Slashdot Mirror
Pocket Wars and Cores
An anonymous reader writes "If I were to ask you what is the most popular processor used in phones and pads, and you said, 'ARM,' you would be correct. Now comes the trick question, 'Who make ARM processors?' Not the ARM Holdings company. They design processors and license their designs to manufacturers. They also have a reputation for creating very low power designs. Interestingly, while almost everyone else was out ramping clocks and power consumption (until they hit a wall), ARM was chugging along addressing the low power end of the market. Now that low-power is all the rage, due to phones and pads, ARM has become quite a bit more popular."
ok, so?
(qualcomm, intel, samsung, marvell, etc.)
Why the Intel logo for this story? They're ones who do *not* make ARM processors, ever since they sold that business to Marvell (oops). I guess the TI logo isn't as cool.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I had always loved Slashdot, but is there any alternative community run site without the Slashvertisements?
Banu
...makes out
There are many, many makers of ARM based 'application processors' and the like: Texas Instruments, Samsung, Apple, ST Microelectronics, nVidia to name but a few. In addition, some people - like Qualcomm with their Snapdragon processor - have licensed the instruction set from ARM, but then have basically built their own core around that.
The nice thing about ARM is that - if you are looking to embed processing power - you can license a core (or two), design them into your own chip and then make it. Said chip can also include a USB controller, or a wireless baseband, or whatever. Intel will not sell you an x86 core for you to design into your own chip; ARM will.
Now: before this thread descends into meaningless ARM versus Intel rivalry, can I point out that the two architectures are optimized for entirely different situations. To say ARM is better than Intel, is like saying a bicycle is better than a ship - it's not a meaningful comparison. If you want to embed processing functionality, or you want low-power (particularly low standby power), then you need ARM. If you need raw processing power, optimised to run desktop or server operating systems, then you'll be wanting x86.
And the reason why x86 is so power hungry? It's because it's on big bits of silicon. And why's it on big bits of silicon? Because it support hyper-threading, out-of-order executon, has hardware virtualisation extensions, has extensive branch prediction, and tonnes of on chip cache.
There is no reason why ARM cannot offer all of these things too (and their Eagle design goes some way to do this). But if you want to do this, then your chip is going to get bigger, and more expensive, and more power hungry.
Over the next five years, we are going to continue to see mobility become more important: and that means more and more ARM cores, and a diminution of the importance of the traditional PC market. ARM has a very bright future - but, I suspect, it will probably have a great deal of trouble getting into the traditional PC space.
--- My dad's political betting
HP makes a SOC system based on the Marvell Kirkwood design. Its the HP t5325 I beleive. It works great as a thinclient but local web browsing is kina slow and theres no flash.
There's no mass market yet. Plug computers are around $100-150, with 256-512MB of RAM and are somewhat taking off. Some might also have video-out, most have USB where you can hang a hub, storage, & keyboard/mouse off it.
The thing is, even with a cheap core and an inexpensive power supply, you're still going to have to pay to include usable amounts of memory. I'd think $100 is a reasonable place for inexpensive compu-bricks with a good selection of ports, until there's a killer app that ramps up the volume and lowers the price.
Since most of us don't need the mobile device to continue functioning after heavy usage for more than maybe 48 hours, ARM has also hit a wall with how much lower power consumption is needed.
Mine was a BBC Micro back in the 1980's. Pretty much stuck with Acorn Computers until 2000/2001. Acorn was owned by ARM, hence the older acronym "Acorn RISC Machines", they now use "Advanced".
ARM derived from the ideas of MOS and WDC (the 6502 and descendents) to make a low-power, efficient processor without fancy overheads.
Remember the rumors when the Apple II flirted with using ARM cpus toward the end of the line when Jobs was herding the company heavily toward Motorola and the 68K? Well the II line died with that, and so went any disruptive chances. Then strangely, it sorta came back again in the Newton, but Jobs killed that when he got the chance again while flirting with the PowerPC.
Then suddenly, Jobs embraced the ARM the next time around in the iPod and then later the iPhone (one-upping Sony in CE), and things have been going swimmingly for them.
Meanwhile, others picked up ARM for portable game devices, PDAs, and WinMob phones. It evolved slowly and not very well -- poor graphics drivers, poor OS/hardware implementations, hardware cycles focused on selling hardware, not the experience, etc.
Then the Jobs and iPhone said, "only the best combination of ARM cpu and graphics hardware for us. No more cheaping out to hardware designers for years like you guys have been doing", and boom explodes the market.
Companies are falling over themselves to make the best ARM hardware they can, although some are still missing the forest for the trees like Samsung. Others dumped the market because they thought it had no money like Intel's (formerly DEC's) Xscale(StrongARM) and ATI's Imageon graphics division (now Qualcomm's) and got caught with the pants down and what are now important toe-holds.
Nvidia whom only abortively were in the market and missed a cycle with the Tegra and half of it with Tegra 2, but seems to be holding their own. Imagination as PowerVR was pushed out of the PC market by Nvidia and ATI but flips it and now dominates as the best and reference hardware for mobile graphics over "newcomers" Nvidia/ATI. Funny enough, ATI's Adreno (from the former Bitboys) got recycled by Qualcomm into something that still viable after a stretch of horrible MSM720x hardware. Apple knowing they need to one-up these old-school houses, got PA-Semi and Intrinsity, fabbed by Samsung to own their own supply line for this critical hardware.
Ya this story just wonders what could've happened if Jobs wasn't so obstinate and denied using the ARM long ago.
Acorn machines were incredible for their time. Their GUI had concepts that have only been realised in mass market GUIs just recently, the flexibility of their OS and their advanced typographical features were many years ahead of their time. Things like the save dialog for a new file having an icon of the file that you could give a name to and then drag that icon to a folder to save it there (rather than having to navigate to the folder in the dialog). Built in BASIC in ROM (most of the OS in ROM, so boot times were on the order of seconds). I could go on...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Give it time. It will come because there's a market for it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Were you looking for this link?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We need to way instain Intel processors who consume more power!
IIRC ARM was a spin-off or Acorn (initially an internal research team working on the CPU that would power the Archimedes line, that chip being the great great granddaddy of the current ARM designs) rather than the other way around.
If that surplus processing power could be harnessed it would be a different story, but Windows isn't up to that task.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm guessing here, but you live in a place where watts are cheap and reliable, right? Did you know most of the rest of the world isn't like that?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But you don't have to go with the wall wart form factor. I was working with an ARM on an industrial micro-ATX board, and that worked great. I was actually impressed with the speed, even though it was a 1Ghz machine. It was a tremendous step forward over another board they had chosen to use, where the only OS you could run was their own hacked up version of Linux, that required dozens of dodgy patches to rebuild the kernel.
If you really pay attention, ARM processors show up all over the place. I bought a little eMachines (the square thing standing vertical on a little pedestal), that works very nicely for running my theater system. At about 5"x5"x1", it's nice to have an absolutely silent machine sitting there that I can run the OS of my choice on. The only problem I had with it is that it didn't have enough USB ports for everything I wanted to hang off it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I think you might want to check this out: http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika Comes in at $129. Not exactly 50$, but I guess that's due relatively small production volumes.
I hated that 'save dialog'. finding a folder in the filesystem and having to drag just seemed slow and clunky in the days of mice with balls that got clogged and before the days of accelerated graphics. The Mac System 6 file chooser was primitive by comparison but did its job.
Acorn's roots are in the Cambridge Mathematics Laboratory. It's nice to think that, while the USA overtook the UK rapidly in computer science after our Civil Service fsck-up postwar, the typical low power do it on the cheap approach of British engineering is coming into its own again.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
those are not arm chips but mips-based x86 emulators.
BBC Micro ran a 6502, the Archimedes was the original ARM-based line.
....they went to extremities with the appendages . Give 'em a hand for getting a leg up !
Back in 2004 I've read a quite interresting article on ARM. http://news.cnet.com/The-unheralded-monopoly/2010-1006_3-5262581.html As you can see, the strong position of the ARM is not new, maybe just a bit more visible these days.
I read through the article and found it very informative. One thing I didn't realize was that Microsoft will not do Windows 7 mobile on ARM.
That was a surprising statement. I googled on it and found this:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20090603123741_Microsoft_Windows_7_Will_Not_Support_ARM_Microprocessors.html
This article says "Micrsoft does not believe ARM can deliver the performance needed." To that I wonder "why is everyone else able to make amazing performance happen with ARM???"
Every time I hear another Microsoft shill claim "but this is not Windows, it is entirely new from the ground up" I have to chuckle a little. If that were true, then they wouldn't have any problem getting performance out of low-power hardware if they designed their OS with that in mind "from the ground up." The truth of the matter is that Microsoft simply can't get away from its legacy code and rebuild from scratch. I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling. Apple did it when they went with OSX. A completely new OS and while the transition was painful for users and developers, it was the right choice. I have been saying for nearly a decade that Microsoft should do the same... others have too... but they simply choose not to at every opportunity.
This whole scenario gives me a better understanding of why Windows Mobile isn't catching on even with hard core MS fans. The "desktop experience" doesn't fit in your hand and they simply don't know how to do it any other way.... (Or maybe they are afraid to since MS Bob...)
ARM has also hit a wall with how much lower power consumption is needed.
This is a line of reasoning I've been fighting most of my career.
Lower power consumption is always needed. In a battery-powered, portable device, energy use is use of a limited resource and, therefore, is never low enough. Even if "most of us don't need the mobile device to continue functioning after heavy usage for more than maybe 48 hours" -- a statement of dubious validity -- the energy saved in performing feature set X can be used to perform additional features, features that may be used to competitive advantage in the marketplace. (Reducing the power consumption of a cell phone enabled manufacturers to add things like audio players, video, big displays, etc. to the device.) Alternatively, it can be used to reduce battery size and weight, which can also be used to competitive advantage.
Like product cost, power consumption is an expense that is never low enough. Designers (or their organizations) that think their product cost or power consumption is low enough are setting themselves up for obsolescence.
HP t5325 costs over 200 USD. OP asked about 50 USD machines.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Comes with open source OpenGL ES drivers?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Sure you can run DSL or TinyCore and the like, but try to install a modern Ubuntu on an old laptop(that will happily run XP) and you'll be pulling your hair out.
The only way in which this is true is when you have little memory. XP will run in 64MB (swap!) but recent Ubuntu will fall all over itself with less than about 256MB, and if you want to run Firefox, you're going to need at least 512MB or have fun swapping. If you use a lightweight desktop like Matchbox and a lightweight Firefox like Seamonkey then you can do okay in 256. Since you really have to copy the CABs to disk to make Windows XP administration not a complete nightmare, the storage footprint is similar. Also, the necessity of loading antivirus software makes XP basically untenable on antique hardware unless you're using it for a specific single purpose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I shouldn't say they can't -- I should say they are unwilling.
I totally agree with the MS problem but I think they can't. Ten years ago they should have got away from everything that Windows had become and start again but they were too scared they would lose their base customers on the way. It shows they were insecure about their product and thought that it was a success they couldn't repeat again - too dependent on a naive market. Instead they came up with the compromise way forward (fix it - let's make Vista) and got terribly stuck as the complexity of the task overwhelmed them.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Wait, so you expect one distro to make good use of modern hardware and be installable on something ten years old and you have trouble?
Colour me surprised.
FWIW I've had debian squeeze running happily enough on a 266MHz machine with 32MB RAM. But then that's headless and running on ARM.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
Economies of scale, I'd think. IIRC most factory production is geared around (and indeed isn't economical unless) the idea of churning out tens of thousands of an item minimum. Preferably tens of thousands per month.
Something like that - unless it's being heavily pushed by someone who can give people something useful to do with it - isn't going to sell many. What are the likes of HP or Dell going to push? "Here, it's just like a desktop PC except you can't run any current software you're likely to want on it"?
Indeed Acorn existed long before the advent of the Archimedes and the ARM chip it powered. It was the first time I had ever heard about a RISC chip. It sounds like ARM was one of the first RISC chips, and has managed to stay around while others just fell back into the unknown.
The BBC Micro before it was based on the 6502 chip.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I have a nearly 6 year old Dell laptop running Windows XP. For fun, I put a demo license of Windows 7 on it and found that Windows 7 actually runs faster than XP on it. Not only that, but I get the full Aero desktop. Four years ago, I would have expected that from Linux. Instead, I find that Linux runs slower than ever on that older hardware.
Your off-brand Chinese importers can hook you up with an ARM-based netbook-esque mini-notebook for $80-$100, depending on exact specs, volume, and the whims of the ebay gods.
Trouble is, in most cases, these will either be running some dubiously-legit(and sometimes questionably well-localized) version of WinCE, or a mildly elderly version of Android. Actual cryptographic lockdowns, in the Apple or Motorola vein, are way outside the budget; but total lack of usable documentation, a confusing proliferation of part numbers, or rampant hardware switching between similar looking models has somewhat retarded the growth of decent sized 3rd-party release groups.
Curiously, the hardware built into these $80-$100, with (lousy) screen, keyboard, and battery doesn't generally seem to show up in $40-$50 versions with DC-in, VGA-out, and USB for peripherals. There are some machines with those specs, like HP's t5325; but the fact that that is a "thin client" and thus "enterprise" instantly doubles the price you'd expect for the specs.
You can also get quite capable hardware in Marvell's *plug line; but those are generally network appliances only, with your only display option being a USB-based Displaylink or similar. That certainly works; but nearly doubles the price and makes for a rather ugly donglefest.
The newer Marvell SoCs do support at least one lane of PCIe, in addition to a raft of other onboard peripherals, so it wouldn't be rocket surgery for an OEM to put out a *plug-esque design with an actual PCIe graphics chip(only a low-end one would really make sense; but even the cheapest PCIe graphics chips available can drive pretty much any monitor that doesn't require dual-link DVI) hanging off that lane. However, that is a bit hardcore to just hack onto an existing *plug board, and, as noted, nobody seems to have done that in commercial quantity.
You can get the cheap-and-nasty "PocketPC of yesteryear shoved into a clone of the EEE701" from any number of mystery OEMs on ebay; but the software will blow and 3rd party firmware support is kind of a gamble.
You can get a *plug-based design, which will have a much peppier ARM core (1.2GHz) and beween 128-512mb of RAM, depending on the exact model, for about the same money(Seagate Dockstars were going crazy cheap for a while, like $10-$20; but that was a firesale of sorts); but those are network-only unless you buy a Displaylink adapter, which pushes you up toward $150-$200, at which point Atom boxes that will run normal x86 OSes with zero hassle and take 1GB+ of RAM start to beckon...
The t5325 is pretty much exactly what you are asking for, except that it is an "enterprise" product, and has a price tag to match. If one could hunt down whatever OEM produces the board inside, and buy 10,000 of the same thing in generic black boxes, those would probably be precisely what you want; but I've never seen any hints on how to do that...
- Windows Mobile - has long supported ARM, but has no version 7.
- Windows Phone 7 - only supports ARM.
- Windows CE - supports ARM.
The only thing that doesn't support ARM is "big" Windows 7, and this is changing:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jan11/01-05socsupport.mspx
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
Yeah, I realized my mistake only after I read that article again. That said, I also found this:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/215779/windows_8_on_arm_expands_microsofts_mobile_horizons.html
And while it is a nice attempt (so far) what I expect to see is the same things we have seen from Microsoft for decades -- they will support Alpha or some other processor for a while and realize "we can save money by dropping support for this minority thing" and then kill it. And according to the review above, while the machines made an admirable attempt, it is still the same old Windows being a resource hog and barely making it work. (For that matter, the 64 bit x86 processor support seems to be really lacking too -- they just can't convince software developers to update their code to 64 bit!! Think your new 64 bit quad core monster will deliver awesome performance on your game machine with nVidia optimus driving the graphics? Nope!!)
Once again, Microsoft is attempting to shoe-horn their old code into new places. I just don't expect it to work. What I expect to see, however, is Microsoft giving a ton of money to ARM makers to boost performance on their machines in order to support their software. This will benefit Microsoft but will also benefit Linux and other OSes on the same hardware in a much more dramatic way... (Unless, of course, they manage to bribe ARM makers to keep their performance enhancements locked down in a way similar to GPU makers like NVidia who only really supports Windows.)
I'm still waiting for something really surprising to happen... been waiting for a very long time. I wasn't surprised that Vista was an utter failure. I wasn't surprised that Windows 7 was more of an apology than a new OS. Microsoft exists on its defense of its market dominance alone. They haven't done anything exceptional with the Windows OS since Win9X or possibly Windows 2000.
Microsoft is eroding away due to its failure to keep up with the changes. Most people can't see it yet, but I certainly can. I think it became rather evident when the public stopped cheering at MS Product announcements.
Too bad nobody's making ultra-cheap machines yet.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
There are. They even include built-in cell phones. Keyboards are kind of lousy, tho.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Too bad nobody's making ultra-cheap machines yet.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
As a powerpc mac owner, I can tell you the reason. For one reason or another, developers (including a lot of oss folks) insist coding X86 only software along with SSE stuff.
So lets say you dare to buy an ARM based netbook, you will find a lot of -already not enough- existing software has either no binary packages or impossible to compile for ARM. Add idiots like Nokia who acquired Qt and removed PowerPC 10.5.8 (most stable OS on planet, no enhancements posted) from official support or Adobe who also removed support from such a stable OS (even in flash plugin updates), you see the picture.
Sad thing is, one can't even blame Apple -yet-. They said "Please use OS X APIS, please don't do hacks" to people who wants future/backwards compatibility. People who listened to them still just clicks to some pref in XCode (or add couple flags to gcc) and ship everything to 10.5.8 and 10.6.x even without having a 10.5.8 machine.
PS: Please don't even mention "everything can be compiled, gcc is so great" etc. type stuff. Just point me to a Mozilla Firefox 4.x officially supported ppc binary (you can compile as tenfourfox on 10.4.11) or Opera, the ARM guys and their PPC compatible 11.x release.
Seriously, Slashdot? This is news?
And now ARM is going after high clock rates with deep pipelines. They'll end up with microarchitectures that are are more or less equivalent to x86 ones. Oh, and they're well behind the game when it comes to important architecture features like 64 bit. A 32 bit "server" architecture is a laughable concept.
The real thing that ARM has that x86 doesn't? You can license their core and put it in your SoC, where all the important stuff actually lives.
We see this same ARM article every few weeks. It's the same bull every time. I'm starting to expect that tomorrow I'll see slashdot / slashvertisement articles that "nature's harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube" has been proven.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Cheap product from some company that only has rendered product pics and is recommended by an Anonymous Coward who is posting about it multiple times.
Spam much?
I have a number of applications where I want a low powered "desktop" form factor. That probably means Mini-ITX or something like that. The canonical example? A home file server. It's not in use 90% of the time, and I'd like my power bill to go down and the heat load to go down. A chip with a super low power standby mode would be nice.
Unfortunately Intel chips don't get that power sippy even when speed-stepped down. VIA makes some semi-interesting chips, but they seem to be integrated with a bunch of features I don't want. I understand the HTPC market is big, but I don't need HDMI out on my file server. What's more, even providing two SATA ports seems to be the exception, not the rule.
I think an ARM "server board" in a mini-ITX factor would sell well. 6xSata, GigaBit Ethernet (even if it can't quite fill it), lots of DIMM slots so you can buy lower density cheaper DIMMS, but still keep lots of cache in memory for things like file servers.
plug computers are going for US$ 99.
some chinese tablets are going for about that, and some of them already have 800 MHz CPUs with HDMI and full USB hosts. ad a cheap USB keyboard and a stand to keep it upright and you're set.
What ? Me, worry ?
Aye, I remember the Beeb range well. I still have the old Master Series machine (that model had a slightly updated CPU, a 65C12 IIRC) in a draw under my bed. It still works too, though many of the old floppy disks don't (I powered it on a few months ago for a nostalgia hit - the Elite disk still seems healthy and I "wasted" an hour or two with it). I cut my programming teeth on that machine (BBC Basic and 6502 family assembler).
The idea here is something like the AppleTV but without it being locked down so it's more like an ION nettop.
Plug in your install media and fire it up...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe too much, too early? I still don't understand why Transmeta failed.
I ran Linux on my last Apple TV. I don't see why I couldn't run it on my current AppleTV or any other modern ARM.
ARM machines aren't THAT pathetic.
A suitable GPU might even make them good enough for video-centric stuff.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think Win8 for ARM devices will approach this... with .Net (managed code) a lot more common, switching out the underlying architecture becomes much less problematic, and far easier for application developers to tweak for portability to the new platform. See what Mono, Moonlight etc for some examples, though not from MS, the concepts can be very similar.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
no, The article (18 months old) says Windows 7 won't be supported on arm: Microsoft Corp., whose Windows operating system is installed onto the vast majority of PCs, said that the next-generation Windows 7 OS will not support ARM chips since Microsoft believes that they would not provide adequate performance. ARM microprocessors are still supported by Windows Mobile operating system,
Yup. :) Well, kinda. We can watch streaming media on it (like Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube), put DVDs in an USB DVD player, or create original content on my regular workstation, and play it over the network. If we want streaming music, I can start it, and then turn the projector off, or put on the visualization of my choice playing in the application of my choice.
I had considered doing MythBox, or a whole variety of others, but opted to just go with a regular OS, and the huge variety of media players available.
It doesn't seem fancy, until I switch over to a web browser, or the video game of my choice. It's not a gaming machine, but it'll do ok some of the time. since everything is pretty standard, I can drag my gaming machine into the room, and just switch the boxes. (move the video and audio cables) and voila. It's set up with VGA, DVI and S/PDIF, which all my current stuff supports.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Oh yeah. I meant this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Because it'd have to run Windows?
You are confusing two things here. Windows 7 is a PC OS. The article you linked and your comments are correct about that, it does not support ARM.
The other issue is Windows Phone 7. It is a complete break from previous versions of Windows Mobile. Neither is a desktop OS, and both run on ARM processors. It is not wrong to claim that Windows Phone 7 is completely new, redesigned from the ground up. It is as they claim.
Microsoft is betting on Windows Phone software for one part of its mobile story, and that part runs on ARM. The other side of the coin is the PC Windows side, which is betting on building more full-PC-function and backwards-compatible tablets than iOS and Andriod can. They may lose that bet, but it's not as confusing as you make it out to be.
Well, it seemed like a simple exercise for them to port back and forth to PPC when they maintained an nt kernel and migrated xbox to xbox 360. But by then, PPC had changed from a pure RISC architecture to a completely different animal anyway. (ironic how Apple migrated the opposite direction at about the same time, pretty much with similar ease, based on maintenance of legacy NeXT x86 code they had in their back pocket. . . I'll say that my 8 year old dual G5 may be slow compared to a brand new Power Mac, but it still rips CD's about 4 times faster because of those motorola vector units. :)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Apple did it when they went with OSX. A completely new OS
Completely new ... in the mid-80s when it was called NextStep. (Program a NeXT and then transition to OS X -- you'll see what I mean.) It might have been completely new to the Macintosh user/dev communities, but it was actually a pretty old OS (~15 years or so) by the time OS X shipped as the default OS on Macs (2002). And, it still had the "blue box," the Classic layer, and the Carbon APIs. (The NextStep/Sun APIs are Cocoa.)
geek. lawyer.
I'm not sure about "posting about it multiple times" I am the first post author , i just didn't have access to my password ring at the time.
I'm geniunaly interested in a ~$50 desktop or thin client. If arm cores are so cheap , and mass production is cheap , i can't understand why there's no product in this price range. I don't want a $150 product , neither do i want a $200 one. I want something say way under $100. For two hundred i can build myself a cheap x86 desktop that overpowers anything arm based.
I would estimate that branded computers account for less than 20% of the market share where i live. (this is an eyeball figure) , so HP and Dell would have little to do with it. People would buy a cheap-ass "Internet" system though.
So you are saying you are running an arm HTPC and you can stream netflix? How does that work exactly?
zosxavius photography
It uses the Freescale i.MX515 soc. The gpu is some sort of Imageon. I think Freescale licensed the gpu design before AMD sold it to Qualcomm who renamed it Adreno. The i.MX515 uses an Open Source kernel shim for the gpu and a closed source user space library for doing OpenGL. At least this was the situation last December. The library is entirely in user space, which means it should be easier to reverse engineer than a driver that is partly in kernel space. Dave Airlie, maintainer of the drm portion of the kernel, has rejected the kernel shim from inclusion in the kernel. He rejects all patches to the kernel that come his way that can not be used by open source code in userspace.
People would buy a cheap-ass "Internet" system though.
See, that's the problem. If it can't run decent-res, full-speed Flash and Java so that the casual games work just like their other machines, and can't run a full memory-hungry web browser so that all the modern JS-heavy dynamic sites interact well, it's not a usable "Internet" system. Plunking a 700MHz single-core ARM and 256MB of RAM into a $50 box isn't going to cut it for the general web-browsing consumer. Try it with a cutting-edge full-featured ARM SoC, and you'll start approaching $30-40 for just the chip (semi-educated guess based on older generations).
I.E. the answer is no.
Watch this Heartland Institute video