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ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender
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."
Still, competitors claim it's mostly 'armless.
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.
'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.
In my opinion, it's the opposite. One thing Windows doesn't have is ARM support (besides Windows CE). Manufacturers are already seeing the advantage of ARM, and the lack of Windows support isn't a deal breaker in every segment. I have a SheevaPlug which is an ARM device, and while most major Linux distributions have support for the architecture, Microsoft just has the one, and it isn't even a consideration for most users of the device.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
" 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes"
I'm sold.
My SheevaPlug arrives via Fedex in about 30 minutes :).
It's going to be like Christmas in a few hours. The Fedex box will be ripped apart strewn across the living room as will be the product packaging. I'll plug it straight into the wall and Ethernet, realize it doesn't do much. Break out the 8GB SD card and not sleep tonight.
Even if there was a Windows port, if you cannot run the vast set of Windows applications a port is useless. You would be better off running a Linux distro since it effortlessly comes with most categories of apps people need, because said apps are open source and usually can be recompiled fairly easily. If most Windows applications were targeted at .NET by now I could see a point, but they are not.
Windows CE and Windows Mobile both support ARM.
There might not be "full-featured Windows" on ARM, but saying there's no Windows at all on ARM is just ignorance.
Except that with Linux, BSD, and even OS X, the code that runs on x86 is the same code that runs on ARM (and PowerPC).
With "Windows", the code that runs on x86 is not the same as runs on the embedded stuff: there's no "scaled down" version like the Unix-based systems. It's a completely separate OS. The only multi-platform stuff that Microsoft has is Windows for Itanium.
Just because the Microsoft marketing folks call it "Windows" CE or Mobile does not make it the same as the desktop / server OS. With the Unix-y systems, it is the code and OS (though perhaps cut down to the bare essentials). And that's what we're talking about here: taking the same code and simply doing a recompile. It's not going to happen with Vista or W7, but it can happen with other OSes (heck, even OpenSolaris is being ported as-is to ARM and PowerPC).