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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.'"
"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.
"...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.
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.
> Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft
> Software+Hardware.
We can only hope they are that stupid.
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