it has to run in another thread. That's why you can't run 32-bit drives in 64 bit Windows.
PS: You fucked up the math in your sig, 1 = -1 <==> 2 = 0
XD

Re:linux32 wrapper

[badkarmadayaccount]

Virtualization != Emulation.

Finally

[Andtalath]

Actual netbooks will come. All current netbooks are small laptops, this is something else which is better.

Re:Finally

[Lennie]

Just have a look at what for example the Touchbook has to offer:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Always-Innovating-Touch-Book/

That's definitly some else then just a small laptop.

Test baloons?

[achten]

Do not know if it is due to the reporter or the strategy itself.
In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday.
It ends with
The company is also researching Google's Chrome for use in netbooks.
Makes netbooks-are-atom-and-smartbooks-are-ARM distinction.
However
Dell couldn't say whether it would ultimately offer a smartbook.
Maybe just floating of test baloons.

Google ChromeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome OS is going to run on ARM in addition to x86, this is likely related to that.

Re:Google ChromeOS

[Lennie]

Or maybe because Ubuntu's next release will have an ARM-release and they already ship Ubuntu.

Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up to

[cheros]

Like it or loath it, Apple has seriously shaken up the mobile phone industry, and got away with something nobody else ever managed: taking a big slice of the carrier's cake on top.

If Appe brings out a sensible iTablet that actually works and is smart enough to work with the laser keyboard (the Bluetooth version does proper HID support) I cannot see that fail, and it will probably nuke the market Dell is looking at.

The tablet in itself goes into markets at present taken by ebook stuff like the Kindle, and with a proper remote keyboard it hits the portable market - why take a whole system if it's that portable.

So I'd wait a bit - let's see what Apple is up to. I hope I'm right - it's about time for such a device.

'smartbook' - I like!

[Anonymous Coward]

better than that stupid term 'netbook".

Re:'smartbook' - I like!

[Lennie]

I like how all these smartbooks will now be running Linux and we can say to people who want to buy netbooks: their is also a smart choice :-)

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[EponymousCustard]

Remember that Asus achieved a large success in the netbook market by releasing the eee before everyone else got their act together. If Dell could do the same, they could gain another reasonably large untapped market

Improve the keyboard layout, and they will come

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have seriously considered getting a Dell netbook because of its native support for Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

But the keyboard, seriously, is the most important thing in a laptop of any size, netbook or otherwise.

If Dell offered a smartbook with the keyboard layout of the Acer Aspire One, then I'll be the first to sign up.

Stockholm syndrome

[xororand]

It's interesting how some people are quick to declare portable ARM computers a failure because it won't run their favorite (proprietary) x86 programs.
That's the Stockholm Syndrome, only with software instead of human kidnappers.

Re:Stockholm syndrome

[Lennie]

First of all, these devices have some limited capabilities, that means their is a certain set/type of programs you'd expect them to run, specifically mostly a browser, an e-mail program, some light Office work maybe.

And pretty much all applications in Debian (and soon Ubuntu) are able to run on ARM/Linux. Only other thing you might want is Flash on these devices to possible watch some video's in webpages.

And their has been an ARM-build of Flash for years (look at Nokia N810 for example).

Re:Stockholm syndrome

[Pecisk]

Not to mentioning that Gnash and Swfdec already have achieved usefulness as Flash player replacements (I use Swfdec for viewing Flash, only some minor video services doesn't work, but Youtube does).

Re:Stockholm syndrome

[MartinSchou]

First of all, these devices have some limited capabilities

Compared to what we have today, sure.

But are you really going to claim, that back in 2000 no one ever did anything computationally difficult, never played games and never did anything beyond light office work?

I would be surprised if the hardware of the nVidia Tegra wouldn't be able to run rings about most non-workstation computers from 2000, and while I wasn't playing Crysis on that hardware back then, I'm still not playing Crysis on the computers I have today.

It's really not the hardware's performance that's lacking for non-game programs - it's the software's performance. The typical rule of thumb says compute performance doubles every 18 months. That means today's computers are ~64 times more powerful than those of 2000. Yet they're still mostly being used for browsing and office work, but now we need monster computers for it?

Re:Stockholm syndrome

[Blakey Rat]

I declare them a failure because, despite years of constant press about them, you still can't walk into a Fry's and buy one.

Yes, but...

[damburger]

...does it run RISC OS?

Re:Yes, but...

[jimicus]

That would be nice, wouldn't it?

I doubt it, however, as RISC OS hasn't had a great deal of development since the early 2000's, and even then the most recent details on the Iyonix website (which I suspect is only up because nobody's bothered to take it down - it says © 2006, FFS) proudly announces "Supports up to 1GB RAM! PCI slots for expansion! 256MB RAM as standard! 80-120GB HDD!"

Re:Yes, but...

[ms139us]

...does it run RISC OS?

Now that's funny.

Seriously, an ARM based netBook would be a radically advanced idea.

We live in EPOC times.

Poor Psion, ten years too soon, all over again.

Chrome OS will help make this happen

[bgarcia]

This is where Chrome OS will help a great deal.

Where most people will be scared of trying linux, they'll trust it when it has the Google brand. Where many people might be confused by an OS that looks mostly like Windows but where everything is just different enough to be confusing, they'll probably understand the concept of "Chrome OS is just a browser & nothing else". The remaining question is if ARM + Chrome OS will drive prices down low enough that people will be willing to forego the flexibility & familiarity of a regular Windows laptop.

Re:Chrome OS will help make this happen

[Lennie]

I wonder what Dell will be shipping on them, they already ship Ubuntu and Ubuntu will have an ARM-port in their next release.

Re:Chrome OS will help make this happen

[Lennie]

Actually, I think most people don't know what Chrome is, they don't associate it with a browser (yet).

"lower power consumption AND longer battery life"

[Anonymous Coward]

"lower power consumption AND longer battery life"!

Wow! Two advantages for the price of one. Amazing.

What's a 'smartbook'?

[TeknoHog]

I'm afraid it will be something weaker and smaller than current netbooks. A toy computer, compared to the real computers that run Windows on x86, like God intended.

The point is, why can't we have a regularly sized laptop with a sensible processor like ARM?

Re:What's a 'smartbook'?

[4D6963]

Or ARM desktops, I mean, why the fuck not? Make a tiny machine (think G4 Cube type box), powerful enough for most desktop stuff, with a low power consumption, and I'm sure you could get lots of people/businesses/schools interested.

Good way for them to buy/replace a whole bunch of desktop machines for cheap, that eat up less power/emit less heat and noise and don't take much room. The time has come for us to have dirt cheap tiny machines.

Re:What's a 'smartbook'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well most people want x86 compatibility and the Atom based nettops can be fairly low power. For example the Aspire Revo which uses the Ion Chipset uses about 20 watts idle and 30 watts under load, and the basic Linux version can be had for £160 in the UK (I'll leave you to look prices where you live) which is fairly cheap. Sure you can improve on this power-wise, my netbook, for example, uses ~12 watts when plugged in, including the screen, and at this power usage I'm not worried about saving a few extra watts unless I'm on battery power.

That said, if they can make them for ~£100, able to play 1080p and with HDMI to connect to a TV, they would be quite attractive.

Re:What's a 'smartbook'?

[4D6963]

Yeah, it's probably a bit early for the market to support it, but if x86 processors don't catch up with the ARM in cost and low power consumption, give it a few years and the Chrome OS and you'll have yourself a pretty desirable desktop machine. Mostly when it comes to economies of scale, I mean, if you're going to buy 200 machines for your school/company these things can make a big difference, and in these settings you don't necessarily care about x86 compatibility provided you have all you need for the OS on the machine.

got a link for that

[rtfa-troll]

Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft Software+Hardware.

Interesting. Do you have a link for that?

I don't think most of the PC manufacturers would be able to complain any more than the mouse manufacturers did about the MS mouse. It might make sense. Microsoft needs the revenue and the whole Netbook thing really scared them. I'd guess that the PC manufacturers could easily be the next partner for them to crush.

Smartbook?

[nurb432]

Yet another marketing term? Someone really needs to restrain the marketing guys.

ARM has advantagse over ix86

[nurb432]

Well, so does ( did ) MIPS. And SPARC. and Power. Each has its advantages over the old x86, but x86 has one advantage that trumps most : 20 years of a code base as the mainstream.

( myself i still prefer MIPS, but good luck finding something that runs it, or something to run ON it.

Re:ARM has advantagse over ix86

[Anonymous Coward]

The advantage of x86 isn't the amount of code written for it, but rather that it's code for an operating system (Windows) that is readily available and people are happy to run.

There's also plenty of ARM code out there - most Windows CE devices are ARM based, as is the iPhone, but most people wouldn't choose to run Windows CE on a notebook, and the iPhone OS/X port isn't available for other ARM based hardware.

Re:ARM has advantagse over ix86

[iggymanz]

Eh, there's plenty to run if you're a MIPS fan.

Debian runs MIPS both ways, big and little endian (for whether you happen to have SGI or Cobalt). OpenBSD MIPS runs on the 64 bit SGI though only o2 runs graphics.

Plenty of IRIX disk sets floating around on eBay

Re:ARM has advantagse over ix86

[sznupi]

Poster above mentioned software side, seems you also would like to have hardware...

There are small desktops & laptops built around Longson CPU, which is basically MIPS.

WinCE & WGA?

[RotateLeftByte]

How long before WinCE gets 'improved' with the inclusion of Windows Genuine Advantage?

Re:"lower power consumption AND longer battery lif

[maxwell demon]

Indeed. You know, with x86 processors batteries tend to get depressive and commit suicide, which shortens their life, of course. With ARM they are much happier, and therefore battery suicides are rare.

This is what I'm excited for

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
Always Innovating Touch Book.

ARM based tablet/netbook with (supposedly) 15h of battery life. The keyboard is detachable, and the tablet itself can run for 5h. The second battery is in the keyboard compartment. This is something that I've had my eye on for a while. And their already working with Ubuntu for a compatible release.

I will buy arm architecture

[FudRucker]

in a laptop or netbook if it means longer battery life, I dont use laptops netbooks for CPU/GPU intensive things, mostly web surfing & email, IM, and occasional typing of documents in OpenOffice on Linux and since Linux already supports arm the switch to that architecture would be seamless...

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[Artemis3]

You are wrong. A device like that, would cost like 900$, the ARM netbooks are going for 200$ or maybe less, these are completely different markets.

Also take in consideration the total failure the iPhone is in Japan, the leader in mobile technology.

Kindle is, frankly, junk. But have you seen other brands, such as chinese Hanlin? The point in ebooks is not just their small size, they also use a display that doesn't use backlight and doesn't draw power unless you change the content. It looks very much like a printed page on a fax machine.

The arm chip probably had a coprocessor

[Anonymous Coward]

to handle the H264, i.e. a TI DaVinci variant. 1W arm cpus are pretty fast, but H264 is damn complex.

I wanna buy Itanium...

[g00ey]

I can't wait to get my hands on a Netbook based on Intels latest Itanium2 cores. Then I could do many cool things on it.

The Itanium architecture is an architecture developed for 64-bit computing without the burden of backwards compatibility with the older I386 instruction set.

I see... I see...

[rbanffy]

I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.

Yesterday they criticized Microsoft's FUD about Linux netbook returns, today they get noisy about Windows-proof computers... They can't say they didn't see it coming.

But, hey, Michael, I will buy three Windows-proof ARM-based netbooks provided they:

- run a more or less standard Linux (I am fine with Ubuntu)
- have a hard-disk
- are expandable to at least 2 gigabytes of RAM
- have an optional 768x1366 pixel screen (plus an analog VGA port for a second screen)

I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.

Re:I see... I see...

[falconwolf]

I see Dell's OEM prices going up, or HP (those loyal chaps), Acer and Lenovo going down.

With a market cap of more than $27 Billion and second only to HP in world wide market share Dell may be too big for Microsoft to effectively threaten. And as for HP, they have supported Linux and Unix for years, they work with Suse, Redhat, the old DEC's Tru64 as well as HP's own HP-UX.

I bet a lot of people here will be happy getting rid of their x86s.

Yea, I imagine some are like this. As for me what counts is cost and speed. Oh, and support.

Falcon

Re:I see... I see...

[sznupi]

Acer and Lenovo are mentioned by Google as also being on Chrome OS bandwagon.

Re:I see... I see...

[badkarmadayaccount]

HP killed the Alpha, FFS. Mickeysoft is just giving them some headroom, you think, they ain't on a leash?

People have a right to ARM laptops..

[Mhtsos]

...in the US at least where the constitution says people have a right to bare ARMs..
*ducks*

Please Do - But Do It With OMAP-4 !!

[cfriedt]

There seems to be a lot of comments about how the average joe is going to be pissy when he discovers that he can't run his windows applications on his arm netbook, or print well for that matter. That is obvious, and therefore redundant to talk about. This is a website dedicated to (hopefully intelligent) nerds, right? I'm more interested in running Linux anyway, or possibly an up-and-coming Mac OS X for ARM.

I would like to say to DELL - excellent idea!!! ARM for netbooks / smartbooks only makes perfect sense! The battery will last longer, they're fully capable of doing everything that a netbook should (including all multimedia applications), they're SILENT / FANLESS. All of that makes me (a green geek / engineer) very happy! If you could pull off an aluminium unibody, then you would have Apple beat if they ever got around to making a Mac smartbook.

My advice though, is to choose your components wisely. People won't want to wait for application contexts to be reactivated from swap, so make sure that you have enough RAM to keep everything going. Also, make sure that you prelink all binaries so that loading times are much faster! Last but not least, I would highly recommend that you choose a dual-core ARM SoC like the TI OMAP-4, which is based on the Cortex-A9 ARM family. With dual-cores, there would be many more pipelines available for concurrent threads, which means very little noticeable lag times.

Specifically for the OMAP, I really hope that the integrated PowerVR 3D graphics core and integrated video codec will get full Linux support at some point soon. TI seems pretty dedicated to supporting Linux on their devices, so I don't think that full support is unrealistic. The enhanced DSP ARM instructions will accelerate any multimedia applications in the mean time, and those are fully supported by GCC, with optimizations in the works for mplayer, ffmpeg, etc, until a decent architecture-agnostic kernel drm layer is in place, with PowerVR / IVA support.

For Windows enthusiasts, I'm sure that Windows 7 will be available at some point for ARM, as we have seen some of the demonstrations already at Computex (although Android seemed to be much easier to port). Will Microsoft even bother making a compatibility layer for ARM? I have to hand it to Apple, that they are in a better position than MS to make a fully featured ARM netbook, given their universal binary format in Mac OS X.

Re:Please Do - But Do It With OMAP-4 !!

[badkarmadayaccount]

Don't forget Jazele mode. Considering JVM IR's code density, Java will probably be the most responsive thing on the netbook, when considering RAM/sys_bus constraints.
Java - snappy? I have to cut down on the weed... :P

CE will become a bootstrap for the CLR

[Gazzonyx]

I think, looking forward, MS will make the CE kernel a lightweight bootstrap for a .NET JIT. It only benefits them to reduce the attack surface, memory footprint, and number of interfaces they'll have to maintain for backwards compatibility and delegate it to the CLR. Then you've got a sand box that can leak memory (and reclaim it!) all day, that has a single interface to the kernel that needs to be maintained, and as a bonus you don't alienate any developers in the process. The last thing they want is another v[bc]-6 or J# incident.

IIRC, you work on an open source project that deals with operating system internals (was it something to do with emulation?); in your educated opinion, do you think this is likely?

Re:CE will become a bootstrap for the CLR

[TheRaven64]

I think, looking forward, MS will make the CE kernel a lightweight bootstrap for a .NET JIT

It already runs the CLR, and the CLR is a lot more attractive on CE platforms where the CPU may be ARM, PowerPC, SuperH, or a MIPS, so architecture-specific binaries are inconvenient and fat binaries get big quickly.

It only benefits them to reduce the attack surface, memory footprint, and number of interfaces they'll have to maintain for backwards compatibility and delegate it to the CLR

Well, they still have to maintain backwards compatibility for existing code, so this doesn't buy them much. That said, the CE kernel is a lot better, from a security standpoint than the NT series.

IIRC, you work on an open source project that deals with operating system internals (was it something to do with emulation?); in your educated opinion, do you think this is likely?

I work on a few open source projects (clang/LLVM, GNUstep and Etoile), none of which deal directly with OS stuff, although I did write a book on the Xen internals a couple of years back...

I think MS would love to be able to release an OS that broke backwards compatibility. To a degree, Wince was this already, but now it has a large amount of legacy code to support. They might release Singularity for mobiles systems, of course.

You might be interested in Sun's *7 prototype system from around '95. It was very close to what you describe.

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[Hurricane78]

No it won't. Because as usual with Apple products, they will cost twice a fortune, and still be rather low-end.

While... well... do you know what those ARM systems actually cost! :)
They start with $200. That is their "very high newcomer" price!
After 3 months, they will have fallen to $100!
And still get complete HD video acceleration, Flash support, 10 hours of lifetime, and practically no heat production.

For that price I wonder if I could simply buy ten of them and link them into a Beowulf cluster. :)

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[Hurricane78]

Oh, and still be cheaper than that iTablet. :P

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem with that is that Apple's tablet will not retail for $200.

MacBook batteries aren't user replacable

[calidoscope]

The secret to the MacBook battery life is that the battery is "built-in". This eliminates the volume and weight taken up by the battery housing, connectors and battery holder. Downside is if the battery goes flat, it requires a trip to an Apple repair depot. A minor help is that the MacBooks use LED backlighting, which is a bit more efficient that the CCFL lighting used on earlier laptops. Yet another help is that MacOS X supposedly has better power management than Windows.

FWIW, my first laptop is one of the new 13" MacBook Pro's and battery life was a big selling point. Another reason is that MacOS X is much more Unix friendly (well, duh) than Windows.

Re:Dell's desperately disposable disposition

[ipX]

I was serious that is not a troll, nice one mods.

Diminishing returns

[firewood]

For any architecture, there is a point at which a CPU designer gets diminishing returns for added transistors and power. A simple 32-bit RISC or GPU seems to be a lot closer to the peak of useful performance per transistor and per microwatt than are the current laptop implementations of the x86 ISA.

At this point the issue left is whether the application speed required fit the performance near that peak, or will the application be better off with one CPU far from the peak that's maybe 4X faster at a cost of 16X more power and transistors, or with the alternative of 16X more tiny CPUs (the direction OpenCL-style computation is going).

Shit people, look stuff up

[falconwolf]

I'm not going to cite every thing in my posts.

You make an assertion, you back it up.

If you don't want to, you don't want to debate or inform.

Falcon

Re:Shit people, look stuff up

[0100010001010011]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1337215&cid=29079467

I don't know if you were paying attention,

[falconwolf]

but most users stopped caring about speed ten years ago.

I don't know if you were paying attention, but Apple switched to Intels from PowerPC because Freescale and IBM could not provide Apple with CPUs as fast as Intel's that did not get hot enough to fry an egg on. Apple released G5 desktops and towers but they were not able make a laptop because of heat. Even today years after the switch programmers push the envelop on CPU power. Heck, even netbooks and the new smartbooks have more power than computers from just a few years ago.

A lot of the non-geeks I know stopped complaining that their computer was too slow around then.

Yet how many replaced their PCs, vs how many are using only a 5 year old PC?

Falcon

blank media

[falconwolf]

the music industry convinced the Canadian government to put a tax on all CD-Rs (DVDs too?)

The US also has taxes on black media. It started with cassette and video tapes, moved to CDs, and now there's a tax on blank DVDs.

Falcon

NT kernel

[falconwolf]

They can continue to make their interface ever shinier, but it's still the same old broken NT kernel underneath

NT 4 was the only version of Windows I liked and did not have a problem with. I haven't used Vista but even XP froze the first tyme I used it. I know it was supposed to be based on the NT kernel but if so MS screwed it up.

Falcon

Thought I'd clarify something though.

[falconwolf]

With x86-64 you can run 32-bit apps seamlessly.

I've been researching about installing Ubuntu Studio on my computer and one of the things I came across is that there are not 64 bit versions of some software and there are problems running 32 bit versions on 64 bit Ubuntu. I found this article on how to How to Run 32-bit Apps in 64-bit Linux.

Falcon

Re:Thought I'd clarify something though.

[ZosX]

I never encountered any problems, but I'm sure incompatibilities exist. I'm running windows 7 64 right now and I was pretty shocked at how seamless everything was. I guess YMMV.

Re:Thought I'd clarify something though.

[falconwolf]

I never encountered any problems, but I'm sure incompatibilities exist. I'm running windows 7 64 right now and I was pretty shocked at how seamless everything was.

That's Windows though not Ubuntu. Just because 32 bit Windows apps can run in Windows-64 doesn't mean the same is true for Ubuntu.

Falcon

Re:Thought I'd clarify something though.

[ZosX]

I meant ubuntu, though I haven't really tried running a great deal on the 64-bit port. It sucks that it isn't seamless.

With new open technologies like HTML5

[falconwolf]

Flash is becoming more and more obsolete anyway.

Maybe after html5 is released. Say, 10 or 20 years later. Some people still aren't using html4 well.

Falcon

Linux-Windows on Alphas

[falconwolf]

Netscape was a problem on alphas, on both Windows and Linux

I didn't try Netscape in Linux on my Alpha but I didn't get it to run in Windows. It was the same with almost all of the commercial, proprietary, software I bought. Shareware was another matter, almost all of the shareware programs did install and run. What I found weird was that the only proprietary software I was able to use on my Alpha was Borland C++ Powerbuilder.

Falcon

DEC ported Netscape to Alpha

[falconwolf]

For Linux, Windows NT, or both? I tried to install Netscape on my Alpha in NT4 but couldn't get it to install. So I called Netscape support and they said it would not run on Alphas. And they didn't say anything about a download version that would work. Luckily I had a laptop I installed it on, otherwise I would have wasted money buying it.

Falcon

Re:DEC ported Netscape to Alpha

[Bert64]

For Digital Unix and possibly OpenVMS...

There was never an Alpha/Linux version, tho you could run the Digital Unix version through a binary compatibility layer. I have never really used NT for Alpha, tho i do know it had up to IE5 and a port of Mozilla at one point.

I don't really see the appeal in an ARM netbook.

[falconwolf]

While I don't want one I can see 2 appeals for them, cost and battery life. On the other hand if Apple came out with a 21" MacBook Pro, I'd want to get one.

For the majority of consumers, that means they want to run exactly the same e-mail program, the same browser, the same IM program(s)...

I do. When I used Windows I used Firefox, Eudora, and OpenOffice. When I switched to Linux and OS X, I used the same apps. Well for email I started using Penelope which was based on Eudora before switching to Thunderbird.

Falcon

FOSS alternatives

[falconwolf]

there are already Linux alternatives to every major Windows application out there.

Not for every major Windows app. There certainly isn't one for pro print photographers. Gimp is fine for web work but it's not so good for print. After more than 10 years of promises Gimp 2.6 finally has some 32 bit support. It also doesn't support CYMK separation natively but uses a plug-in for it.

Oh, hold on. I see there's finally a Mac OS X port for Gimp, so now I'll try it out again. I tried it on Windows but preferred Paint Shop Pro.

Falcon

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[falconwolf]

Also take in consideration the total failure the iPhone is in Japan, the leader in mobile technology.

Japan may be the leader in mobile tech now but China is the largest market and Apple is working on a deal with China Unicom to market iPhones.

Falcon

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[falconwolf]

No it won't. Because as usual with Apple products, they will cost twice a fortune, and still be rather low-end.

1989 wants it mime back. Similarly configured Macs and PCs are similarly priced. And Macs last longer than Windows OEM PCs.

Falcon

iphoney?

[Anonymous Coward]

what about the iphone? it has the crowd's interest. linux on hardware that was equal would grab developers interest.

I wouldn't buy and ARM based windows netbook.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you cannot do the recompilation/porting yourself, so there is some disadvantage, but you can be sure that, if there's market, all products that are still being actively developed will be ported

More importantly, Microsoft cannot simply flick a compile switch and have virtually every Win32 application running natively ready for their next OS release. My experience with proprietary apps on ARM based smartphones is that app vendors will want to charge extra for the privilege of of running your app on a non-x86 CPU. Even if not, they'll make you buy a new license for the different architecture - you won't just be able to transfer the software to the new one. Even if you do pay, they'll only sell version n+1 - with new innovative ways of annoying you. All of which assumes that they are actually still in business.

It would take years for there to be any point in buying a ARM based windows netbook when almost-as-good and much simpler x86 based netbooks are available.

64 bit vs 32 bit

[falconwolf]

I meant ubuntu, though I haven't really tried running a great deal on the 64-bit port. It sucks that it isn't seamless.

OK. I'd rather run 64bit Ubuntu but like I said before I read there were problems. I'd rather just install 32 bit Ubuntu Studio and get it setup that possibly spending weeks getting the 64 bit version running, or finding out it won't. As it is now it may take me a few hours, if there are no problems.

Falcon

Re:Nice idea, but let's wait for what Apple is up

[badkarmadayaccount]

There is metric butt-ton of 8+ y.o. ThinkPads that want to talk to you, bub. Also, people don't (usually) buy computers to make a supercomputer, host a high load server. They just want to do basic computing stuff with excellent/good responsiveness + some gaming. When you (the average user) go Mac, you get crap graphics relative to the rest of the machine, and if you go low end, you might as well get a netbook, at least you'll get a battery and screen for a similar price. If you go high end, then you are doing the equivalent of burning natural diamonds to boil the water for your tea. Either way, it sucks. I'm not saying Macs don't have a place in the marketplace, but they are given way too much credit.

HP killed the Alpha

[falconwolf]

HP still sells Alphas. Actually though I think DEC damaged Alphas with poor marketing, and a shitty interpretor, FX!32.

Mickeysoft is just giving them some headroom, you think, they ain't on a leash?

No, I don't think HP is on MS's leash. MS got away with playing hardball during the Bush years, the Clinton Department of Justice had them on the ropes, but they can't count on being able to continue. MS also still has the EU hanging over them.

Not that I don't wish they wouldn't try to play hardball aqain, I supported the original judge's verdict and believe MS should have been broken up into 2 if not 3 different businesses. If MS did maybe they would broken up.

Falcon

Re:HP killed the Alpha

[badkarmadayaccount]

Nowhere in that link did I see info about selling Alpha systems. They have stopped receiving orders for new systems, actually. And FX!32 is not an interpreter, it's a dynamic long term caching recompiler. They got it up to 50% native speed, and had headroom for more. The industry standard solution - QEMU - has a hard time topping that. And the bad name Alphas acquired came from poor support from MS, even though the offered Windows for that CPU. If things had gone even a little bit different, the Alpha would have gotten enough inertia to get to the commodity sever market, much as ARM, MIPS and PPC rule embedded, and even the odd x86 system would still be with an ARC boot firmware, instead of that god awful IBM (now Lenovo) PC compatible BIOS. And I'd be typing this on a mid end SPARCstation based Mac, since Sun had bought Apple because their hardware rules. And everything in the machine, down to the northbridge Verilog would be CDDL. *takes another hit from the bong*

Re:HP killed the Alpha

[falconwolf]

Nowhere in that link did I see info about selling Alpha systems.

Perhaps HP did stop selling them, I see where they say they supplied AlphaServer until 2007. OK, I was wrong. I found this: "HP discontinued production of AlphaServers at the end of April 2007. The production of new options stops in April 2008."

And FX!32 is not an interpreter, it's a dynamic long term caching recompiler. They got it up to 50% native speed, and had headroom for more.

Whatever it was, it was not that good. Of the number of programs I bought I was only able to install one, Borland C++ Powerbuilder, on it. Yes I have an Alpha computer, one of my knees is touching it now.

And the bad name Alphas acquired came from poor support from MS

It was Microsoft's responsibility to make sure software ran on Alphas? Or was that the responsibility of DEC? I admit I trash MS and don't like the company but it's not their responsibility, they had none with regards to Alphas. They didn't even have to release NT4 for Alphas. Now having said that the NT4 Workstation running on my Alpha is the best version of Windows I've ever used and I've used Windows 3.x to XP. Not once did it crash, freeze, or show me the Blue Screen of Death. XP on the other hand froze the first tyme I booted up a PC with it installed. It didn't finish booting so I had to physically turn it off, by holding in the power button.

Falcon

Re:HP killed the Alpha

[badkarmadayaccount]

When making a virtual environment, you have to make reasonable assumptions. I'm pretty sure they did, and since the CPU-emulation part is straightforward, I can only conclude that most of the applications were off-spec (considering what trouble WINE is having, it is a reasonable possibility) and were doing stuff that FX!32 was not expecting. That, or it had some bugs, but hat would you expect from such a short lived app? Again, it not like WINE 0.01 was crazy useful, but would you deny that it has a point in its existence? Considering that MS is closer to the applications, stack-wise, it makes sense that it's their responsibility - because the sole reason for existence for an OS is running apps.
BTW, I am crazy with envy right now... Dude, you got an Alpha?
*rofl*
Most BSOD issues are hardware/driver related. Because of the exotic hardware, they probably got some competent coders on the job, and I dare say that DEC made some pretty good hardware in the day (AFAIK, since I was born '93).

Re:HP killed the Alpha

[falconwolf]

What I found weird about installing, or trying to install, software on the Alpha was that the only commercial closed source proprietary software I was able to install was the Borland compiler yet I was able to install a few freeware/shareware and open source programs. Not even Netscape would install, I called tech support and they said they didn't support Alphas.

because the sole reason for existence for an OS is running apps.

And the sole reason for the existence of hardware is to run software.

BTW, I am crazy with envy right now... Dude, you got an Alpha?

Yeap. I ordered it from Microway back at the end of 1997. I ordered it with two 5GBhard disks, which were big then. On one disk NT4 was installed and Redhat Linux was installed on the other. I don't know if I could do it but I'd like to upgrade it. For hardware I'd replace the HDDs, add a DVD drive, Firewire, new network card, and USB, as well as RAM. I'd replace one HDD with a disk at least 100GB then make two partitions, one for NT4 and the other for Linux, the other one I'd replace with a big drive. At least 1TB, for user files. Both NT4 and Linux would use the second drive as the home partition.

Of course about all it's good for now is as a play thing, unless it's used as part of a Beowulf cluster. I don't want it to go to waste, so maybe I can use it as a server. I don't know if they can but maybe the Geek Squad can upgrade it.

Falcon

Re:HP killed the Alpha

[badkarmadayaccount]

Don't bother with Geek Squad. I don't think that a hard drive upgrade would be hard. PATA-SATA converters are dirt cheap. Though I'm not sure about the rest.
BTW, what sort of errors did you encounter?

Don't bother with Geek Squad.

[falconwolf]

I don't think that a hard drive upgrade would be hard. PATA-SATA converters are dirt cheap.

Well I've replaced and added disks before but I don't know what interface the Alpha uses. That and once when I replaced a disk I had to run a utility that came on a disk with it. I'm also concerned about compatibility. Next to the Alpha is a PC with Linux installed. When I bought it I bought a Maxtor second disk to use as the user partition. No matter what I did I couldn't get Linux to recognize the disk. It ended up Linux had a problem with Maxtor drives so I returned it and got a Seagate. After installing it I didn't know how to get Linux to mount it so I had someone at the Geek Squad do it. He had to research it himself but then told me what to look for next tyme so I could research and do it myself, I know the fstab file has to be edited now.

BTW, what sort of errors did you encounter?

Installing software with FX!32? It gave me messages it could not install the software. Now they may not really be errors but they were to me. Here I was, I'd spent a lot of money on hardware but I couldn't install most of the software I also bought. About the only saving grace was that I also bought a laptop I was able to install the software on.

There I was with all the hardware and software, wishing I had bought Macs instead. Well after ten years of buying and using Windows PCs I finally switched. First to the Linux PC above, then I got a MacBook Pro for my laptop.

Falcon

Re:Don't bother with Geek Squad.

[badkarmadayaccount]

If you're going to spill serious money on computers, get a Thinkpad, do some research for Linux compat, throw Ubuntu with Etoile on it, and you'll get something at least equal to a Macbook. Sure, app compatibility with mac apps won't be there, neither can you use I/O Kit drivers, but Linux is mature enough to make them a non-issue for general usage.
BTW, did you consider trying QEMU instead?

If you're going to spill serious money on computer

[falconwolf]

et a Thinkpad, do some research for Linux compat, throw Ubuntu with Etoile on it, and you'll get something at least equal to a Macbook.

Before I got my MacBook I did research and I plan on installing Ubuntu Studio on it. And I doubt a Thinkpad with or without Ubuntu installed is better than a MacBook Pro. The Thinkpad X200 Tablet may come close if Leveno offered a 17" model, all they have is a 12.1 inch LCD. However that wouldn't hold true if Apple were to also to offer a 17" tablet.

One reason is because though I can install Ubuntu on my Mac, I can't install Photoshop CS4 in Ubuntu. And no, GIMP is not a drop-in replacement for professional print photographers. It's fine for amateur or web work but not for print photography.

Linux is mature enough to make them a non-issue for general usage.

General use yes, but not pro print photography. I am hoping to start my own photography business and I don't want or need to buy 2 laptops.

BTW, did you consider trying QEMU instead?

QEMU? I don't er didn't know what it was. Apparently it's a hardware emulator. While it can host Windows NT4 for Alpha, as well as Mips and PPC, as a guess I didn't find anything saying it can run on an Alpha to emulate an Intel. So it does me no good.

Falcon