OLPC Set To Dump x86 For Arm Chips In XO 2 274
angry tapir writes with this excerpt from Good Gear Guide: "One Laptop Per Child is set to dump x86 processors, instead opting to put low-power Arm-based processors in its next-generation XO-2 laptop with the aim of improving battery life. The nonprofit is 'almost' committed to putting the Arm-based chip in the next-generation XO-2 laptop, which is due for release in 18 months, according to Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC. The XO-1 laptop currently ships with Advanced Micro Devices' aging Geode chip, which is based on an x86 design."
Now with Shoulder & Elbow Joint Technology! (Score:5, Funny)
OLPC Set To Dump x86 For Arm Chips In XO 2
I'm sorry, I thought ARM is an acronym for Advanced RISC Machine (formerly Acorn RISC Machine) [wikipedia.org]. Why am I seeing it used as "Arm"?
Or is there something I don't know about the processing power of two of my appendages?
Re:Now with Shoulder & Elbow Joint Technology! (Score:5, Funny)
Or is there something I don't know about the processing power of two of my appendages?
*flexes*
Slashdot, I'd like you to meet Blue and Cray.
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I hear your fore arm is pretty powerful.
Re:Now with Shoulder & Elbow Joint Technology! (Score:5, Funny)
I hear your fore arm is pretty powerful.
A wise old mariner with powerful fore arms once said: "I yam what I yam."
Re:Now with Shoulder & Elbow Joint Technology! (Score:5, Funny)
Four ARMS? Were they arranged in a beowulf cluster?
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In Germany, where we usually write things together, if they describe one thing, we call that error a "Deppenleerzeichen" ("moron's blank"?).
Don't mess with the ARM... (Score:2)
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+1, Pedantic
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Well I happen to know for a fact that in many languages, if you can say it out loud as a word, it should be spelled with only the initial letter capitalised. English is however to bloated to find such well-defined rules.
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While technically an acronym, it's been around long enough to lose the all caps in many minds. Especially with plays like StrongARM.
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And "dran" also means 'attached', so 'arm dran' means being badly off as well as 'arm is attached'.
Which leads to the saying:
"Lieber arm dran als Arm ab"
Better be badly off than to lose an arm :-)
What does this mean for their WinXP models? (Score:2)
I'm uninitiated at the arts of ARM, and am too lazy to look it up.
Re:What does this mean for their WinXP models? (Score:5, Informative)
It would mean no Windows. ARM is not an x86 architecture.
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Windows CE runs on ARM [arm.com]. Granted, CE doesn't have the level of application support you'll find in other versions of Windows though.
Re:What does this mean for their WinXP models? (Score:4, Informative)
The level of support?
It flat out won't run x86 code.
Whereas debian and other linuxes have full distros aimed at ARM.
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I believe the iPhone runs on ARM. They should switch to iPhone OS. Unfortunately the version of Linux on the XO is sort of retarded. I got one to develop programs for and absolutely hate the XO desktop. It's really poorly designed IMO. Apple probably wouldn't license the iPhone OS to them though. So maybe a Linux distro with a more iPhone-like experience?
The XO hardware is pretty good but the software needs some serious work. It just feels experimental and poorly thought out.
Re:What does this mean for their WinXP models? (Score:4, Informative)
WinCE (What were they thinking when they picked that name???) does not run standard windows apps. Since this is the reason many stick with windows, it kind of kills that whole aspect. WinCE is the core behind Windows Mobile and some embedded systems, and would not likely work well in a full laptop.
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That it went together with their other products of the time? WinME and WinNT?
"Yes! You too can harness the speed of WIndows across our whole Family of products! CE-ME-NT!"
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I will play the devil's advocate. I love my Gentoo/GNU/Linux/KDE box more than any system before. But you picked the wrong examples (except for Firefox).
Open Office -- this has to be said -- is a pile of trash, that can only be considered good, if you come from MS Office or its clones. If you want to see a good interface, look at the InfoBox of Lotus SmartSuite. (Which is unfortunately a pretty outdated office suite, and is my number one wish for becoming open source.) Oh, and as far as I know (correct me i
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But it needs an interface made for non-programmers (not going to happen anytime soon) and a new name. Then it can stand a chance against Photoshop
1. There was a project to do this, gimpshop, but I don't know how successful it was.
2. This little topic always makes me slightly angry. How many of the people saying "Gimp is no photoshop" actually paid for photoshop?
It must be one of the most widely pirated apps out there, yet somehow every man and his dog seem to complain it's one of the things stopping them mo
Oh dear God no (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a developer who ports Windows CE to devices. All day, every day. Teach classes on it even. Been doing it since CE 3.0. Currently on 6.0.
CE makes a passable embedded/PDA device, but there is no way in the world you'd want it on a laptop.
It just isn't made for that kind of a setup. No native compilers, no swap file. Expensive license restrictions. It's less like a computer and more like a gadget in terms of overall feel.
Use Linux instead.
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It wasn't a success, but it wasn't a brick, either.
I remember those kinds of CE devices from that era. You're right. Not a brick, not a success. Definitely something in-between.
I just can't see CE as a desktop OS, no matter how small. You need Platform Builder to tweak the OS. No swap file, so you have a hard limit on memory. No native compilers. Maximum number of processes is 32, unless you run CE6 where they bumped it up to 32k.
Try to imagine Openoffice running on a CE device, what that woul
That would mean they are dumber.... (Score:2)
... than they have been so far...
Don't blame Bill for this one (Score:3, Insightful)
The XO was a product of the western media lab -
custom hardware, FOSS and a western - constructivist - philosophy of education bundled into an all or nothing package for the third world education minister.
His alternative was the Classmate - a straight-line path to the higher grades, the trade school or college, the job market -
for the students who had a real shot at making it that far.
Full Windows on ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFA
"Like many, we are urging Microsoft to make Windows -- not Windows Mobile -- available on the Arm. This is a complex question for them," Negroponte said.
OLPC is in talks with Microsoft to develop a version of a full Windows OS for XO-2, Negroponte said. The XO-2 is still 18 months away from release, so "a lot can change with regard to Microsoft and Arm," Negroponte said.
I don't really see this working. Windows has run on Risc before of course, but almost no one ported their applications to any of the Risc platforms. And a top of the line Arm (a Snapdragon or Cortex A8) is still less powerful than a bottom of the line x86 (Intel Atom), so it's not like you can run x86 binaries at an acceptable speed through emulation, like Dec tried with FX!32 on the Alpha.
Re:Full Windows on ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole excuse people use for running Windows is it runs their applications. Seeing as how they're all for x86, porting Windows itself is only 1% of the issue.
Re:Full Windows on ARM (Score:4, Insightful)
That should only be the case for native applications. .NET applications (fully MSIL) is should not matter as long as the runtime is available..
For pure
Re:Full Windows on ARM (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen surprisingly few pure .NET desktop applications on Windows. Most use P/Invoke and/or COM interop in more than one place, often to call some third-party C++ library.
Re:Full Windows on ARM (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a MS-DOS EMU app for my HP Journada 720 (Windows HPC on a 255Mhz ARM chip), and for anything beyond rudimentary shell type commands, it was unusably slow.
Linux + ARM however would be lovely. I've got all sorts of daemons crunching instructions on my Western Digital MyBook World NAS. Still, by default, I believe they lack an FPU. I wonder if they'd add a coprocessor...
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"Even Windows 7 potentially has some DOS 1.0 code..."
What? You realize that Windows 7 lineage traces to Windows NT which ran on non-x86 processors, right? No DOS code.
I guess if by "potentially" you meant zero potential then that's right.
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I suppose it depends on whether any of the vm86 mode in Windows 9x made it into Win2k and beyond.
If any of the 16-bit ASM code behind the various int 21h DOS calls was retained in the real-mode emulation layer then one could say modern Windows still has DOS code still in it.
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They could always "leverage" Open Source. WINE and qemu should do the job :-)
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That's Server 2003, which is the most recent version I've got handy. The assertion that there's some legacy code in Windows 7 somewhere is a reasonable one.
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MS-DOS 1.0 was released in '81 and work on the OS2/NT project started in '85. Are you telling me that you are completely sure that none of the code from one project was recycled into a project that was started four years later?
If anything, I'd be willing to bet that if they shared any coders, there's got to be some recycling on some level, no matter how unimportant. Avoiding reinvention of the wheel is not a new concept.
I personally don't care one way or another, it's just that you seem to be awfully arro
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Um no.
ARMv4 lacks the FPU. The newer Marvell chips certainly have FPUs now. ARM is great!
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Probably... Windows in my cell phone eats my battery alive, and sometimes the interface gets unreasonably slow, so it's probably munching on cycles too :)
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I may be kind of cynical, but it seems ot me the OLPC project is now saying they recognize a lower power, less expensive processor would be a major benefit to their stated goals...but they can't (or really don't want to) adopt it anyway unless Microsoft® gives them the "okay", since they've effectively abandoned already-capable-of-running-on-ARM Linux for Microsoft.
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I would think the new marvell sheeva chips are pretty close. They run in the 1.2-1.6 GHz range.
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I hate Windows CE devices too. They are hard to use and developing for them feels like they are a bastard step child. Most programs aren't available for them and when they are they also feel like crappy stripped down versions that don't work well.
I'm currently working on moving a major project from WinCE based devices to iPhone based devices. Much cheaper to build on and a better user experience.
Like many? Who are those many? (Score:2)
I don't understand Mr Negroponte. His natural allies would be the geeks moving the wheels of Linux.
The project would save substantial amounts of money and would provide a flexible, extensible machine for children to wander and learn.
In Windows you are straight-jacked to do whatever the licenses you are given allow you to do, and you have to pay for the privilege and enjoy it. It is like paying for a bad tempered dominatrix ...
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Why would you want to run x86 binaries? Most x86 programs are so unoptimized, that if you actually looked at the code, it'd make your eyes bleed. (figuratively, of course)
One advantage of ARM CPUs is a lot of software to run on them still has to be made or ported. Since only the most committed (and skilled?) developers are doing that at this stage, my hope is ARM software will have a more efficient baseline.
Considering how far most Windows apps have slid, this isn't unreasonable or difficult.
Its irrelevant anyway... (Score:3, Insightful)
The OLPC project is dying. Four years ago, you didn't have the netbooks. Now you do.
Shifting to ARM will simply ensure the death of the OLPC project, because being able to run real windows is an underappreciated benefit of x86.
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Or for that matter, being able to run OS X. For example, by all accounts the Dell Mini 9 can be turned into an excellent low-cost Hackintosh.
But you are correct about the effect of the netbook market on the OLPC project. The OLPC was a visionary idea, but visionaries rarely outlast the revolutions they help create.
Re:Its irrelevant anyway... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure the scope of the OLPC is not for commercial use. Why would anyone care if it runs Windows? It's a computer. It's better than nothing.
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There's a sort of chicken-and-egg argument out there, that since Windows is what is used in 'real business', that kids should be educated on Windows
No.
Education should not ever be a singular streamlined production line of teaching children how to work in the business world. This applies to every level of education, from Grade K->12->PhD.
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Personally, I'd leap at the opportunity to buy a decent n(et|ote)book with an ARM inside it. But maybe that's just me.
The only big benefit of Windows is that it runs enterprise apps and/or that it's what you're used to. OLPC is not aimed at enterprises or at people with existing experience of computers, so why would OLPC users care about having Windows?
Does Ubuntu run on ARM? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nothing at all. What's the incentive for people to use an OS from an manufacturer who deems them worthy of crapware?
Re:Does Ubuntu run on ARM? (Score:4, Funny)
Nothing at all. What's the incentive for people to use an OS from an manufacturer who deems them worthy of crapware?
Masochism.
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My answer was laziness, which isn't really an incentive, per se. I'll change my vote to masochism.
Re:Does Ubuntu run on ARM? (Score:5, Informative)
You know there is something called debian which runs on all sorts of architectures. And this debian resembles ubuntu somewhat :P Relevant link: http://www.debian.org/ports
Metamoderation (Score:2)
Debian Maintains An ARM Distro (Score:2)
It work great. I run it on an nslu2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 [wikipedia.org]
How much power saving are we talking about here? It seems to me the LCD panel/backlight are by far the biggest consumer of battery power.
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It seems to me the LCD panel/backlight are by far the biggest consumer of battery power.
Don't forget that the XO screen has a monochrome no-backlight (reflective) mode.
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How much power saving are we talking about here?
Probably not too much since the Geode uses about .8 watts according to the specs.
Re:Does Ubuntu run on ARM? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft wouldn't need to artificially limit an ARM port of Windows to only allow three applications to run at a time, since there would only be about three applications available for the platform.
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Applications.
Perhaps the largest argument in favor of windows on x86 is that virtually every bit of legacy software that somebody or other absolutely cannot live without for whatever reason runs on it. There is zero chance of most Wintel legacy software ever being ported to ARM(not
Re:Does Ubuntu run on ARM? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is basically a weakness of proprietary software in general...
We've had x86_64 for what, 6 years now? Windows XP got ported pretty fast, but driver support is still awful since most hardware vendors haven't bothered to port their drivers. And true 64-bit app support is even worse.
On the other hand, the Linux kernel got ported to x86_64 shortly before the physical processors were actually available. I was running a full-blown Debian distro on it a couple months later. All the apps were open-source and the kernel makes great efforts to design device drivers for portability, and so for distro maintainers it was largely a matter of just recompiling the packages.
What lags behind in 64-bit support under Linux? Surprise, surprise, it's closed-source stuff like Flash and video drivers.
Closed-source software develops a massive amount of inertia against architecture changes. With open-source, as soon as one developer decides to recompile for the new architecture, maybe tweaks the code a bit, you're off and running.
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Flash Player 10 for x86-64 Linux:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes_64bit.html [adobe.com]
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Time for OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember clearly that /. reported that Steve Jobs had originally agreed to license OS X to the OLPC project for free (as in beer), but that the offer was refused.
Since it is a well-known fact that Apple has had OS X working on an ARM architecture in the iPhone and iPod Touch for nearly 2 years now, it would seem a no-brainer at this point for OLPC to take Apple up on their offer.
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Do you honestly think it would be MORE work than porting XP to ARM? Or Ubuntu (which I gather has NOT been sucessfully ported to ARM yet). I believe there are embedded Linuces that do run on ARM, but those are not "desktop" distros any more than you claim that the iPod Touch/iPhone version of OS X is. So, what's your point?
I never said that it would just be a matter of downloading the iPod Touch firmware into an OLPC machine and rebooting. But remember this: We're talking about a FUTURE product, not an exis
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Sure cross compiling for ARM is hard [slashdot.org] but people do it, dev versions of the Pandora runs desktop Linux fine. It actually pretty easy to run Linux on ARM.
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I'm pretty sure Debian can be used for desktops. I used to run Debian on my Psion Series 5mx, which was much less powerful than the specs for these new ARM-based SCCs.
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Of course they could do it, it's just that offering an existing product (OS X for x86) is not the same as offering the more-costly option of porting it to another platform. There's no reason to believe that Jobs' offer would have implied that they were willing to spend the engineering dollars required to port OS X to whatever platform OLPC decides to use.
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It's not as if Apple has had ANY success or experience porting their software to (or writing new software for) an ARM architecture. Oh wait.
I mean, it's not as if they have any experience writing software that integrates well across multiple hardware platforms. Oh wait.
I mean, it's not as if they have any experience designing clean & usable interfaces that people generally find easy to learn, and which make more
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This isn't Mac vs. Windows, it's o
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I paid $200 for my XO in the G1G1 deal. 6 months later I paid $200 for my iPhone 3G. The iPhone has 8 times the capacity, Wifi so easy a kid can configure it, and is hands down a better 'computer' than the XO in my opinion. Sure, it doesn't have Python, but coding on the tiny keyboard was a pain anyhow.
Apple has been making computers for education long before Negroponte. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes ahead again. Think of all the educational apps that can be built with the iPhone SDK and distribute fo
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I wonder if the big batch of 10" touchscreen LCD panels they are rumored to have bought are for an educational market killer.
Cue Transmeta... (Score:3, Funny)
...oh yeah, nevermind.
Damn.
Anti-microsoft? (Score:2)
Negroponte probably got sick of pigs heads on his doorstep and anonymous phone calls at 4am.
Poor OLPC (Score:4, Interesting)
They jettisoned Sugar, and they keep courting Microsoft. So sad. I wish the article would have explored the "open source" hardware concept. No idea what the heck that means from the article or for OLPC:
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They jettisoned Sugar, and they keep courting Microsoft. So sad. I wish the article would have explored the "open source" hardware concept. No idea what the heck that means from the article or for OLPC:
If OLPC is considering truly open source hardware... why are they only considering ARM as an alternative architecture? How about MIPS?
There are a bunch of patents on the ARM architecture [wikipedia.org] and ARM has been quite aggressive [cnn.com] at shutting down open-source reimplementations in the embryonic stage.
MIPS has several open-source implementations (a good guide to them here [jopwiki.com]) which can actually run on real hardware in FPGAs. I've tried 'em. There are a couple patents on the instruction set which are expiring soon, but
No successor (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that AMD is not planning a successor to the Geode [engadget.com] processor used in the XO-1 probably influenced this decision, at least in part. In 18 months, there may not be any Geodes remaining.
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Well, they could switch to the Intel Atom chip. But the ARM makes more sense. The only reason I can see for using an x86 chip is binary compatibility, and it's not like that's a big issue for a project that's so thoroughly open source. I never quite understood why they went with the Geode in the first place. Because Quanta gave them a good price on the motherboards?
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Why make a new Geode? They have Imageon, Sempron, Turion, and Conesus (part of the Yukon platform). They just sold off their small device graphics chips division to Qualcomm.
AMD holds a large position in their very recently spun off GlobalFoundries, which is likely to be competitive to fabricate some ARM-based chips and other things AMD doesn't itself design.
I'd say their bases are pretty well covered without the Geode.
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http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/274414/amd_sees_no_geode_chip_replacement_sight [idg.com.au]
"There are no plans for a follow-on product to today's available AMD Geode LX products, but we expect to make this very successful processor available to customers as long as the market demands," said Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.
The chip is too old for further development, said Dean McCarron, president for Mercury Research. Chip designs and manufacturing processes have improved since it was first introduced.
Sums it up nicely. They'll still make them as long as there is a demand, but no more architecture improvements.
If they want a drop in replacement, they'll have to contact VIA. Please ignore the price. :P
No Change (Score:5, Insightful)
So you'd get all of the disadvantages of Windows, while simultaneously loosing the only real advantage it has, plentiful software. Smart.
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Yeah, this seems like the worst of all worlds.
Anybody remember Windows NT for the Alpha, MIPS, or PPC? No. Me neither.
No one bought them because there was no support. Closed-source vendors never want to port their software to new architectures, even very similar ones.
Open-source projects developed at least TWO pretty decent reimplementations of Adobe Flash (SWFDEC and Gnash), a moving target, before Adobe got around to a beta for the 64-bit version of its closed source Flash. Lame!
This is fine; close to native DS virtulisation?! (Score:2)
I do not think Microsoft will work on an ARM port, even something that translates x86 to ARM because the ARM processor is likely to be way too slow for this.
Nintendo DS runs on an ARM architecture. Maybe now we can run those games at full speed on another device? Certainly now with an emulator on this device there would be less translation and more instruction passing. Great!
Same goes for any other ARM-based processor device and emulation.
Wine will not run on this and neither will Windows. I am so fine with
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Re:Now they can get the keyboard back (Score:4, Funny)
A keyboard. How quaint. (cracks knuckles)
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Use the mouse.
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Good morning, Dave.
Re:Why is this highlighted? (Score:5, Funny)
It was angry, but it seems to have calmed down now.
Re:still pissed at Intel.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, actually the netbook makers such as Asus are trying to move towards ARM-based machines with Linux so that they can reach much lower price points. ;-)
In some way it makes more sense than the x86 Linux offering they had: why pay for x86 compatibility if the users aren't going to be able to install Word or the windows drivers for the printer they just bought? You might as well go fully incompatible and buy cheaper chips that use less power etc.
As nobody had predicted the success of netbooks and the reasons of that success are not completely clear, it makes sense to try the ARM approach just in case it's going to be very successful.
I believe that some people run AmigaOS on their netbook by the way
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Yeah, what an idiot, no one would ever buy one of those [apple.com].
Re:still pissed at Intel.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:still pissed at Intel.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even a 400MHz Pentium2 will run circles around those 1GHz ARM CPUs.
Nowhere near true. Clock for clock, the Cortex A8 has similar performance to the Pentium-M.
That's the point, really, isn't it? ARM chips need special hardware DSPs for just about ANYTHING you want to do.
No, but it's more power efficient. A 1.5GHz Pentium M can't decode 720p H.264 without dropping frames, while the DSP on a typical A8-based SoC can handle it easily in around 200mW. Doing the same thing on something like an Atom CPU would take around 2-4W. You're talking at least an order of magnitude power difference for doing the same task, which in a mobile device is very important.
Yes, because most people don't do anything computationally intensive with their netbooks
Exactly, and for the things that are computationally-intensive it makes more sense to have dedicated silicon that can handle it in a fraction of the power consumption. That's why most of the shipping ARM SoCs have a DSP and a GPU on die.
Re:Negroponte's Revenge on Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing is, to fulfill its objectives, the XO-2 has to be cheap, really cheap, to make. Atom based netbooks, even for the lowest spec models, in a highly competitive free market optimization process, have essentially failed to crack the $200 mark. Most are $300-$400. The OLPC guys really want less than $100. At this point, a $200 Atom netbook has already been cut to the bone, very little left(you might be able to cut out the ethernet jack and VGA; but you'd need to add the wireless mesh chip, and the more rugged case, it'd be a wash). Expecting that branch of development to halve in cost in the near future is pretty implausible.
That, rather than bitterness, is most likely the real reason. ARM is available, from a variety of vendors, at price/performance points that scale relatively smoothly from highish-end microcontrollers to modestly powerful laptop chips. x86 isn't(not yet, anyway).
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Atom based netbooks, even for the lowest spec models, in a highly competitive free market optimization process, have essentially failed to crack the $200 mark.
I don't think thats necessarily a "We can't make them for less than $200" but rather a "Everyone is going to think our laptops are crap if they are less than $200" idea.
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I suspect power consumption has more to do with it (although given that battery cost is a significant cost of a system, reducing power may reduce cost too)
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So, OLPC is switching because x86 costs a leg and an ARM?
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I for one don't welcome this particular acronymous coward ;)
Linux (and open source in general) is great because you can switch architectures much more freely. You can make choices based on technical merit, instead of being stuck on x86 due to some closed application.
For example, a few months ago, the power supply in my x86 server crashed. I mounted its hard drive with a USB adapter into an iMac, emerged the requisite servers, and continued serving the same content from the same partitions.
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Linux with ARM is superior to Windows with Intel x86 in this platform and target user group.
How's Gnash or SWF-Dec doing these days?
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What does such a move mean for backward compatibility? Aren't their applications already written with the existing OLPC in mind? I am afraid, it will not be as easy as "just recompile" to port some of them and those, who have already paid for theirs may have to pay again to be able to use them on the new hardware...
Have you ever used, um, open source software before?
It's a piece of cake to port. I regularly run Linux on my x86_64 computer at home, x86 at work, and MIPS on my router.
Porting well-written open source apps is mostly just a matter of recompiling these days. It is really "just that easy" in most cases. That's why Linux has had flawless kernel-drivers-and-apps support for x86_64 for >5 years, while Windows still doesn't.