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.)

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Ask and you shall receive.