MeeGo! Nokia's hope for the future is developing at a quick pace, and considering the rather lukewarm reception of Nokia's Symbian^3 devices, that quick pace is more than justified. MeeGo got a big boost today with AMD announcing support for the platform. The company puts its money where its mouth is, too.
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Member since:
2007-02-17
AMD have released programming specifications for most of its family of graphics chips, so that open source developers are able to write Linux drivers for AMD/ATI graphics chipsets.
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
AMD have recently announced the AMD Fusion™ Family of APUs.
http://sites.amd.com/us/fusion/apu/Pages/fusion.aspx
AMD have even deomnstrated the first fusion APU chips:
http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-demonstrates-2010jun...
In particular, the Falcon APUs seem to be targetted at the low-power segment of the market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion
An option to be implemented into mobile phones, UMPC and small multimedia devices, with the codenamed Bobcat processor core focusing on low power consumption (1 to 10 Watts TDP) computations for handheld devices such as UMPC.
It would seem that this announcement from AMD joining the Meego effort is entirely in line with the Falcon APUs target market.
The only strange thing is that Meego is aimed at netbooks, mids, tablets and handhelds. Intel is involved because most netbooks use Intels Atom CPU in conjunction with Intel's GMA graphics accelerators. AMD's Fusion APUs will probably become a direct challenge to that combination of Intel chipsets within the meego target market.
Intel and AMD both involved in Meego: strange bedfellows it would seem.
Edited 2010-11-16 00:22 UTC
Member since:
2008-12-26
Member since:
2007-02-17
http://blogs.amd.com/press/2010/11/15/amd-joins-meego-linux-open-so...
So there you go, a quote from the horses mouth so to speak.
As for competing against Meego partner Intel in the Meego target market, this snippet of information from the same article might explain it:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/node/5887
Edited 2010-11-16 01:59 UTC
Member since:
2006-04-01
I am so glad to finally see some very serious efforts to push Linux on mobile platforms. Although it would be wonderful if this was pure altruism I think we all know it is not. So long as the market remains competitive and all players still feel as though there is the possibility both to grow if resources are invested and fall behind if they do not continue to invest significantly, we the users should be pretty well set to benefit from some serious innovation. Hopefully the Linux Foundation will carefully cultivate this good fortune and make sure no one player comes to monopolize while all others are marginalized.
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Member since:2006-04-01
Indeed, as asserted by others, I generally think of Android as a "sort of" linux. While Linux is a kernel. I think of Linux as also including a large ecosystem of tools and infrastructure that make me a happy camper. Personally, I am eagerly awaiting the Nokia N9 with Meego sometime early next year. I am from the SuSE camp and having Zypper for package management is right down my alley.
Member since:
2006-09-01
AMD opted not to play in the netbook arena. AMD has finite resources, when compared to Intel, and they have to pick and choose their battles. At the time, they were hemorrhaging money, integrating ATI, and had a server focused core which was behind the performance of Intel equipment, so it wasn't pressing AMD release an Atom competitor.
The plan was to let the market develop, and then release a chip which was competitive. Even now, netbook, smartphones, and tablets aren't where the money is. AMD needs to play in the arena, but it's not going to be a giant profit center for them. This is evident in the Bobcat chip. The Bobcat chips will be able to be used as a desktop/laptop chip and as a netbook/nettop/tablet chip.
x86 chips are still pretty far away from being used in smartphones. They are too big and too hot right now. In a few years they maybe, but not at the moment.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2007-02-17
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODc5Mw
AMD's Alex Deucher has now confirmed that there are open-source graphics drivers for Fusion on Linux already in existence, but they're just waiting for them to be approved for release. Alex (a.k.a. agd5f) mentioned this in our forums. "Open drivers are already written, just waiting for final approval to release."
While it's a bit of a surprise that the open-source drivers are already written and just behind held up by approval (perhaps more legal reviews), it should not come as a complete surprise that AMD has been working on open-source drivers for this CPU+GPU combo architecture.