- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Berlioz
ARM tells Intel where to get off
ARM has been showing off its latest range of chips at the Mobile World Congress 2009 and effectively telling Chipzilla and Nvidia where to get off.
While world plus dog writing about how Intel is going to blast its way into the Smartphone market with its Atom, and penning yarns about how Nvidia can carve its own niche on the scene, boffins at ARM have been getting on with making stuff that punters might actually buy.
The Mobile World Congress has been seeing a number of ARM's efforts. These include the Ubuntu Alpha release on the ARM Cortex- A8 processor. Since Ubuntu 9.04 is scheduled for full release in April 2009, it could shunt both Ubuntu and Arm into a strong place in the netbook market.
As if it was hedging its bets, ARM has adapted ARMv7 architecture to run the Debian Linux-based Xandros distribution.
Other things on show were a Pegatron Netbook and Nettop running the ARM Cortex-A8 processor. They are ultra slim, high performance, low power and low-cost with full Internet connectivity and extended battery life. Apparently we will see them later this year.
Another thing at the ARM stand was the Thinkfree Mobile which is running on the ARMv6 architecture and powered by Java.
It also looks like ARM has got Phoenix HyperSpace working on the ARMCortex-A8 processor.
ARM said HyperSpace has been optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8 and will be jacked under bonnet of netbooks and mobile devices powered by ARM processors.
Wistron is running a demonstration of something called a P/Book which has an 11.1-inch screen. Both are powered with ARM processors based on the ARMv7 architecture and will be available in 2009.
It is worth pointing out that the 11-inch plus market is something that our chums in Nvidia are desperate to get into because this sort of gear needs more graphics which is supposed to be its forte.
More than 10 billion ARM-powered phone-like gadgets have been flogged world-wide so far. µ
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NVIDIA is flogging their Tegra product line, which is based around an ARM core. You're confused about ION, but Tegra is the most capable SOC in the Smartphone or MID space.
nVidia's Tegra is ARM tech.... and ARM doesn't make their chips, they design chips and others make'em and bung'em into SOC designs... So why would ARM tell nVidia off? Logic error much?
ARM please don't restrict the laptop makers by screensize for each cpu.
Allow the Acer's and Dells to supply us with whatever we want. Namely £300 10-15 inch netbook/laptop capable of running email, openoffice, gps, 3g, skype, wifi etc.
Intel restricts laptop makers from putting cheaper cpu's into the larger screen laptops, because Intel controls large parts of the market. Intel want's customers to pay Intel more if they opt for a larger screen. This means opportunity for Arm, AMD, VIA etc.
Just a couple of comments. The article inaccurately states that ARM has adapted its architecture to work with Xandros linux. The ARM architecture is a fixed entity, and it is the linux distribution that is bent around to fit in with the OS friendly parts of the architecture.
Secondly, ARM does not build final products. They are several layers away from the OEMs/ODMs, and merely license RTL designs to semiconductor companies. These companies manufacture the CPUs/peripherals into SoCs, which are then selected by device/equipment manufacturers for design into their devices. So the notion that ARM is either interested in, or capable of, controlling how big a screen is on a device is entirely nonsensical. Such decisions are entirely up to the company designing the product. In fact, ARM does not know every product that its designs have ended up in, so many are there. It would be impossible to know.