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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.
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.
I think you have microsoft confused with apple.
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.
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.
No.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
"...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.
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.
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.
Actual netbooks will come. All current netbooks are small laptops, this is something else which is better.
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.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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...
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.
Ubuntu will have an ARM-architecture for their new release: Karmic Koala, scheduled for release in October 2009
New things are always on the horizon
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.
New things are always on the horizon
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
...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.
At the bottom of Mathcad's Wikipedia page you'll find 9 open source options.
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.
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.
And Debian has been distributing an ARM version for over a decade, now. It worries me how that fact is missing from reporting.
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.
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...
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"it also has a huge disadvantage - it does not run x86 programs"
This is Slashdot. Being Windows-proof is a feature, not a bug.
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