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Surveying the Challenges of Linux On Cortex A9-Based Laptops
Charbax writes "In this video, Jerone Young, lead partner engineer at Canonical, explains some of the challenges facing Canonical and other companies who are part of the new Linaro project, in preparation for the now imminent release of a whole bunch of ARM Cortex A9 Powered laptops and desktops likely to be manufactured by giants of the industry such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba, as well as lesser names such as Quanta, Invetec, Pegatron, and Compal, all of whom have been showing tens of early prototype designs of these ARM-powered laptops at trade shows around the world during the past year and a half. They're working to standardize the boot process, write drivers to use graphics and video hardware acceleration, optimize the web browser (Chrome and Mozilla), and implement faster DDR3 RAM and faster I/O bus speeds, as well as to optimize the software to use the new faster dual core ARM Cortex A9 processors."
A previous poster already answered, on a nice manner. But to make things clear, x86 is a bad architecture, and to make it run any fast, you need to create a very power hungry chip. ARM is a much better architecture, leading to smaller and less power hungry cores.
There is also a problem of scale here. It is cheaper to make an ARM that everybody uses than to make a x86 that will fit only a ninche. But that doesn't completely apply to the current situation, since the A9 is also ninche. (For the A8 things are different.)
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There's just very little reason to do it. Consider the modern PC. Consider that it won't boot if you don't have an archaic PCI bus and legacy peripherals. Consider that well before the 4GB memory limit was hit, the 4GB addressing limit was really hampering the OS due to the fact so many memory address spaces are "reserved" for peripherals that may or may not be there.
There is a lot of waste in the PC from a hardware/software standpoint all in the name of conforming to this "standard way of doing it" that dates back 30 years. I doubt you want this in your cell phone.
ARM has been able to evolve significantly due to this level of flexibility. The AMBA system bus itself has almost kept pace with the rate of CPU speed increases. Not only that but a lot of SoC vendors use their own proprietary bus architecture depending on the application. A company named Sonics provides packet-style memory access IP for SoC vendors that allows highly efficient memory bandwidth sharing amongst multiple heterogeneous cores. You'll never see this in a PC.
Since I'm currently running Ångström linux on a brilliant cortex A8 machine (the pandora) - and yes, it runs chrome and ff3.6 no problem and has 3d drivers that make Quake 3 perform really well - I can't believe that these 'challenges' are going to be insurmountable.