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ARM Exec Says 90% of PC Market Could Be Netbooks
Barence writes "ARM chief executive Warren East has claimed that netbooks could dominate the PC market, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro. 'Although netbooks are small today – maybe 10% of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market,' he said. East also said ARM isn't pressuring Microsoft to include support for its processors in Windows, claiming progress in the Linux world is 'very, very impressive.' 'There's not really a huge amount of point in us knocking on Microsoft's door,' he said. 'It's really an operational decision for Microsoft to make. I don't think there's any major technical barriers.'"
whether it's true or not is another thing
Netbooks are supposed to be those things too small to work like a real computer but too big to be really portable! How could Steve Jobs be wrong? Is it true that they are small enough to be more portable than a laptop but big enough to be more useful than a cellphone/PDA?
I wonder how long I will go on musing for, before I break down and buy one...
Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years? I don't have any reason to doubt the Arm-Linux netbook space will grow (although, even that isn't necessarily a given, but it seems reasonable, anyhow), but 90% sounds like a bunch of marketing BS from a guy who can't possibly deliver the goods.
Sell out? Not sure what you mean by this. ARM sells (designs for) chips that can run Darwin, Linux, *BSD, RiscOS, Wince, Symbian, NewtonOS, and a host of others. If Microsoft chose to port Windows 7 to ARM, why would you regard this as ARM selling out?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years?
When Linux netbooks based on x86 were gaining market share, Microsoft embraced the netbook by first keeping Windows XP Home Edition available throughout the Vista era and then optimizing Windows 7 for such ultra-low-cost PCs. Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.
What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims."
ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!
Laptops are pretty crude these days. Spinning drives, spinning fans, bulky operating systems originally designed for desktops that were adapted for the laptop instead of purpose-built.
The Palm OS stuff years back really made me wonder, especially when I got an external keyboard for my palm -- could you upscale something like this into a computer? It has more horsepower than my first desktop, the fancier palms could get on the net with wifi. What if you made a bigger screen and stuck the palm guts in that? At the time I figured the problem was cost and performance. Screens are half the price of a laptop so why would anyone want to spend several hundred bucks for a gimped device when they could spend a few more and get a full-featured laptop? But the iPhone had the right idea. Stripped down, customized OS for the phone. Leave the whole desktop OS design behind.
The hardware really has come a long way and basic user needs haven't become that much crazier. Putting an mp3 player in a car used to involve putting a freakin' PC in the car, now you either have an mp3/cd player in the dashboard or a line in for your standalone player. You used to need a pretty beefy machine for the time just to get online and read your mail. Cell phones have enough power for that now. And storage capacity? It's crazy.
There will always be a need for as much crazy power as possible in a portable format but that will be a smaller niche of the market.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"Sell out"? I'm no Microsoft enthusiast; but last I checked, it was pretty standard for chipmakers(or, in this case, ISA designers who licence to chipmakers) to cheer on pretty much any attempt, by any party, to run more software on their hardware. In this case, though, I think that Mr. ARM executive can just keep dreaming.
Microsoft's overwhelming strength, and considerable burden, is backwards compatibility. The market, especially the business market, is rotten with gross little bespoke applications(as well as big serious expensive applications, shrinkwrap and bespoke) that are win32 only and likely to remain so for years to decades. Microsoft's customers scream at them every time some change breaks something(and not just the little home users, whose whining is of limited consequence, the big thousands-of-seats guys). Even their move to 64 bit X86, once both AMD and intel had given it their stamp of approval and its future was basically assured, but with full 32bit compatibility, was slow and arduous. It isn't even past tense, really, the move is still happening.
If it were just a matter of porting the NT kernel and Windows components to ARM, I suspect that that would be in the realm of doable. It'd have to be worth their while; but doable. Dragging the third party ecosystem, which is a huge percentage of the value of Windows as a package, though would be an epic nightmare. Especially since, unlike 64 bit X86, this wouldn't be a one-way move. They'd have to be pushing for parallel offerings, ARM and X86 from all relevant vendors, for the indefinite future. Welcome to hell.
My kingdom for a modpoint
Sell out? Not sure what you mean by this. ARM sells (designs for) chips that can run Darwin, Linux, *BSD, RiscOS, Wince, Symbian, NewtonOS, and a host of others. If Microsoft chose to port Windows 7 to ARM, why would you regard this as ARM selling out?
Microsoft wont just agree to support ARM as is. It will have conditions attached to it. It won't be something so explicit as a requirement to stop supporting the other systems. It will be more insidious. One tack will be to nullify the advantage of other OSes. By requiring a cache large enough for Windows or memory requirement that will nullify cost advantage of Linux. Another tack would be to create a small variant of ARM that is incompatible with the others. Then due to the market dominance and/or shady undisclosed deals and pay backs, the window only version of ARM chips will be subsidized from the monopoly windfall in the MSOffice franchise.
Eventually everyone will be able to say, "we tried, but the market wants Microsoft. It is all free market you see!", while conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms. The MsOffice franchise that is churning up some 25 billion dollars a year in profit, flowing through secret contracts wrapped inside non disclosure agreements, distorts the free-market continuum just like a black hole warps the space-time fabric.
Remember the original 150$ Linux netbook. How Microsoft suddenly extended the WinXP life by 10 years and strong armed Asus. How the one lap top per child project suddenly decided to add a 2GB memory chip, raised the price and foundered completely. Microsoft is not a 800 lb gorilla in the jungle clearing. It is a supermassive blackhole that influences everything in the galaxy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
i.e. including all those people who don't have PCs yet in this world of 6 billion people.
This is all just my personal opinion.
It's a question of if people want it.
Just look around you, my Subaru is more than what most people need but it's one of the smaller cars on the road on average. Most people should be able to get away with eating 2200 calories or less a day but look at our fat asses and tell me that it's happening. Most people should be able to get by on a handful of TV channels and a modest collection of DVDs but we have hundreds of channels, On Demand, more DVDs in our homes than books... etc etc etc.
Modern culture likes comfort, modern culture likes the big is better lifestyle. Most people aren't going to adapt well to the next step up from the Speak and Spell. Even those who do begrudgingly adopt to it aren't really going to want it and, if they can afford a little better, will reject it with whatever bullshit logic they need to use to justify something a little more luxurious.
People have this obsession with hording and with being able to show that their possessions are bigger, stronger and faster than anyone else on the block. Computers are part of this culture of possession and no amount of benchmarks and proof of concept are going to change that.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Try this on your atom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5gYSgqka1A&feature=related
I think it just makes nonsense out of your performance argument.
This is all just my personal opinion.
This will require fast, cheap and energy efficient cpus, and if well could not be netbooks, ARM and other non-intel (i.e. TI's OMAP4) cpus should have a good portion of the market in that scenario,and probably a lot will be somewhat linux based (android, moblin, maemo,etc)
conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms.
That is the usual place to carry out backroom deals though, so it's hardly surprising that people forget about it. What would be memorable is if they carried out these backroom deals through the medium of skywriting. Or perhaps interpretative dance...
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Wow...
I don't think that expanding the Cache and ram on the ARM would hurt Linux or OS/X at all.
ARM doesn't make chips. So yes Microsoft could buy the right to make ARM CPUs and make their own flavor of ARM just like Apple, nVidia, TI, and Marvell have.
I think your fears are a bit miss placed at this point. Also since Microsoft has been floundering in the Mobile market for years I don't their is all that much to fear from them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
90% of PC users don't write code, compile, edit or recompress HD or any other video, render 3D anything, nor compose pages for publishing.
90% of PC users surf the Web, read and compose mail as text, watch video and tolerate sub-HD quality, and occasionally flip through their digital photographs. Rarely they use some Web service to make albums, remove red-eye, order Christmas cards and replacement checks every two years, and play Flash games. Web services rule. Banking, social interaction, news, pr0n, it's all in the Web. Microsoft has already lost this battle. Bing is their last gasp to be relevant in Webspace. Microsoft buying Yahoo! would just kill two birds with one stone.
Flash is the most demanding application most users bother to use, and many don't even realize it. Their browser is second, and they complain about how slow their machine is when their IE instance grows to >300MB and they can't get from one corner of their plot to another instantly in Farmville. They think it's their computer being slow when Facebook takes a moment to show them something cool.
Put Flash on their netbook, and any OS out there is adequate. YouTube has its own deal. If you can put Netflix on it, you're home free. Microsoft Works would be overkill. GMail is all the editor they need.
Microsoft has to fight netbooks, and especially ARM-based netbooks, since they lose any hope of selling Office 2007+ to these users. Unless they make Windows 7 Mobile on ARM a subscription model, and you need a credit card to activate. The billing starts in a year and continues until your bank fails or you upgrade, and maybe even past that.
Ubuntu or any Linux on ARM looks better and better. I suspect ASUS and others could do some nice work with Linux distros for a fraction of the cost of licensing Windows, deliver their customers some serious value, and be free of Microsoft. That last benefit may be the most powerful of all.
But the Empire will strike back. Even Adobe has a huge stake in this. If HTML5 succeeds in replacing Flash, it will be Acrobat that saves Adobe. Oh, wait...
And if they succeed, and Microsoft loses netbook share, expect Linux to suffer security exploits as never before. We haven't seen corporate espionage yet. The Microsoft v. Novell/Lotus/WordPerfect battles were nothing compared to this war. If^H^Hwhen it starts, the carnage will be worldwide, and both sides will suffer. I'm not sure any of the Chinese^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbot farmers have really exerted all their ability to own Windows. We ain't see nothing yet.
Me? I bailed on the netbokk thing and bought a 12" Thinkpad. I just needed the screen space. A Pentium M anything is fast enough for my portable machine. Those were too good.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Given that, as far as I can tell, the only difference between a laptop and a netbook is size, what he's really saying is that laptops are going to get smaller.
Or that, a lot of people who didn't buy laptops before, on such grounds such as price and size, would start buying the new /smaller/ devices.
The absolute number of classic PC and laptop won't change much. But a fucking big new propotion of the population would start buying the netbooks.
Don't think "Laptops are displacing desktops at the workplace".
Think the way PDA were a new market that didn't cannibalise laptop users, but made a whole new batch of people buy the devices.
Or think the way the Wii didn't lower the success of PS or Xbox, but got successful in reaching a whole new market of casual gamers who would never had bought hardcore-oriented machines.
(Or what Apple is hoping to achieve with the iPad : the device for the couch at home, missing in the line-up between Macs - at work - and iPhone/iPod - on the move)
There are a lot of young people, who don't really need a PC given their work or studies. But they would appreciate being able to go on-line for socializing.
Currently their smartphone's screen is a little bit smallish. Dead-cheap simple small netbooks would be the way to go
(and would enable them to do some small editing on the cloud / GoogleDocs while on the go).
Now, will ARM's hopes of finding a new market to exploit get realised ? Hard to tell but I suspect this might work.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims." ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!
After spending a while in Japan (and observing their net/electronic pattern usages), combined with purely anecdotal observations on communication and usage patterns of people here in the US and in my beloved 3rd world country of origin, it is fair to say most people are fine with a device that lets them e-mail and twitter and upload pictures on facebook, google for stuff, read the news and job sites, maybe run MS Office or Google Apps, and for the savvyy video conference with skype (which is how my grandma who lives in a little town up in the mountains got to see my newborn baby for the first time after getting Internet over dial-up.) Shit, even some of the Xingu people up in the Amazon have internet access now!!!! Anyways, go back to the topic...
The average electronics consumer WILL NOT use that type of device to run DVDs (there are super-cheapo portable DVDs for that) or run gcc, Mathematica or a LAMP. They don't need a super-duper CPU and the latest and greatest graphics card.
We, what we call "powerusers") certainly want a mighty gadget that can run everything we want in one device. But we do not represent the average electronic consumer.
Typical people, the average electronics consumer of 2010, whether here or Japan or south of the border, on the other hand will be happy to have an iPhone/BlackBerry, the smallest possible laptop/netbook that can do the job without much jitters and a portable DVD player (comes handy for entertaining your kids while you are busy with your laptop/netbook while having breakfast at Panera or wherever they sell breakfast with free wifi).
Warren East is re-stating the obvious (and inflating stock values), but that's his job. What we are missing here, is our ability to objectively judge the merits of his claims, not from our point of view as l33t hax0rs, but from the shoes of the average consumer - they are the ones that constitute the market (and the opportunities therein), not us.
There is nothing(other than economic calculation) stopping them from making ARM a future option. And, given MS's general style, if they did have an ARM option, they'd roll in the necessary updates to visual studio, and otherwise try to encourage the developers.
The problem is the past. Vendors who are out of business, or have EOLed given products, or who would(not unreasonably) want more money to deliver ARM versions of their existing X86 products. Horrible internal apps hacked together in VB6 by somebody who has since retired, or shoddily built by contract outfits. Even with Vista, a tiny compatibility break compared to an ISA change, caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth about this stuff. Heck, they had to build a fully, virtualized "XP Mode" into corporate editions of 7 just to get the legacy customers to shut up.
Linux went multi-platform comparatively easily because(while it is in many respects deeply conservative) the linux community doesn't really care about binary compatibility. If the source isn't there, available for update as long as interest persists, it is considered dead. If you want binary compatibility, you can go cry, or pay somebody to build it for you. Mac went sort-of multi platform comparatively easily because Steve doesn't much care about the past(one of the things that makes him interesting to watch is his willingness to murder products and technologies that he considers to be outdated, even if they are popular and successful. Look at the imac and the floppy drive, or his termination of the iPod mini, a hugely successful product, in favor of the nano) and because its platform moves have always been from less powerful to more powerful platforms. Rosetta and the classic environment were a (mostly) viable option for legacy PPC stuff because the new intel chips were a whole lot faster than the old PPC ones. An X86 emulator on an ARM netbook would be ugly.
In the long term, Microsoft could indeed make ARM an option(and, it seems, that their real long term plan is for everybody to be targeting the CLR in any case); but to actually sell a "Windows on ARM" product, they'd have to beat their legacy market, a tough task.
Damn.
At 3:30 on that video. . , I think I just saw the future.
The laptop and the netbook I picked up last Summer, and even the PC's I've been running over the past few years are all about to fall into the same category as my Dad's old stereo system. -Where the shape and weight of a given device will no longer be determined by space requirements of the technology packed inside. Every square inch inside my Dad's old amplifier was strategically taken up with vacuum tube electronics whereas the modern gear I could buy as a teenager was mostly empty space inside sleek plastic boxes with big shiny knobs. Empty calories.
Which probably means that it won't be long before netbooks and laptops are craptastic princess-pink or G.I. Joe themed items complete with dirty finger prints available at garage sales or brand new clattering around in the calculator section at the local Office Depot. The laptop you are using right now, while it is (most likely) a humming, energy hungry heat monster, will nonetheless ooze solid-state build quality and a healthy heft when compared to the next generation of light-as-air junk tech.
And when I think about it. . .
A lot of super-popular electronic media technology has come and gone over the last thirty years. Tape decks? Gone. Portable CD players? Gone. VCR's? Gone. The humble telephone? Changed beyond recognition. Here's a quiz: What's the one piece of technology which has stayed the same throughout that whole period?
That's right! Headphones and the 1/8" audio jack. Apparently we've arrived at perfection with audio gear. Everything else has changed.
I wonder what the final expression of the video display will end up being. . .
-FL