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ARM Attacks Intel's Netbook Stranglehold
Barence writes "British chip designer ARM is launching an outright attack on Intel with the launch of a 2GHz processor aimed at everything from netbooks to servers. ARM claims the 40nm Cortex A9 MPCore processor represents a shift in strategy for the company, which has until now concentrated on low-power processors for mobile devices. In the consumer market, ARM is pitching the Cortex A9 directly against Intel's Atom, claiming the processor offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy. 'It's head and shoulders above anything Intel can deliver today,' ARM VP of marketing Eric Schom claims. However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows. 'We've had conversations with Microsoft and you can imagine what they entail,' says Schom."
What is involved in porting code to a new chip? I've done some programming in my life, but it has mostly been limited to personal interest and school projects. I imagine it can't be as simple as just recompiling. So what does it take to port code?What are the hurdles? Assume (accurately) that I'm a total noob.
Does ARM plan on integrated video along the lines of Nvidia and ION? http://www.nvidia.com/object/sff_ion.html
People are willing to pay $15 more for XP (the cost of an XP Netbook license), but are they willing to pay $100 more for Windows (the difference between the cost of the announced ARM-based netbooks and a typical x86 model)?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A Microsoft refusal to support a really cool netbook technology would be a good opening for Linux.
Great! You go ahead and be an early adopter, suffer through first gen/beta headaches, buggy drivers, random system crashes. Call me and let me know when it's stable enough for "mom". I don't know about you, but I've grown used to stable hardware, and I'm not about to go back to pre-XP SP1 crashyness for an extra hour of battery life, maybe even two. 5 hrs is plenty enough for me.
moox. for a new generation.
Windows has pretty much a lock on the desktop, so the new chip won't have much market there. The desktop is also the declining market, so the new chip won't be missing that much. The big growth will remain in servers, where windows is optional at best, and netbooks/mobile devices where windows is a minority player. ARM may have made a rather astute decision to concede the dying segment to Wintel and make a big footprint in the markets that will continue to grow, and which also happen to do just fine without Windows. If they make sure to brilliantly showcase the not-windows OSs, ARM could come roaring back as a force to be reckoned with in consumer-level computing.
There are a lot of barriers to Windows adoption on the ARM processor that go beyond MS not really wanting it. If they really want to gain market share above and beyond cell phones and PDA's, ARM needs a strong partner to create a real, integrated, polished solution. And by solution I don't mean a device. They need to do something akin to the iPhone, in creating a nice device or set of devices with a consistent polished operating system and with an integrated ecosystem of solutions. The project is large in scope and they need a partner that preferably has an existing position to leverage, experience, money, and which is not beholden to Microsoft. A cell phone service company might be a viable partner or Canonical and someone, or RIM or Google or an appliance maker that has not entered the netbook market yet.
If they really want to sell netbooks with ARM processors in them they have to think big. They need to better than hope MS is scared. They need to commit to building a system that bypasses MS's core monopolies through vertical integration. This is no small task. They need the hardware, which has to be cheap and hit a sweet spot. They need an OS and applications. They need dev tools for applications and services. They need Web and network services integrated with the device. More than all those pieces which are out there, they need someone to put it all together in a nice package and usability test the whole user experience from buying to opening the box right up through using it for all the common tasks: Web surfing, E-mail, chat, word processing, potentially phone calls and videophone, playing games, playing music and video, and adding new applications. The problem with a lot attempts at this sort of thing is the assumption that someone else will take care of parts or that blaming someone else somehow makes a failure better.
ARM is not x86, I know that. The issue here is more about the emulation. Nothing says ARM can't be emulated on X86, except microsoft currently. Save the ad hominem.
Any half-decent OS (I think this even include Linux these days) uses the same drivers on multiple architectures with just an abstraction layer for dealing with the different busses. OpenBSD on ARM, for example, supports exactly the same set of USB devices as OpenBSD on x86, including things like USB video cameras. If anything, supporting multiple architectures improves the quality of the code. NetBSD and OpenBSD both recommend testing all drivers on x86 and SPARCv9 and this has helped find a lot of bugs that are not obvious on x86 but crash on SPARC, which has improved the drivers and benefitted x86 users.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just out of curiosity, does the ARM version of Ubuntu take advantage of some of the stuff in ARM for doing HD video at low power? Or is it just ubuntu, recompiled for the architecture? There are several advantages to each different CPU. Do things like Flash (or even Gnash) work on ARM? Or VLC, or anything?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I run Debian on my ARM server (@ 500Mhz). It performs very well. Thanks for pretending!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
the arm architecture is own by them and they have a history of using patent threats and strategic headhunting to kill competition are related open source projects.
The only way the ARM manufacturers stand any chance is to either go for a completely new OS or jump onto the Linux bandwagon. Microsoft wont endanger their cooperation with Intel and AMD until ARM has secured a sufficient enough marketshare. This makes ARM and Microsoft a catch 22 happening. Any support will be superficial with lots and lots of fot dragging.
On the other hand Asus has shown just how successfull cheap small devices can be with Linux on them. If the ARM companies goes ahead full steam pushing devices with Linux Microsoft will be forced to jump aboard no matter what they really want to do. By then Microsoft wont be calling the shots and ARM will have a much better bargaining position.
I also think the ARM manufacturers should take a long hard look at the Wintel OEMs and think about their situation. Do they really want ot find themselves in a position where all their revenue is taken by a third party like Microsoft who doesnt contribute anything at all to the platform? Are they comfortable to be totally in the hands of a company that cant manage to turn out a new version of their OS in almost ten years?
HTTP/1.1 400
TFA mentions that Google Chrome OS should support ARM, so since we already see Google Phones with Android and Google Apps, I don't think it's overly optimistic to hope to see a "GoogleBook" or Google Tablet.
The reason that DEC/MIPS/PPC NT failed had absolutely nothing to do with the lack of apps, but the lack of the value-proposition those companies provided to end-users. MIPS/ALPHA/POWER platforms were two-four times more expensive than commodity Intel platforms. No one forsaw the power-house that Intel was to become with the Pentium Pro/Pentium II, and that single factor alone killed those platforms.
The apps issue was only secondary. When NT 3.1 first came out, boatloads of apps were ported to MIPS/Alpha as well as Intel. BOATLOADS. I supported a network with all three (four, we had some pre-release IBM PowerPC's in 1997). But that cost differential is what killed any chance for a multi-platform windows.
This is a different case. A9 can be as cost efficient as Atom.
Don't fall into that trap. The future of that driver is very much an unknown at this point in time. It is unclear if Intel intends to support it, and "clusterfuck" is the word xorg developers have used to describe the project handling so far...
Summary: Do not buy Z series before a proper driver appears, unless you're happy running a specific version of Ubuntu forever, or vesa is good enough for you.
MPlayer already takes advantaje of several different processors characteristics, requiring a simple recopile. If it doesn't aready, it doesn't take a lot to take full advantaje of this chip.
Also, flash does run on ARM, but I guess it doesn't optimize for each processor. If we are luck, that will make Google start streaming Youtube videos on a way that uses mplayer. They can even keep the flv format.
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