PC Thoughts

[andrewducker]

Considering the success of Linux laptops like the Eee, how long until someone brings out a non-x86 variant?

Are there processors out there that would be as faster, cheaper and more power-efficient?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

That's easy; rumour has it that the Palm Foleo is not dead -- they just decided not to ship it at the time. Since Palm did their huge public wobble, the Eee has proven that the concept wasn't wrong; they were just a little over-priced and under-spec. So unless Palm are even deeper in the tank than I thought, it's not unlikely that a Foleo-Mark-Two will surface in the next year. (ARM-based, natch.)

[andrewducker]

The question is - do they support Flash?

If I can't watch YouTube on it, it's not good enough...

[martling.livejournal.com]

You can't watch YouTube on your phone either for the same reason. Sooner or later either Flash or YouTube is going to want to fix that.

[andrewducker]

Very true. Although Flash Lite does support video.

Checking around, it looks like Flash has now been open-sourced, so it's very likely that it'll be compiling on other architectures in the near future...

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Flash Lite 3 is really a stop gap. A good one, but it's only Flash 7...

My money is on AIR 2 (which will be mobile and is built on webkit). Interestingly it looks like MS are bypassing the mobile version of Silverlight 1 in favour of Silverlight 2, and that will run on multiple mobile OSes..

Mobile RIAs FTW!

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

There is a mobile version of YouTube that delivers everything using H.264 - it was initially developed for the iPhone, but works well on other next-gen mobile devices like the Backberry Bold.

[andrewducker]

Good point.

And avoiding FLV would be nice...

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Could be a good home for the ARM-on-steroids-with-integrated-GPU NVIDIA (re)announced earlier this week at COMPUTEX in Taiwan...

[martling.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of cheap low-power ARM-based chips out there. PDAs and phones already run on them and Linux is already ported to pretty much every major chip family, if not individual devices. The clock speeds don't tend to be as high, though.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

You should check out the latest ARM 11s. Close to 1GHz clock speed...

[robhu.livejournal.com]

IIRC Arm based devices / laptops have been tried in the past, but it always failed because x86 compatability is pretty important if you want to actually use the thing.

Obviously you can't run Windows on it if it's not x86 (well, not well - none of the ports have ever been very good, and even 64 bit windows is something of a disaster), and although theoretically you can run Linux not everything will compile properly, etc... It requires good software support to be there, which there isn't as no laptop / desktop users use such hardware. Also anything proprietary (flash etc) isn't going to work.

I'm not sure why we need something better anyway. Intel's Atom chip is pretty damn spiffy. When you get to that level of multicore only sapping a few watts the power usage of the other bits on the laptop become more important.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

See also: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-era.ars

[andrewducker]

Saw that yesterday, linked to from the /. article that spawned this thinking in the first place. :->

[andrewducker]

Atom does look good. I was just wondering if anything else was better.

I'm thinking that Windows is what's giving the x86 chips the massive advantage they have (although obviously it's self-sustaining as well). If Linux becomes more common then compiling on other architectures becomes, at least, possible.

Using the Eee, I'm mostly using exactly the same software I use 95% of the time on Windows: Thunderbird, Firefox and Pidgin. If I was running those on an ARM machine that'd be the same experience too.

Not for the next couple of years though.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Run your timescale up a year or so. ARM 11 derived processors hit the end of this year, and go volume round about H209.

They're initially targetted at MID-class devices (so wll go head to head with Intel's SOC Silverthorns.)

/me enjoys going to processor conferences...

[andrewducker]

I was more wondering how long it would take the software to catch up - whether there was code in things like Pidgin that are x86 specific, or if it would just be a recompile to get it onto ARM...

But I guess that wouldn't take _that_ long.

Getting Flash working might take a while - but I know how fast coders can work when they need to :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Why would Pidgin have x86 specific code in it?

I think the problem is even with the FOSS stuff there is a big difference between 'everything should compile on alien architecture' and 'big distro has a stable release in alien architecture'.

Unless you're uber big you don't want to have to have your own distro or QA your open port of another distro to a different architecture.

[andrewducker]

Why would Pidgin have x86 specific code in it?

Dunno - but I know that there frequently is code in apps that is architecture specific, especially if they do any complex stuff with pointers or the like.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Sure, I just wouldn't expect any fancy pointer stuff happening in Pidgin.

[andrewducker]

You never know when people are going to have horribly complicated things going on inside, just because someone decided it would make the code 0.3% faster.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Just to point out:

* complex stuff with pointers and the like

What? Have you been swallowing toothpaste again?


Pidgin is based on libpurple and gtk, both of which are portable. If you google for pigdin + ppc you will find a few precompiled pacakaged.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Atom has some interesting competition in Via's Isiah. Both hit at the same time, and Isiah builds on the work Via did with the C-7.

Atom is pretty much Intel catching up with the C-7...

(AMD has a low power Puma in the works too.)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Didn't Ars recently review the Puma and decide it was going to tank?

[andrewducker]

Not exactly, if you mean this article:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080604-amd-launches-puma-aims-to-gain-ground-in-the-mobile-market.html
They say that it's not low power enough to compete with the Atom - but if that's not the market it's aiming for then it might be ok.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Which is odd as it's not trying to compete with those. A more interesting comparison would be with the mobile 45nm Core 2s.

[andrewducker]

I agree. That article was just saying that all of the attention is currently on the Atom (and similar) because Eees are so popular right now, so it seemed odd to be competing in a different space.

Personally, I'd say it's best to be competing out of the spotlight, because that's where the spotlight will be _next_.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Is it really a place out of the spotlight they can compete in? It seems to me that 'low power laptop' is the area they used to try to compete in, but that area is entirely owned by Intel now.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

You must have missed NVIDIA's announcement from earlier this week. It's upgrading the ARM/GPU combo it's developed for mobile phones for Netbooks.

There's a Linux implementation for it...

[andrewducker]

Cool - cheers!

(Although the stuff I've seen is mostly talking about Windows Mobile - which I hear is a pain to develop for).

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

MID-class devices will pretty much be exclusively Linux or OS X for the foreseeable future. There's talk of an ARM compile of Windows, but I'll believe that when I see it...

[andrewducker]

http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/06/nvidia-confirms-tegra-for-windows-mobile-mids/
says that the first Tegra designs are going for Windows Mobile exclusively...

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I guess they're scaling up the version they're using for the original mobile phone version of the Tegra.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

What nobody else has mentioned is Apple's acquisition of P.A. Semi. Rumour has it that Apple are hoping to use the company to build custom chips for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which are both platforms with a lot of potential.

[andrewducker]

True - and both can run whatever silicon they feel like, as Apple has total control over the software.

[andrewducker]

Of course, the iPhone is already running an ARM design, so I wouldn't expect that to change...

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

The fact that the iPhone is currently running on an ARM likely implies the opposite -- it implies that enough of the kernel and the platform are architecture-neutral that they won't necessarily be tied to any particular architecture.

The small-laptop/large-MID space is an interesting one, as it's a space that's essentially being converged upon from two different directions by two different processor architectures: ARM from the mobile device sector (cheap, power-efficient), and Intel from the portable PC market. There isn't quite an overlap: ARMs are still cheaper and more efficient, and Silverthorne (Atom) is still quite a bit faster, more expensive and power-hungry.

As for the actual processor architecture, as distinct from implementations of the architecture, there's really no significant amount of code that's architecture-specific in Open Source code, and likewise Mac OS: we already know there are ports for x86, POWER and ARM; presumably porting to a different architecture would be almost as trivial for Apple as it is for Linux.

Which is to say, the only thing that's really tied to any particular architecture is Windows, and even then sons of Windows CE are happy on ARM, MIPS etc. And so matter how much we all claim to loathe it, Windows will be the thing that keeps x86's edge over ARM keen: because it will be a market requirement more than a technical requirement.

Hey, you know, some crazy-ass people might even try to build such a machine on a Blackfin.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I hate to be unable to bring anything to your discussion, but I can't, so there you go.

I did, however, want to ask you about stuff like the Eee PC. Do you know of any other low-price point systems that are also desktop systems? I'm looking for a book sized machine for a couple of hundred dollars that can run linux that I can hook up to a KVM.

But then again, I guess I might as well get an Eee PC or wait for the Eee desktop model.

[andrewducker]

I suspect that this is what you want:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/06/asus_shows_eee_box_b202/

So, yes :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Ask and you shall receive.

[andrewducker]

I'm intrigued - but waiting to see what reviews of the finished object are like.

I'm fairly sure I saw reviews of a PowerPC one recently, too.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

The thing is - it isn't a laptop, and I don't care all that much whether a desktop uses 2W, 20W, or 200W (ok so I'd happily leave a 20W computer on all the time but might not with a 200W one).

[andrewducker]

Absolutely - I don't care so much about power there.

But if it's absolutely silent...

[robhu.livejournal.com]

At 2W they probably don't have the energy there to run a fan ;-)