The most talked-about phone at 3GSM in February was Sony Ericsson's W950, which is a single chip smartphone with a midrange price. With one chip running the baseband radio and the applications processor, manufacturers can create some BoM savings, and take high end features to a mass market. But it needs a real-time OS, capable of handling the signalling stacks, something Symbian has but Microsoft doesn't, and probably won't for another couple of years. Does Linux?
"Trolltech is working with handset manufacturers that are building Linux handsets based on single core, so these phones are being prepared to ship - but the timing is hard to tell," says Nord.
MontaVista and others, he adds are developing a real time-hardened Linux supporting single core.
"There will be phones this year that use this," he says. "It can be done either by real-time extensions to the Linux kernel, such as the software developed MontaVista, or by virtualizing."
Without single chip support, Linux is left struggling in third place behind Symbian and WinMob.
Using the Newton UI is a kind of Zen. Everything it does is so obvious you wonder how anyone could possibly conceive of any other way of doing things. You write some text on the screen, and the text is added there. You draw a square, and you get a square.
And that is the mark of truly great user interface design, backed up by extensive human-computer interaction research. The interface is so good that it is 'transparent' and you don't realise that you're using it, you just do what you want to do.
IBM did it for different reasons though. They made the BIOS assembly code publicly available so it would be more difficult for clone manufacturers to hire coders who could legally reverse engineer the BIOS because they hadn't seen the original code.
You think? Try looking (that's all) at some "shared source" code, then contribute some code to an OSS project and see what MS's lawyers do to you and the project you contributed to.
MIPS's power consumption is really nowhere near as good as ARM's. Plus ARM is bringing out the desktop-level cortex next year, and AMD really has nothing comparable waiting in the wings.
Right, so is running multiple L4Linux kernels simultaneously on top of an L4 microkernel similar to running the HURD set of servers on top of an L4 microkernel?
Take a look at the RISC OS desktop. Fourteen years old and still years ahead of anything else for usability. Too bad the rest of the OS is obsolete.:-/
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I see the iPhone uses a 667 MHz ARM processor that's able to execute Java bitecode directly. I wonder what Java performance is like on this thing?
If somebody made an ARM powered laptop with solid state storage then I'd be very happy. No moving parts, silent, incredible battery life.
So what parts of the Newton live on in OS X?
Wouldn't a Ford Pinto be a Dell laptop?
Sorry, the Newton wasn't Steve's idea so it had to die.
Does this emphasis on multiple cores by chip manufacturers mean that we're reaching the upper limit of individual core speeds?
IBM did it for different reasons though. They made the BIOS assembly code publicly available so it would be more difficult for clone manufacturers to hire coders who could legally reverse engineer the BIOS because they hadn't seen the original code.
Steve Furber is a co-designer of the ARM and Amulet (asynchronous ARM) microprocessors.
In the UK we have an ISP called the the Phone Co-op, which is a consumer co-operative owned by its customers and run solely for their benefit.
Presumably that's a MIPS chip. Hopefully someone will build something similar around the ARM Cortex when it comes out.
No, it was a consequence of World War Terminus.
If somebody made an ARM powered laptop with solid state storage then I'd be very happy. No moving parts, silent, incredible battery life.
MIPS's power consumption is really nowhere near as good as ARM's. Plus ARM is bringing out the desktop-level cortex next year, and AMD really has nothing comparable waiting in the wings.
Right, so is running multiple L4Linux kernels simultaneously on top of an L4 microkernel similar to running the HURD set of servers on top of an L4 microkernel?
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Take a look at the RISC OS desktop. Fourteen years old and still years ahead of anything else for usability. Too bad the rest of the OS is obsolete. :-/
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence at my university have been going on about stuff like this for a while. Personally I think it's all science fiction but hey...
Does anybody still play that?