In 2009 ARM showed off prototype netbooks “capable of driving HD content, can surf the web for 8 hours, and will cost round and about 250 USD”. Yet still, none have made it to the market. Why do you think this is so? Because ARM signed a deal with Adobe in 2008 to bring Flash and AIR to the ARM architecture, a promise they will finally deliver later this year. And you wonder why Apple won’t have Flash on the iPhone when it can hold back an entire product category for two years.
I’ve been waiting for ARM netbooks to appear for some time, I was eventually forced to buy an Atom-based netbook instead. The laptop / netbook martket has been stagnant for the last year, for a long time we have been wanting to see this market get a shake up in the form of new architectures getting the shelf space to shine. Both ARM and MIPS represent a possibility of thinner, fanless laptops that last all day on a charge.
ARM-based machines show great potential for Linux too, giving it a platform where the competition is not so deeply entrenched. Android is nice, but it’s not quite Ubuntu, and using WindowsCE is like being in the 90s again (although Nvidia seems to think otherwise).
That window of opportunity for ARM+Linux to live happily every after is quickly closing though. With the delay of these ARM based devices, Intel have had time to get their act together.
Asked if the smartbook delays had anything to do with performance relative to Intel’s netbook-dominating Atom chipset, Drew said he had “not seen that one come up once” in discussion with manufacturers.
Drew’s comments came as Intel detailed its Moorestown chipset, a version of Atom that is tailored for smartphones and tablets. Moorestown’s arrival later this year — around the same time as smartbooks hit the market — will ensure competition between ARM and Intel in each company’s stronghold: respectively, the smartphone and the subnotebook.
The iPad has also sent shockwaves through this unborn market:
In March, another ARM executive suggested that more than 50 ARM-based tablets would be released later this year. According to Drew, the sudden explosion of interest in the tablet form factor had “confused” some manufacturers that had been considering ARM-based smartbooks, which tend to resemble laptops, thus further delaying smartbooks’ advent.
You may hate all the Apple / Flash / H264 discussion and think it doesn’t relate to you, but here technology is being kept out of your hands because of Flash—or more specifically, because of Adobe. I know there are a ton of OSnews readers who would love to get their hands on a cheap ARM based machine. There was immediate discussion of how we would love to see RISC OS, or even Haiku on such a machine.
Had these laptops been available, then they would have presented very strong competition with Atom-based machines and Linux may have finally seen some foothold in the retail sector. Linux based netbooks were there first, but with Microsoft practically giving away Windows XP and Windows 7 now taking the lead, Linux just represented a different UI on the same crappy hardware. What I wanted to see is the difference between an Intel/Windows laptop getting three hours battery life and an ARM/Linux laptop getting 10.
Son, I am disappoint.
The sooner Flash (and all proprietary runtimes, Silverlight included) are gone, the sooner new product categories and devices can spring up without having to wait on the blessing of Adobe and their glacial development pace. Device manufacturers should be able to go to market the moment they have the idea. Like it or not, this news is demonstration that Adobe are holding us all back, even those who like Flash.
AFAIK, the Gdium netbook (MIPS) does run Flash lite. I believe Gnash does a pretty good job anyway. Works pretty well with youtube and dailymotion.
Silversight? WTF? Who use Silversight? Who has even silversight installed?
Edited 2010-05-06 09:06 UTC
The majority of people using windows?
Everyone who wanted to watch the winter olympics online, for starters. Everyone who uses Netflix video on demand for second. Anyone who wanted to watch the live “Me to We” conference in Vancouver. Anyone accessing some other education-related conferences in BC.
Silverlight, unfortunately, is out there, and on some heavily-used sites.
We get frequent calls about why schools can’t access some online content … since those sites run Silverlight, and the Moonlight plugin just can’t handle it.
Netflix subscribers using the Watch Instantly feature use Silverlight. That’s just one place I can think of.
As for gnash, does it work with pandora.com yet? Last time I tried it resulted in epic fail, but that was admittedly almost two years ago and I’m sure they’ve made improvements…
…, I would like to get my hands on a ARM-based Linux-driven smartbook. Quite actually I don’t give a crap about Flash or Silverlight, I just need something a little better than your average Atom-based netbook (tm?).
Wishlist: 1300×700-something 11″ screen, nearly full-sized keyboard, SSD storage with 32GB is enough, 1GB RAM, Ethernet port, WiFi+BT, 2 USB, SD slot, around 1Kg weight. And fairly thin.
And I agree, I wish hard that Flash, Air, Silverlight, etc, etc have a fast and gruesome death.
Edit: didn’t forget, but that’s something we all want, lots of battery time…
Edited 2010-05-06 08:58 UTC
You might want to check out the Asus EEE 1201N netbook. It uses the Atom 330 CPU (dual core with hyperthreading). It comes with nVidia’s ION chip and you can actually play World of Warcraft on the thing at around 20 FPS. I have one and would claim it to be sufficiently powerful for most things. I am far, far, far happier with this model than my previous one (1000HA).
Why why why? Come on, it’s all but dead. Let it be. It’s a OS of it’s era and machine class. But now all machines can run OSs that is mainframe in features. I want pre-emptive multitasking, I want proper virtual memory, including safe per process address space, different login privileges, hell, different logins! Drive numbers are no better then drive letters, I want mounts and sym links. Applications folders where nice, but package management is better. I use to love RiscOS, and I look back at it with fond memories, but I wouldn’t want it back. Even Acorn won’t 100% behind RiscOS, remember RiscBSD? Come on man, leave RiscOS in RPCEmu, it’s over. But ARM lives on strong. Maybe use Rox Desktop if you’re really desperate. It’s the desktop most people loved anyway. Much better take a real OS and make it into a desktop one, then take one made for a limited desktop machine and try and make it a real OS. (Windows is my example, but that’s a rant in itself.)
Who mentioned anything about RiscOS? It has nothing to do with this article…
In the article:
There was immediate discussion of how we would love to see RISC OS, or even Haiku on such a machine.
I just wanted to make 100% clear that not all of old Acorn users are deluded that is a good idea. Waste of time. Might be interested in vitualizing a RiscPC on it, but not the insanity of RiscOS being the machine OS.
Heh, I was reading the linked articles not the OS News one. Ah well…
Regarding RiscOS on these things, I can see it being a hobby project but nothing more without a really serious update to the underpinnings of the OS, which I’m sure would be more time+effort than using Linux.
There’s also a niche market of elderly people that don’t know anything other than RISC OS, and are using either circa-1997 233 MHz StrongARM RiscPCs, circa-2000 233 or 300 MHz Kinetic (RAM local to the CPU card) StrongARM RiscPCs, circa-2002 600 MHz XScale-based Iyonixes, and circa-2004 400 MHz ARM9-based A9homes with a beta OS.
Those users, that’s all they know how to use, and that’s all they’ll use until they die. They’ll buy new hardware if it’s cheap enough, but only if it can run RISC OS. For that matter, a couple companies have sold x86 PCs running Virtual RiscPC, which… isn’t very good, and has nasty, buggy DRM.
Exactly how small is this niche? I can’t see it’s more than a few hundred at most. A better solution to help them would be a effort on Rox and RpcEmu. It’s not good to be tied to any chip type, even ARM. That’s if it’s worth getting new machine for them, not like there is new RiscOS software… But honestly, moving OS isn’t that big a deal, even if the machine is dead, Linux can actually mount ADFS. For many old Acorn app, bet there is something to convert the files. Like Draw to Inkscape sort of thing. A better business is help emigrate these old RiscOS users left behind to the new lands we all enjoy. Let RiscOS lie in peace.
The problem is… you know the kind of users that use Windows 98 and a Celeron 333 from 1998, today, because it works for them, although they might want something faster, but can’t figure out that newfangled Windows XP?
That’s probably half of the active RISC OS users. And I’m not joking. We’re talking about users that are so inflexible to learning new things, that they are completely unable to use anything that isn’t RISC OS.
And, the PC-based solutions, right now, are booting a full Windows, and then booting RISC OS. If something goes tits up on the Windows side, they’re completely lost.
The other half of the users are doing it for fun or for profit (and get into terrible flamewars with each other quite often, because the ones doing it for profit are ruining the platform,) and are your typical retrocomputing community, that completely failed to learn from the Amiga community.
Oh come on. 98 to XP isn’t a big change interface wise. Everyone else coped just fine. Why do they need something faster unless they are running more modern apps, in which case soon enough they will need a new OS too.
Moving from RiscOS to something else isn’t a big deal either. Christ, Windows copied the iconbar since Win95. It’s not a case of can’t learn, it’s a case of won’t learn, which isn’t a attitude I will support.
The half that can use something else, they choose to make their lives difficult and can support themselves.
We’re talking about elderly people with way too much inertia, though.
Basically, the commercial RISC OS market exists to take their money.
That market has a limited lifespan…It’s best not to bet too much money on that ship….
Not only that, but the commercial market is resorting to FUD to try to keep the hobbyist free stuff from encroaching on their market.
That is PURE fantasy. It’s a little like the response often heard when the 17th century Cornish man was questioned in English – “Me na vadna cowz a Sowznack”. Which, at the time, was thought to translate as “I can’t speak English”, but actually meant “I _will not_ speak English”.
Anyone still using RISCOS as a primary OS is doing so because they want to, not because they have to.
I was very careful to NOT say that all they could use was RISC OS, although I see I did say that there’s a demographic that can’t figure out XP. (Although, there are a couple users here and there on the comp.sys.acorn newsgroups that stick with RISC OS because of certain programs that they like, that are unavailable on other platforms.)
I’m well aware that they COULD use other platforms, and just don’t want to. That’s my point, that they don’t want to. RISC OS works for them, so why switch?
Then it’s their problem and I have no sympathy. They can do what they like, but it will annoy me if any real development money is spend pandering to these die hards. It’s over, we lost. Unix way is a better way of doing OSs anyway, go and work on the Rox desktop if you must, but a OS is not it’s desktop, RiscOS itself is not worth keeping.
Well, and I think there might just be an active effort to kill commercial RISC OS, by some hobbyists.
At this point, the people that actually care about advancing the platform treat it as a plaything, something to mess with in their spare time when they’re not developing for more modern OSes. The people that think the platform has a future as a commercial OS… well, they’re not making enough money to give it that future.
Operating system is only as good as the software it has, and RISC OS has some very good software. Linux on the other hand is only suitable for web browsing, as it has lots of software but most of them are crap.
For most people desktop is the operating system. They only care about the user experience, not what is hidden behind the user interface. … And about the Unix way of doing OS, that way is almost as old as the Beatles. Does that make it better?
Have you even tried later version than RISC OS 3.
The thing is, I’m going to be a bit pee’ed if all that I can buy is tablet form factor ARM/Linux machines.
I read this yesterday:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/ipad-keyboard
Made me laugh. So you need a real keyboard to be productive? Surprise surprise! So, as it’s something you are going to want all the time, really it might as well be part of the unit, and say, fold out. Wait a minute! That’s a clam shell form factor!
Keep looking at OpenPandora…..
http://www.open-pandora.org/
Just wish it was a A9 ARM…..and the screen was bigger (less boarder, more screen)…..and it had HDMI out and could do HD video…..and had a real harddisc with some real storage i.e. hundreds of gigs. That would make me wet my pants and have to buy one regard less of being broke. 😉
The OpenPandora is basically a Motorola Droid with a smaller screen. What’s the estimated cost of that when it’s released?
(NT)
Ditto. Put a big sticker on it that says, “DOES NOT SUPPORT ADOBE FLASH,” in 24-pt bold all-caps, and get the things out.
… but the Kroc/Thom anti/pro articles are getting out of hands.
Seeing that Kroc was the author of this piece about flash, I pretty much knew how he would spin it without reading the article
Come on Kroc, “Think Different”!!
Speaking of doing your own thinking [i.e. don’t let Steve think for you], I think ARM is full of shit on this one. Do you really believe ARM gave up a huge market just to wait for Adobe? I mean, come on people, use your brains!
No, I find myself with Kroc/Thorn on this. I’m probably not the only one surprised how successful the iPhone has been despite not having Flash. Not having Flash is something I hear technical iPhone users complain about. Normal users don’t even know the name of what they are complaining about. There is no way Adobe, or anyone else (MS I see you and Siverlight), should have this hold on what devices are used to access the internet.
We don’t really like Flash on osnews, none of us do. But neither do we like being told what to think, or see some company with a hidden agenda limit our choices just to increase their own market share and profitability.
That being said, if you had been following the debate you would know that Kroc and Thom don’t agree at all (which is a good thing, I mean, we don’t want OSnews to become another iNgadget). Unfortunately, they are also becoming a little predictive, which was the point of my post
Edited 2010-05-06 10:07 UTC
Yer, I free admit I wasn’t noting who wrote what and only noticed the anti-Flash bias. 😉
I assume you mean Apple by “But neither do we like being told what to think, or see some company with a hidden agenda limit our choices just to increase their own market share and profitability.”
I don’t think ARM are doing an Apple. They are just saying Flash is a problem for them getting devices to market, and I think that probably is true. A iPhone might be able to get away with it because it’s not just a web browser, but devices that are mainly web devices would seam pretty rubbish if they can’t access big chunks of the web.
I disagree with Apple on many many things, but not being pro-Flash isn’t one of them. Them claiming it’s about freedom then being pro-h264, and further locking down the iStore, is just a little hard to swallow though.
We seem to agree on all but one point: ARM laptops being delayed because of Adobe? I just don’t believe that! I think the delay was due to these
<ul>
1. both ARM and TSMC underestimated the challenges of low-power multi-GHz design.
2. ARM is still experimenting with their GPU line!
3. Intel moved Atom manufacturing to TSMC mostly to delay ARM development (I bet you didn’t thought of that one!!)
4. ARM wasted a lot of resources on low-power embedded models: Cortex-M0, M1, M3, M5 and M6.
5. on a tablet/notebook, the CPU/GPU power is a fraction of the LCD power anyway. Manufacturers had to wait for AMOLED to become cheaper.
6. sure, ARM may have been delayed a few weeks due to Flash issues
7. TSMC was switching to a lower node and had as usual allocated a lot of resources for next generation FPGAs (due to their simple structure, memories and FPGAs are always the first to be tested on a new process node)
8. who knows, maybe ARM is busy with the cellphone market and isn’t really interested in laptops at the moment…
</ul>
Well … I could be dead wrong, but at least I do my own thinking
Edited 2010-05-06 11:39 UTC
All good points (though I think 6. is months not weeks).
Still crossing my fingers ARM start to take on x86. Without Windows, just don’t see why we need x86.
Totally agreed, it does not sound plausible. Double so since there already exist a flash version for ARM. It’s not optimal, but I doubt hardware manufacturers care if they decide there are money to be made.
Disagreed, mostly because you seem to missinterpret the nature of ARM. They do not sell processors, they only license IP.
High speed ARM SoCs are offered from multiple vendors and sold in high numbers alrady, so the design sounds solid.
Different vendors pair ARM cores with various GPU cores, the most powerful ones comparable to regular Atom offerings. A common alternative are actually GMA500 or slight variants of it. The solution is already on the market and competitive compared to Atom.
I do not think that would affect all the ARM suppliers. Unlikely that Intel could deny all of TI, ST, Freescale, NXP, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcom, Atmel, Actel, Micrel etc manufacturing capacity.
Those models outsell all of Intels x86 range with a huge margin. And again, ARM does not manufacture anything, TI, ST, Freescale, NXP, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcom, Atmel, Actel, Micrel etc does. And they have been delivering chips based on those designs for a while now. As is Cortex-A8 and A9 is in the loop, so ARM is already licensing out those designs. So one could stipulate that the needed resources are already spent.
A fair amount of power goes to the LCD back-lite, but an Atom with accompanying chip-set easily push past the 5W mark so a more efficient SoC can easily give you an extra hour or two(or demand a smaller battery).
Nah, they easily go for the same cheap crap as they use in netbooks.
The manufacturers may put a small delay into launch depending on such external issues as seasonal scheduling(student semester start and the like), service provider wishes(phone companies offering dataplans etc) or a nearly finished Flash. But not to this extent, as time to market counts.
Not all ARM manufactures depend on TSMC.
The suppliers of ARM SoCs want to sell chips, they do not care to much in witch market their chips get used.
The biggest reason for the delay of such devices are the hardware vendors, like Asus, Acer etc, they are not ready to commit to the market segment. They are not confident that the market are economically viable, and to cut into their own netbook market. And the cheap Chinese producers are to busy churning out variants of their Atom based designs, to get as much profit as possible out of it, to spend development resources on competing ARM based designs.
Thanks Morty!
I was feeling that this thread was ignored in favor of the usual fanboy and flame war comments, but you gave me my hope back…
Anyway, here are my follow-up comments:
Actually, when you go high-speed and/or low-power, you can’t just buy Verilog code from ARM. You will need to buy a hard-macro optimized for an specific foundry.
Actually no. How many handheld Cortex-A9 at 2.0 GHz have you seen so far? Qualcomm has done some work on snapdragon, but they are not licensing their work to anyone else, and why would they? And why didnt Apple by SoC from Samsung as they usually do this time?
Yes. And if you think about it, what you wrote is a very good reason for ARM to delay their netbook line until the new “Mali” is out.
I actually happen to know that it did
I think you are mistaking Cortex-Mn with ARM9 and ARM11. The ones I mentioned are not available “in production quantities” yet.
Fair enough, but ARM does not have an efficient SoC for these types of applications yet [see my previous point about the GPU]. Also, do you think normal users would give up a windows laptop with 12 hours of battery life for a completely untested ARM platform with, say, 14 hours of battery life?
The initial multi-GHz design are all on TSMC, who is working with ARM to increase performance/lower power at the moment.
Actually, this one would since it means a major shift of focus for ARM and they maybe were not feeling ready for it yet [again, see my previous point about GPU].
Yes, this is very much true.
That’s not a fair comparison because they are being sold a phone and do not expect the full functionality of a computer. They also have access to the itunes store which provides them with video rentals. The vast majority of streaming rental services on the web use Flash.
Place a user that browses the news in front of a netbook without Flash and that user will be annoyed. Being unable to watch news videos will be viewed as a limitation, not a feature.
Wasn’t there a story recently about Apple planning to buy ARM?
Maybe this is ARM doing some sympathetic PR for Apple. “We can see why you don’t want Flash on your iWhatever, it’s holding us back too. (whispers)Buy Us!(/whispers)”
Flash is over – its gone. Adobe have completely failed to keep pace with the mobile computing revolution. No Flash on an iPhone? How about Flash on any phone. If a company seeks to make its proprietary software a key web standard then it has to, as a bare minimum, keep up with the web and market developments and Adobe has utterly failed to do so.
Flash is today’s 3 in inch floppy drive. When Apple dumped that everyone screamed and said you will sorry. They weren’t sorry and the floppy died.
In three years time nobody will care about Flash – heck in 18 months nobody will care. Adobe crying to the government about Apple is just pathetic.
As I look round the office I’m in, every machine still has a 3 inch floppy disc drive…. They are never used mind, I’m sure machines live their whole lives without the drive ever being used…. Lets hope Flash is not todays 3 inch floppy, lets hope it’s the 5 inch floppy you never see any more! 😉
Flash works great on my N900. As does Firefox. Here’s a nickel, kid – get yourself a better phone. 😀
(http://tomayko.com/writings/that-dilbert-cartoon, for you beardless youngsters…)
I keep posting this link but no one seems to read it.
http://androidcommunity.com/flash-10-1-vs-html5-on-nexus-one-adobe-…
Flash isn’t going anywhere. Hulu and other big publishers prefer Flash to H.264 because it has content protection and is better suited for ads while Google is helping cement Flash by including it in Chrome and keeping it the default format for YouTube.
The only way Flash could have been killed off was with the help of Google.
The problem I have with all of this – there has been a version of Flash 9 on the Nokia Maemo platform for about as long as Flash 9 has been available. It ran very, very slowly, yes, but it WORKED. If anyone is to blame, pointing fingers in any one direction is more about face saving. Whether Adobe was incapable of giving an optimised version or ARM was incapable of delivering a compelling reference platform, I don’t know. But chickens require eggs and vice versa.
No one but Adobe could have done anything about the implementation. So if Adobe thinks it’s not worth it, the platform will never have good Flash support, regardless of what the platform could actually do. Yes that’s true of any software, but this software has become part of the web!
Netbooks are seen as nothing more but tiny notebooks by 90% of the people out there, and they expect to have a x86 processor and Windows on them, even if they don’t know what they are (I’m tired of replying to those saying it’s not true, this has been discussed far too many times).
If Apple manages to create a viable worldwide market for tablets, this is where we’ll see other options.
Why could only Apple provide people with a low power lightweight web terminal? The Facebook masses don’t care (or know) what OS or chip their browser is running on. They just want it to be slick, have a long battery life and work as a web terminal. If they want to type then you need a keyboard, and a keyboard means clamshell not tablet, at least to me.
Many normal people who bought a netbook thinking it would be a little laptop, returned them, Linux or not, when they found it wasn’t up to the job of a laptop. Least that was my understanding.
There is a place for ARM’s smartbooks waiting to be filled.
The logic is a little obscure here.
Why could they not introduce a notebook without flash, like Apple has, if Adobe was late with it? Apple has done it by means of a ban, but it shows they could have launched without it, if Apple can.
Why is it a reasonable response to this for Apple to ban flash based applications from their notebook? I understand that if its not there, you can’t include it, but why do you have to ban it if it eventually becomes available?
The argument makes no sense. What most people think is, introduce whatever hardware and systems you want, and let people run whatever they want on it. Nothing in the history of Adobe makes that an unreasonable thing to want.
Because Apple hasn’t released a notebook without Flash, they have only excluded Flash from their idevices and they also provide an itunes store for video entertainment.
If Apple put an artificial limitation on Flash in their Macbooks then people would freak out. When people see a keyboard and monitor they have different expectations, and for good reason.
I didn’t get it, why does Adobe Flash unavailability for ARM hold back manufacturers making ARM netbooks?
Really, hardware release is waiting for software release?
I thought the whole boom hype of ARM netbooks was that they would run Linux because Windows is not ready for ARM. So the next surprise will be prolonged holdback because we’re waiting for Microsoft?
Educate me, I must be missing something.
You’re already asking enough from users to switch from Windows.
Taking away Hulu and Flash games goes too far. They’ll view the browsing experience as grossly inferior when they keep coming across empty white boxes where Flash is supposed to be.
No, we’re asking that users switch to ARM-friendly Linux distros, instead of x86-only distros.
I’m waiting for some smartbooks really long. I want them now! I do not want flash at all (it sucks, especially on Linux). I want to run Linux with decent webbrower with HTML5 video, accelerated XVideo and good old mplayer. And I saw it was working many months ago.
So, give me it now!
I really do not understand why they are delaying this products. THey are very cool, and by waiting they just giving Intel a time to smaller the gap, which isn’t good for ARM.
It is stupid to postpone selling good hardware because of external company. If they want flash, they should pay more to Gnash project.
Why they can’t sell this smartbooks just with Android or Ubuntu without flash, and if they want continue working on Flash with Adobe, to update it later?
Apple somehow managed to do this with iPad (there is no Flash right? and it is ARM right?). So what is the problem? We have already decent decoding of ogg or h.264 on this machines.
Edited 2010-05-06 14:00 UTC
I think the problem is just “normal” users who might not understand, and then bad mouthing it long after the issue is resolved. It is stupid, sell it to non-normal users until it’s ready for normal users! The non-normal users might even help you in getting it ready for normal users. I just don’t get why these things didn’t come out years ago.
That’s a risky business strategy when the profit margins on netbooks are already razor thin.
Maybe. But if you are going to generally release it anyway, and it’s just things like Flash holding things up, release to a market who don’t care until it’s ready for everyone.
This is what happen when everybody (Companies, organisations, individuals,…) uses a non-standardised feature on the Internet (not only web).
Flash is specified by a commercial company, and you will never ever know how the support will go.
And, when a company owns a part of an interface massively used, they own a too big power. It becomes something called a monopoly ($$$). Until another company(ies) put forward something new.
And the techies (I was) are like a pack of chimps, rushing on a new arrival of bananas:
Nobody cares if it is poisoned on the long run.
Is there hope ? Yes a little bit tiny, follow my eyes, W3C.
If GSM/UMTS is a worldwide standard adopted by all those companies, why HTML5 shall not ?
Thus, avoiding unfair competition from the CPU to software providers.
Edited 2010-05-06 14:22 UTC
The hardware vendors should have shipped with out Flash and Air then provided it as a patch update when Adobe finally got around to it. They should have made it very clear that the lack of one’s ability to watch stupid kitten tricks on Youtube was due to adobe.
I’m not sure about the original n800, but the Nokia n810 had WORKING flash “out of the box”, and that was released for the n800 and all that was long before the above agreement.
With a small hack to enable the feature, it even worked with the camera.
So I have no idea what you are talking about “Waiting for Adobe”. I don’t know what that agreement said, but I would note:
ARM is not one architecture like Intel – there are enough subtle variants that an executable optimized for one version of the chip will not necessarily run on others.
Even two years ago, the higher native ARM clock speeds were rare, expensive, and killed battery life. You had to use the DSP and/or video acceleration cores and they presented an even larger set of variables.
I will blame Adobe for this at least – they seemed to hate or ignore Linux for a while (on all platforms). They seem to be getting better but that camera thing (flashcam) was because they refused to update to use V4L2 instead of the more ancient API. They limited Linux support, and you don’t run Flash by itself, and most ARM platforms ran Linux.
And this exposes the lie of Adobe’s “openness”. It only runs on linux when THEY choose to compile it for Linux. They need not be opensource, but if their policy was wherever a working firefox browser could be brought up, they would attempt to provide the current flash player and work with the community. (Think old PPC Macs).
In Adobe’s defense, I don’t know of any effort by ARM to standardize the architectures sufficiently (look at the arch/arm/ tree in the linux kernel) to make it reasonable to create a high-performance version of flash for all ARM architectures.
Or perhaps it was the licensees. It generally was each chip manufacturer refusing to release some details about their specific core or features or individual users like Nokia adding the proprietary bits so the thing would work.
It is a lot like Apple complaining how slow Adobe does video while refusing (I think they since relented) to publish an official video acceleration API.
Flash on ARM? Which flavor? Which audio system? Which video accelerator (how can we tell, is the API for this one public, …).
And for that matter, I’m quite sure someone will eventually get one of the Android versions of flash onto a jailbroken iPud and it will run as well as the equivalent Android hardware.
The only reason Flash is not on the iPhone is because Steve Jobs doesn’t want it there.
And that’s because he wants them to shop at Steve’s Mega Video Game and Movie Emporium.
Same for x86. Each major revision of x86 CPU requires core-specific optimizations as well. And SSE4 will not work on P4 or earlier AMD part.
The only ARM cores what worth optimizing are Cortex-A8/A9. Others are legacy.
System API should be abstracted anyway (as they’re multiplatform), so in a matters of days platform specific support can be implemented.
I believe they didn’t use video accelerator directly – OpenVG / OpenGL is a way to go.
Anyone know what this might be?
Mothers day sale netbook AU$199:
http://catalogues.samswarehouse.com.au/portal/embedofferdetails__Of…
Did you mean Possible ARM netbook? =)
the specs are funny
Windows CE
2GB HDD
4GB SD RAM
512MB memory
64MB memory capacity