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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.'"
And what reason do we have to believe this isn't a just negotiating tactic against Microsoft?
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.
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.
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.
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).
No.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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.
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.
Basically a big Up Yours to Intel and Microsoft.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actual netbooks will come. All current netbooks are small laptops, this is something else which is better.
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.
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.
Insert
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.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
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
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.
Or maybe because Ubuntu's next release will have an ARM-release and they already ship Ubuntu.
New things are always on the horizon
...does it run RISC OS?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
"lower power consumption AND longer battery life"!
Wow! Two advantages for the price of one. Amazing.
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?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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).
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.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.