Netbooks use various types of processors, but most of them are built around Intel’s Atom processor and architecture. There are more exotic options, such as the Chinese Longsoon processor, but those are quite rare and hard to come by – and certainly not as powerful. Apparently, another contender is preparing to enter the netbook processor market. Say hello to ARM.
Rob Coombs, director of mobile solutions at ARM, has told ZDNet that the company’s upcoming Cortex A-8 and Cortex A-9 processors will find its way not only into smartphones, but also into netbooks. “In the future we’re going to be in netbooks,” Coombs said, “Expect announcements in the next few months.”
The Cortex A-8 will be the successor to the ARM11 architecture, found mostly in smartphones (like the iPhone) and PDAs (assuming people still buy those). The company claims that the Cortex A-8 goes into gigahertz territory, which is probably a requirement if you take a look at the competition ARM is facing. The Cortex A-9 is the multicore brother of the A-8, and will become available in 2010. The UK-based company will face Intel head-on on this one, but will obviously be in a bit of a pickle because Windows XP and Vista do not run on the ARM architecture – you’d need Windows CE/Mobile/Embedded/etc./etc. for that. Of course, Linux will run on and adapt to ARM just fine, so most likely, these netbooks will run Linux.
Funnily enough, Intel itself is an ARM-licensee, and the company has also announced plans to move into the smartphone territory with its next-generation Atom chips, expected late 2009.
http://www.openpandora.org
…cheers.
Edited 2008-10-23 14:37 UTC
my thoughts exactly. im looking forward to reading the reports when people get theirs from the first batch.
but the videos so far have been impressive
and lets not forget about beagleboard:
http://beagleboard.org/
Edited 2008-10-23 16:14 UTC
They already were…
http://www.psionplace.com/hardware/Psion-Netbook-2000-09-05-psion-p…
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/notebooks/0,1000000333,39116901…
😉
Ah yes. The ORIGINAL Netbook… Maybe with the forthcoming promised opensourcing of Symbian, the whole thing could be recreated on more “modern” hardware.
Actually, I’m surprised that it took this long for the Psion Netbook to get a mention, what with it being the origin of both the name and the form-factor…
Edited 2008-10-23 17:46 UTC
“http://www.openpandora.org“
Yeah, just too bad they only made 3000 of them (all sold out now), and the next batch won’t be available until march 2009.
The return of RiscOS? WHy not? – instant-on boot from ROM in 2 seconds, fast, lightweight, and GNU toolchain support … netbooks are the perfect vehicle for RiscOs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
I would sooner hack my own limbs off with a rusty spoon.
I’m sure there’s an ‘ARM’ joke in there somewhere but I just can’t think of one…
Quite right, RiscOS is nothing like good old UK born and bred RISC OS.
You’d think so; (I read somewhere that the ARM architecture was designed for, or in parallel with, RiscOS) but it’s been brought up in the past on OSNews that RiscOS has no memory protection, preemptive multitasking, or multi-user support… It’s basically another AmigaOS 3 or MacOS 7; amazingly capable for its time or even after, but lacking internal features people expect nowadays.
As for size, I’ve mostly resigned myself that we’re not going to see those tiny OSes with megabyte footprints any more, unless we’re ok with giving up a lot of features…
Edited 2008-10-23 22:00 UTC
Guess what ARM originally stood for? That’s right, Acorn RISC Machine. No points for guessing who created the RISC OS…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
RISC OS is slightly later than ARM. Acorn originally had plans for a much more ambitious OS for ARM, but they realised that they couldn’t finish this in time, so they made a much simpler OS called “Arthur”. This was later extended to become RISC OS.
RISC OS certainly as memory protection, and has had this since Arthur. No pre-emptive multi-tasking, but that is not nearly as large a problem as you would think. And for netbooks, I really think multi-user support is redundant.
But I agree that RISC OS no longer offers many features that you can’t find in other systems, and it lacks many of the browser-related technologies (Flash etc.). What it does have is a font system that gives readable text at low resolutions and an advanced GUI that runs with little resources (both CPU and memory).
Ten years ago, it would have been an obvious choice, but now it is just one of many plausible choices.
Yes, the original OS project was called ARX. It was being developed at Acorn’s Palo Alto Research Centre, and mostly written in Modula-2. It was to have a unix-like design with a Mac-like GUI. Sadly whilst the project was being written by a bunch of very bright academics, they had little real-world experience, and it would also seem no competent project managers. With no sign of delivery, ever, and the launch of the Archimedes looming it got axed. Arthur (short for Acorn Risc by THURsday) was essentially a quick hack based on Acorn’s old 8-bit OS for the BBC Micro, spruced up by a bunch of game developers, with hardly an OS developer to be found. Arthur got renamed RISC OS for version 2.
RISC OS 2 and 3 most definitely did not have memory protection. A buggy application could crap all over any part of memory, bringing the machine crashing down in a heap.
One of my hobbies 15 years back was cracking RISC OS games. The lack of memory protection was very handy.
The co-operative multi-tasking system was lousy. If an app misbehaved your GUI would become useless; your mouse pointer would still move but that was it. Any app taking up too much CPU, and not ceding control back to the OS often enough, made for a sluggish and unresponsive system. A buggy app getting stuck in an infinite loop could demand you reboot to regain control.
15 years back I’d drunk the kool-aid and was sold on RISC OS’s co-operative model. In retrospect, I put up with a load of crap and didn’t know better.
(NB I think that post-Acorn these flaws got partially addressed, but I’d stopped developing for RISC OS before Acorn died.)
Unfortunately RISC OS is inherently an insecure and unstable OS.
You’re right tho, multi-user is absolutely pointless on a netbook. 🙂
Ten years ago these major flaws in RISC OS were there, so I wouldn’t say it was an obvious choice. Acorn knew this and in Feb 1997 they announced a replacement OS called Galileo, which was not expected to be RISC OS compatible.
Speaking as a person who likes RISC OS and still owns systems that run it; RISC OS is in no sense a plausible choice for a NETBOOK.
It is too possible for an error in a web browsers handling of some data type to crash the whole machine.
IIRC RISC OS5 has multi-user support, memory protection.
OK, it’s Co-op. But that usually means that Apps are better written to avoid taking over the machine.
In any case it could be re-written to do pre-emp. Given an incentive.
Which incentive to rewrite yet another kernel?
Linux is there with support for all kinds of hardware, it can be made to boot in 5s (on a SSD, 10s with an HDD), it has real time support, nice thread performance, etc.
So the kernel is a “done deal”, what remains to be done is to build a good OS with it (I consider current Linux’s user space to be just average: lack of responsiveness is capital sin in my book).
Unfortunately many prefers to reinvent the wheel..
Because without good Youtube etc. support those devices won’t be very attractive.
Maybe even have a look the FSF most wanted list.
At the moment a good web experience is pretty tied to X86. Open Source can help.
Are you defining good web experience by it’s ability to surf youtube?
Edited 2008-10-23 14:41 UTC
Isn’t adobe porting flash onto arm? They have to as the iphone and pretty much any mobile device runs arm based cpus.
Either way they have somewhat of a head start as flash lite(a subset of full flash) runs on arm so I can’t imagine it being too difficult.
Also given that these proposed cpus will be considerably beefier, there will be fewer performance considerations.
Edited 2008-10-23 14:51 UTC
optionally there is gnash.
tested it recently and seems to work quite well.
The Nokia internet tablets are ARM Linux and have full flash support, so support already exists, it’s just not made generally available.
Knowing Adobe, by the time they finish porting Flash to ARM, x86 would already be the dominant platform for cellphones.
Edited 2008-10-23 20:58 UTC
Looks that way, but you gotta admit, in most (dumb) computer users’ minds, there’s some truth to that. People seem to get hooked on YouTube for whatever reason and can’t seem to go without it, or they’ll have a fit. Personally, I wish YouTube would get rid of all the damn Flash and all that fancy crap and give us an old-fashioned link to a proper video file (ahhh… the good ‘ol days…), but that’ll never happen. At least give us an option, but they want to make it as complicated as possible to “save” one of their videos and be able to watch it off of their site.
IMO, Flash sucks (bigtime), but it’s mostly required to appease all the brainwashed people out there who have had it forced upon them by sites requiring it and their computer’s OEMs preinstalling it to the sight of dollar signs. And YouTube took its popularity and turned it into something that’s here to stay. It’s like Intel and Microsoft… Flash and YouTube… they’ve both reached mass popularity, and they both depend on each other (for the most part), and they will both continue to fuel each other.
Edited 2008-10-23 20:02 UTC
Linux can play flash video, on any architecture you please.
Use either Gnash or SWFdec.
I’m not sure if it works as a plugin currently with firefox … I have had it working before, but last time I tried it didn’t work.
Sounds like a great definition to me
Absolutely.
For most surfers the ability to see online video is an essential part of the experience. This generally means Flash.
In an ideal world, HTML5 would be complete, have standard (widely used and unencumbered) codecs defined for audio and video tags, and be widely deployed, and thus there would be no need for Flash. It’s not.
Most surfers don’t care about standards, they just want things to work. Those of us that do care are a tiny almost insignificant minority.
For this task flash video is enough – and that’s supported in MPlayer.
I use Youtube a lot on my MorphOS system. And there I don’t have a proper Flash support (unfortunately), but flash video is not a show stopper since MPlayer does it perfectly.
Personally I’d rather like to see a ppc based netbook (would really like to use MorphOS on a mobile device), than on an ARM (but that’s just fine, too).
I’m pretty sure that Adobe has a version of their flashplayer for the ARM architecture. Why else would they be begging Apple to let them run flash on the iPhone. I do agree with you that open source could probably come up with a far better solution.
Nokia N800 and N810 have Flashplayer 9. It’s too slow to be all that useful.
but then we are talking about a cpu thats about 1/3 of the cortex A8.
Yes, but it could be optimized. It is just a build to exist. Gnash is also promising. Have you seen it in Genesis’ blog?
Gnash can play Youtube. Even in 64-bit, I believe.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
“Streaming Video
Gnash supports the viewing of streaming video from popular video sharing sites like Lulu.tv or YouTube.com.”
Last time I tried it with Firefox, it didn’t work, but it did play the .swf file I downloaded from Youtube. This probably means that Firefox’s plugin mechanism is broken again.
I have a superb web experience. I can’t remember the last time I came across something that wouldn’t work. Admittedly I can’t use web sites that demand I download Active-X plugins, but I can’t remember the last time I came across one of them. I surf to loads of sites that use Flash, and even occasionally come across some that use Silverlight. They all work for me.
I’m using a PowerPC-based Mac.
So they can’t run windows, so what? The only windows that would be light enough to run on these would be XP anyway. As has been demonstrated already, you don’t need windows to run on a Netbook, and especially not on an iPhone. Its about time we shed x86, and MS and finally head into a future where we are not stuck with legacy just because of compatibility, something which is not an issue on a smartphone. On the netbook, it may be an issue though I think that people expect too much from a device that is supposed to be for basic computer tasks. You don’t need windows to browse, the internet, IM, or e-mail.
Windows CE runs on ARM… It is very lightweight. And it even has decent web browsers now.
Actually, “ARM Netbooks” have been around for EVER. They were just called “PDAs”.
I used to own a device that used an ARM cpu.. and was called a “netbook”. Put out by Psion. Ran Epoc32r5. Great device.
“Netbooks” are nothing new. Just a new marketting spin on something that has been around forever.
Edited 2008-10-23 14:59 UTC
Does anyone remember the Apple Newton…?
Probably best if we didn’t. 😉
Im very pleased another OS might be joining the fray, especially as one as lightweight and stable as RISCOS.
The con i would say,is isn’t this the problem linux is having on the netbook front, is that it’s not windows. From the previous articles many netbooks are being returned because they are not running windows.
Personally i think it’s laziness on the part of some consumers. Many people switch to the Mac without a problem. As mentioned before many people used PSION devices without a problem the PSION 5 and 7 where previous incarnation of the current netbooks.
I was reading an article on another web site regarding the many superb designs of web sites, these web sites looked really good, however it got me thinking. Many people say that Windows is the only choice on a netbook because people are familair with it, i.e. they know where the start menu is etc.. However these same people how are familiar with windows will 9 times out of 10 then proceed to open a web site and navigate the web with web sites with many different layouts.
For example barclays has a different layout to nationwide when accessing your online account, these sites are laid out completely different to digg which is different to youtube etc.. etc..
If a person can navigate all of the many web sites on the web, they can certainly navigate Linux and certainly navigate RISCOS.
These OS’s also have the advantage that the hardware being shipped is gonna stay the same throughout the products life, i.e. there are no problems with drivers.
ARM is already in the “Netbook” market, hasn’t anyone heard of the Sharp Zaurus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus
http://www.openbsd.org/zaurus.html
I have a Zaurus, and no, that’s not a netbook by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a PDA.
The Zaurus is dead. For that matter, my Zaurus is dead. I dropped a light object on it and the screen shattered. Sharp lost interest in that device. And I lost interest in mine.
But the Zaurus is not a netbook. Neither are Nokia’s offerings. (I have one of those, too. Higher quality hardware than the Zaurus.) Netbooks have reasonable, though minimal sized screens and keyboards. The Zaurus keyboards and screens were in a different class.
One device, from long ago, that had an amazing screen and keyboard in pretty much the optimal form-factor was HP’s 100LX and 200LX. Ran DOS 6. Quicken built in. Lot’s of very nice apps built in, as a matter of fact. The PIM was fantastic. However, in that day TCP/IP was still catching on with the general public. Our conversations on the boards often involved how to add a TCP/IP stack and whether Java and Mosaic were reasonable possibilities. So decidedly, it was not a netbook.
The netbook is a new phenomenon. Unless you want to call them small laptops. A case could be made that the Sony VAIO was the first netbook. But the price was *way* too high. I’m not exactly sure how size compares. The VAIO’s certainly seem larger than my ASUS 701. And yeah, I’d like an ASUS 900. With Linux please.
Edited 2008-10-23 16:10 UTC
Hello Libretto! Hello Gateway Handbok! There have been a lot of “netbooks” over the years. I think the difference is this:
#1 – the time is right. In the past, the idea of a second computer, or even a second laptop (!) was too strange. But this is increasingly becoming a possibility.
#2 – the device is right. The combination of acceptable performance and LOW prices has arrived. Too often these devices were offered at a premium – you paid for the smallness of the device. The OLPC changed this concept – it was possible to put a reasonable computer in a small form-factor for a LOW price. $100, $200, $300 – these are unheard of prices for what used to be called sub-notebooks.
The combination of these two factors has created a very viable (pun intended!) market. Also, I don’t think we have seen the “bottom” of this market. I predict sub-$100 devices in the future – think passive LCD screens.
ARM based netbooks exist already and I am not talking about yesterday’s PDAs. Google “Razorbook”. It is a shame it is such a low end machine, but better ARM based netbooks could be made.
It was just a matter of time, ARM runs well on low powered and embedded hardware I don’t know why it took them so long!