Tegra 2 Tablets/Slates Impress At CES 48
MartinSchou writes "At this year's CES it seems that everybody and their cousin are talking about tablets, slates or smartbooks. This year, however, might be the year of Linux — if not on the desktop, then at least on your other computing devices. Amongst this years top contenders are slates running nVidia's Tegra 2 chipset, boasting 10+ hours worth of 1080p playback, with entries from Quanta, Mobinnova, ASUS, MSI and Boxee (though this is a media computer). Notion Ink have brought their Adam slate, complete with a Pixel Qi transreflective, multi-touch capable screen."
Nice; but... (Score:5, Interesting)
What remains to be seen, though, is what their linux support looks like. If all there is is "enough binary blobs to get whatever version of Android the OEM decided to install to boot, and nothing more", that is largely useless. A bunch of OEMs get cheap software. Yay, I'm so happy for them.
Given that this is Nvidia, I'd be shocked if any but the barest GPU driver support is OSS; but if the support isn't good enough to produce third party firmwares and upgrades for these devices, they might as well be Tivoized.
I love Tegra 2 (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a fantastic chip. Low power and really fast. I'm seeing about 2x the CPU performance on benchmarks over an Intel Atom N270. And the GPU performance is just amazing compared to the intel GMA stuff.
I often joke that Tegra 2's ARM could emulate x86 in software faster than an Atom could run it natively. Put that in your Windows pipe and smoke it!
New term: "smartbook" (Score:4, Interesting)
I had never seen the term "smartbook" before. This article defines a "smartbook" as a netbook with a non-x86 processor (likely ARM).
I guess it's a portmanteau of "smart phone" and "netbook". Or maybe it means "smart enough finally to use something other than x86 for an ultra-portable device".
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357758,00.asp [pcmag.com]
steveha
Re:year of *nix (Score:2, Interesting)