It seems that after Intel, just about every chip maker wants a piece of the netbook pie. AMD is an obvious competitor, but VIA is also eyeing the little notebooks. However, more exotic options like the Chinese Loongson chips and ARM's Cortex A-8 and A-9 chips are also among the contenders. We can now add a new contender: Freescale.
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Member since:2005-12-02
"Not supporting the arm processor but your logic is flawed. Computers used to all be proprietory and only worked with the software and hardware they were designed for and the world got along fine that way. We had far fewer incompatibilities then as well. Part of the problem with the PC is we expect them to run anything we throw at it then blame the OS maker for not making Obscure Part X work with it."
That was well before the modern PC even came into play. These days the majority of people have at least 1 PC in the household. x86 has been on the scene since 1978. The fewer incompatibilities and such come from the fact that at the time you mention, if people had anything in the home it was an atari game system, or maybe a commodore64 or maybe even Tandy (Radio Shack). As for modern personal computers in the home, which did not start until the late 80's, and those were few at that, we had Apple and the numerous other manufacturers, Apple being the only major player that did not use x86 once that all kicked off. The incompatibilities you mention have not existed for awhile, as long as you stay with x86.
Member since:2005-08-11
You can buy x86 processors from at least 3 companies, Intel, VIA and AMD. That doesn't sound very proprietary to me. ARM is also proprietary, they just license to more companies. Seems to me when it costs a billion bucks to build a fab, you can't be very well giving designs away for free.
Member since:
2008-06-18
If I buy a netbook with an arm processor, and I don't like the OS it comes with, I have to go find a distro that has been ported to it. If there are none but the one that comes with it, then I am out of luck. In that scenario, so is the company I bought it from, as I am probably not going to be the only one in that situation. I can't even fall back to XP. Sounds like a bad deal to me.
Not supporting the arm processor but your logic is flawed. Computers used to all be proprietory and only worked with the software and hardware they were designed for and the world got along fine that way. We had far fewer incompatibilities then as well. Part of the problem with the PC is we expect them to run anything we throw at it then blame the OS maker for not making Obscure Part X work with it.