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Is ARM Ever Coming To the Desktop?
First time accepted submitter bingbangboom writes "Where are the ARM powered desktops? I finally see some desktop models however they are relegated to "developer" models with USD200+ price tags (trimslice, etc). Raspberry Pi seems to be the only thing that will be priced correctly, have the right amount of features, and may actually be released. Is the software side holding ARM desktops back? Everyone seems to be foaming at the mouth about anything with a touch interface, even on the Linux side. Or are manufacturers not wanting to bring the 'netbook effect' to their desktop sales? Are ARM powered desktops destined to join the mythical smartbook?"
Look on eBay for an Archimedes.
They're rapidly becoming a collector's item, but they were on the desktop in 1987.
Seriously, what is the reason for having a desktop ARM computer? Power consumption? I don't think there's a very large market for people who will settle for tablet-like performance in order to save a few dollars a month at most on electricity compared to existing low power processors. People with power grid problems will want something that runs on a battery anyway, and a tablet/netbook makes more sense there.
Is it just for something fun to play with? Something small and portable? You can always get a small ARM tablet and hook up the HDMI to a monitor if it's the full size display and keyboard you're missing.
Not sure what touch interface has to do with anything. That could be just as easily implemented with any architecture, and it's maybe the ONE thing I agree with Steve Jobs about -- touch does NOT work as a viable input method for a desktop.
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
It was on the desktop first. I was a kid, not terribly good with money, and it was expensive, so I just missed out on being an early adopter.
it's a long story, but i've been working to get ARM-powered desktop machines and laptops into the hands of free software developers for some time.
one of the key problems are that the chinese and taiwanese factories have absolutely no software expertise whatsoever. some guy decides he got caught out by the USA and UK Governments placing embargos and tariffs on imported clothes a couple years back: his business was affected, so he goes "i know, i'll diversify, i'll make tablets, those are popular". so off he goes, he gets supplied with a GPL-violating Android OS right from the word "go" by a limited number of Chinese ODMs who are having a really hard time keeping hold of their software engineers, and it just goes downhill from there.
the other problem is, as can be seen from the insane amount of money spent by the openpandora group, that case-work for laptops etc. can well be in excess of $100,000. that means that anything like the "pegatron netbook" has to be bought in volumes of 250,000 and above in order for the R&D costs to be amortised over a reasonable period.
this is where the EOMA initiative comes in: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/PCMCIA
by reversing everything on its head, and getting free software developers a modular architecture which _could_ be dropped into a mass-volume product, the tables are turned: those Chinese Factories can be supplied *by us* - Free Software Developers - with a completed ready-to-ship OS.
so, yes there's a board which is available that is similar in size and function to the pandaboard, origen exynos board, beagleboard, IMX53QSB etc., but unlike those boards, by complying to the EOMA/PCMCIA Open Standard it would be possible to literally drop that hardware-software combination straight into a mass-volume product, with the development effort of the required motherboard being nothing more than a low-cost 2 to 4 layer board that even KiCAD, Eagle or gEDA could do.
one key part of this strategy is to leverage arduino-like boards, like the leafpad Maple:
http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/PCMCIA/MiniEngineeringBoard
anyway i think that's enough for one slashdot post. bit of background and some additional links, here:
http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=502
Developer only? What is that non-sense? The TrimSlice ships with Ubuntu ready to use. ~$200 for the feature set is a steal, IMO. Not happy without a Dell logo or something? What's the problem with the TrimSlice?
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Smarttop $129 thin client
Smartbook $199 laptop
They run Ubuntu and are based on the Freescale iMX51.
They are far more powerful than a Raspberry PI.
Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz)
3D Graphics Processing Unit
WXGA display support (HDMI)
Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder (currently not supported by the included software)
512MB RAM
8GB Internal SSD
10/100Mbit/s Ethernet
802.11 b/g/n WiFi
SDHC card reader
2 x USB 2.0 ports
Audio jack for headset
Built-in speaker
10.1" TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution
Freescale i.MX515 (ARM Cortex-A8 800MHz)
3D Graphics Processing Unit
Multi-format High-Definition hardware video decoder
16GB Nand Flash
External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2)
Internal MicroSD slot
802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch)
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
2 x USB 2.0 ports
Phone jack for headset
Built-in 1.3MP video camera
Built-in microphone
Built-in stereo speaker
I'm sorry but.....why? WTF would you want ARM on the desktop? Are you living in a mud hut in Zambundi and don't have any electricity to spare for a desktop?
Lets be honest folks, the big selling point of ARM is how cheap it is on batteries. Well guess what you do NOT need when you are inside? Why that would be a battery! See that plug on the wall right in front of you?
Cycle for cycle x86 stomps the living shit out of ARM, it just uses more power to do so than most mobiles can afford due to the fact we haven't had a real breakthrough in battery tech in ages. Well that and the fashionistas at Apple have made iSliver batteries the "in" thing in which means you have to power the thing on a battery the width of a tic tac. I don't care if you put 8 cores on the thing, a bottom o' the line AMD quad, even the low power AMD quads, will stomp the living shit out of ARM. drop in an i series and it isn't even funny how badly it gets stomped.
Like everything else it is about using the right tool for the job. ARM royally kicks ass in mobile, embedded, and in places where you need a device that'll take milspec levels of abuse due to the fact you can run it fanless. X86 kicks ass in desktop and laptop where you want more performance and don't mind giving up some battery life for it. But ARM on the desktop makes about as much sense as stuffing an i series into your phone, that is none at all. The majority of code out there is x86, even on Linux x86 outnumbers ARM code by a pretty wide margin. So unless you just really really REALLY want the Droid version of Angry birds on your desktop it just seems more than a little stupid to be running a mobile chip in a place where you are right beside a plug in.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is a bizarre claim, considering the majority of code out there is in C or in higher level languages like Java, Cobol, C# and so on, so technically the processor architecture is irrelevant for most code.
As to Linux, there are small pieces of the kernel written in assembly, but these have been rewritten so Linux can run on a number of non-x86 platforms. The vast bulk of Linux and its userland tools are written in C, so the underlying architecture is irrelevant. Want to run emacs on an ARM variant of Linux, well, just bloody well compile it for that ARM processor.
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I'm sorry but.....why? WTF would you want ARM on the desktop? Are you living in a mud hut in Zambundi and don't have any electricity to spare for a desktop?
Lets be honest folks, the big selling point of ARM is how cheap it is on batteries. Well guess what you do NOT need when you are inside? Why that would be a battery! See that plug on the wall right in front of you?
You know, it's just possible some people might want to conserve electricity. Or even shave a couple of bucks off the old electricity bill. Just because you can use a resource, doesn't mean you should. I have running water, but I don't just leave the faucet on all day in case I might want a glass of water.
I don't know, but if you had one of those little portable solar cells, could you just power an arm laptop anywhere?
Smudging the screen isn't the problem. The problem is holding your arm up for long periods of time, or the repetitive motion of raising your arm up to touch the screen. That's not something most deskjockeys are going to be doing a lot. It's horrible for ergonomics.
A standalone touch pad doesn't have that problem.
Most phones are held in the hands with lowered arms, hence it's not a problem for those devices.
Hell, laptops were being sold with touch pads as the primary pointing interface. Not much different from a desktop, really.
I don't think any particular feature of touch pads was the perceived problem. But then, you seem prejudiced against Jobs, so my reply is likely pointless.
I want silence. COMPLETE silence.
I want a computer you can barely find, it's so small and unobtrusive.
I want a computer so cool it can be covered in papers and crap without me worrying about it overheating.
I want devices that are dirt cheap to buy and dirt cheap to run, because I want them in every room, on all the time.
I want ARM.
ARM licenses IP. Intel sells chips.
If you license a core from ARM you can put it down on a chip, then put down your other logic (north/south bridge, interface logic like USB) on the same chip. Then you can end up with your entire system on a chip.
With Intel you have to buy a CPU, buy a north/southbridge. If you want custom interfaces beyond that, that's more chips too.
So the net effect is that the Intel-based system uses more chips and that means it costs more, uses more power and is larger. Using more power means you need to put in a larger power supply, that costs more. If it's battery-powered, that means it needs a larger battery, that costs more. Larger in and of itself makes something more expensive to make as it requires more materials. And then it being larger means it costs more to ship from where it is made to the customer. And then finally every increase in costs also means more increase in on-the-shelf price because you not only have to cover the higher costs, but the OEM and retail margins on the costs.
The next effect is that ARM devices will be cheaper to buy and to run. And in the case of portable devices, more sleek too.
This may not matter to some customers but to other customers lower costs means a lot.
Performance is an issue. We have ARMs already in the pipe (dual-core ARM A15) which have sufficient power for most uses and ARM will certainly have even faster cores later.
I see a strong future for ARM in laptops and in home computers. No, not in tower computers but those make up a shrinking part of the market already.
Finally, as others have said, be careful about agreeing with Steve Jobs. He's a consummate liar. Just because he says he doesn't like touch for the desktop doesn't necessarily mean much. It means Apple doesn't deliver touch on the desktop today, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything more. Apple could flip on this at any time like on the video iPod.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Lol...
You probably missed the Windows 8 presentation.
Not only does Windows 8 and the upcomming Office run on ARM, there is already a production ready ARM laptop that's going to be sold.
Image larger than iPad battery life and weeks of standby, a full HD resolution, accelerated x264 full HD video playback. Internet Explorer 10 full acceleration and DX11.
No fans. No noice. No overheating on your lap. Dirt cheap. Light. Fast for desktop use.
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Here be signatures
BAFTA video: http://bcove.me/tux4wa2x The part most pertaining to the current thread is at 14:32
Making the situation even worse is the fact that there is a complete lack of standardization on the ARM platform, especially for all the peripherals. But even for the core itself there are many different variants. This can be an advantage for embedded developers, because it gives you lots of choices.
For binary software vendors, it's a nightmare, because they would have to support all these different versions.
This is a bizarre claim, considering the majority of code out there is in C or in higher level languages like Java, Cobol, C# and so on, so technically the processor architecture is irrelevant for most code.
Speaking as someone who has ported an actually quite well written (relatively) game interpreter from x86 to arm: bwahahaha. For java/C# it's feasible (although even then, four out of five programs will require at least some superficial code changes), but porting anything written in C is going to be a headache at best, and more likely a complete nightmare - and that goes doubly for C++ actually, at least the way it's commonly written.
I am trolling
Once code's been ported to two or three architectures these problems don't tend to come up any more (because the first couple of changes reveal all your implicit assumptions that could be broken), and that's true of a lot of open source projects. But any code that's only ever run on one platform will have portability issues. You don't have to take my word for it - try it yourself, pick a random project that doesn't release non-x86 builds off sourceforge and try and build it for arm.
I am trolling
ARM was originally developed as a desktop CPU, and it was on the desktop - it's been and gone.
ARM stood originally for Acorn Risc Machine, it was developed by Acorn because they couldn't find an adequate processor for what they wanted to do to follow on from the 6502. Many of the CISC chips at the time (mid 1980s) had very poor utilization of memory bandwidth and poor interrupt response (Steve Furber in one of his talks recently on the development of the ARM - he's one of the two people who developed the first ARM CPU, pointed out in particular the National Semi 32016 (IIRC) that they were thinking of using, until they found out the multiply instruction took over 100 clock cycles and could not be interrupted).
They also wanted ARM to be low power, not to make their new line of desktop computers energy efficient particularly, but because they needed it to be cheap so the computers could be affordable. If they could get it under 1 watt, they could use plastic packaging instead of ceramic packaging which reduces the cost by an order of magnitude. They had no tools for estimating power, so they just designed *everything* on the chip for low power. When they got the first samples back from the fab, they were blown away when they found the chip consumed 0.1 watts - they had massively overachieved.
We had the Acorn Archimedes in school. IIRC, it had an 8MHz ARM and it could emulate - in software - an IBM PC with VGA graphics faster than the original IBM PC ran. That's how much faster the ARM was at the time compared to anything else around. Without needing to be in a ceramic package.
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I was aware of the N900. I still use an N800. I just didn't need an upgrade yet, and I was waiting for step 5 of the 5-step mass market process for Maemo (becoming concerned about bureaucratic interference when Meego became the company's strategy and they decided to dump Debian for Linux Foundation silliness), when the Elop Effect happened. So, no, I don't think the N900 was successful.
Have a nice time.