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ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender

Posted by timothy on from the raising-an-arm dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

7 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. ARM/Linux in the Tesla Roadster by Rei · · Score: 5, Informative

    To tie in with an earlier article on the front page: the Tesla Roadster's battery pack management system is ARM-based. It's built around a Philips-LPC2294 with 32 megs of ram and a 1GB U3 Cruzer Micro USB flash drive, running Linux kernel 2.6.11.8-1.3.0.

    --
    Look at me, still talking while there's science to do.
    1. Re:ARM/Linux in the Tesla Roadster by cbhacking · · Score: 4, Informative

      Between versions 3.5 and 5.0 (Windows 2000), NT was actually ported to several other architectures, including PowerPC and Alpha. None of them were particularly successful commercially, and from what I heard, the Alpha port was killed by in-fighting between Microsoft, DEC, and (IIRC) Compaq. The only non-x86-derived (and on RISC architecture) port of NT currently maintained is Itanium (ia64).

      There's no architectural reason why NT couldn't be ported to ARM, and I actually think it would be a good move to replace the WinCE kernel with a ported branch of the NT kernel optimized for smartphones. They could even keep backward compatibility with WinMo by using a WinMo subsystem (similar to the way that NT is compatible with both Win32 and POSIX by way of subsystem - the kernel doesn't directly handle Win32 or POSIX syscalls, they instead both get translated to NT syscalls which are designed to accommodate just about any API). This would also let Microsoft remain relevant on ARM-based netbooks, provided they port the Win32 subsystem (yes, applicaitons would need to be re-compiled, but for many apps that's all it would take).

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
  2. Re:So, where are ARM netbooks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

  3. Re:So, where are ARM netbooks? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are a few things; but mostly obscure or dubiously suitable. The Touchbook (not toughbook) still has a touch of beta about it; but you can actually order one. The Sharp PC-Z1 has a bad case of obscure and japanese; but otherwise exists. You can also get a number of super cheap ARM based netbooks from various random Chinese outfits. Trouble is, most of those are basically the WinCE PDAs of a couple of years back, stuck into a netbook shell. Truly dire specs are the order of the day.

    I'm frankly a bit surprised. You can get beagleboards and shivaplugs, with pretty credible ARM based specs, for not all that much even in small quantities, and ARM based smartphones are all over the place, so the field seems surprisingly thin on the netbook side.

  4. The Debian Distro Says Otherwise by mpapet · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

    I've run it on an NSLU2. Worked perfectly. They've got desktop packages for it an everything.

    Ubuntu is has been standing on the shoulders of giants (Debian) for a long time. It's time for you to go straight to the source.

    --
    http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
  5. Re:Almost 3 billion chips this year? by Volante3192 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Had you read the article, you'd see where all the chips come from, because it's summarized right below that line on the first page.

    Hint: if you have an electronic device that is NOT a desktop or laptop computer, the odds are somewhere around 99 out of 100 that it's using one or more ARM chips. This includes, but is not limited to, cell phones, GPSes, home routers, calculators, and portable gaming devices like the DS.

  6. Re:OS/X? by kamochan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apple's iGadgets are ARM-based and run a variant of OS/X. Of course, ARM also has WinCE, so that kind of balances the karma.