ARM amazes Me!

A silicon processor that is not fabricated by the designer company is an amazement in itself. Thar the processor has been around for such a long time and has undergone improvements over time adds to that amazement. Though it could not make dent in the PC space, it is almost omnipresent in the mobile telephone handset segment. There are two interesting evolutions taking place as of now.

The first of these is that the personal computer may be undergoing an evolution in front of our eyes. The tablet form factor seems to be generating a lot of interest and there are a lot of devices on offer or about to come into market. The leader in this space is the iPad of course who seems to have sold more than a million devices, since its introduction a little more than a month ago. This form factor is likely to become the device of choice for people.Will the recent netbook form factor be as popular as it was at the launch of the products?

The other evolution that is happening is that tablets are getting designed by not Intel processors. The highly popular iPad is built around a processor, the A4, that has ARM at its core. There are tablets that use NVIDIA's Tegra processor that has two core ARM and graphics processors to take care of handling 1080p video. So, an interesting speculation is if ARM is going to take over the Tablet space!

While Atom from Intel powered the netbooks predominantly, the netbooks were designed to be mainly for net surfing rather than personal productivity. Thus the underpowered Atom was a good fit. But, now it is threatened with tablets. Tablets are designed to be able to personal productivity applications as well. That is a genuine threat to netbooks and Intel has already come out with a dual core Atom which can overcome the low horse power of the original Atom chip.

Let's wait and watch if ARM is going to take over the tablet space after conquering the mobile kingdom!

Android is Moving into Sub-laptop Space

When Android came out on a cell phone, it was quite a sensation. Within a couple of years now, it seems to be moving into these small formfactor laptops. Gartner reported from Computex 2009 in Taiwan that Android is set to move into this space certainly. Computex showed quite a few exaples of these products that used Android.

This space actually includes couple of types of products. The netbooks, 10 inch display with Atom on the inside kind of products that are primarily aimed at being a net aid. These products are actually PCs with scaled down performance, being the same Wintel combination. In fact lot of people are seeing these as truly affordable laptops.

The other product category in the same display format are called smartbooks as these use the processors used in smartphones and giving you similar net access on the small notebook format.Thees are predominantly ARM processor based.

Examples on both kind of platforms were seen on the show floor, coupled with the fact that Microsft is not going to port windows 7 onto ARM, there's enough incentive for Goole to fill that vacuum. Additionally ports to MIPs also were shown. Acer is even doing a x86 port of Android. So, what's going to stop Android! Let's watch and see, this is going to be interesting.

MontaVista Linux Available for Atom Now!!

MontaVista Linux version has been released for the new Intel Atom 2500 processors. These power efficient processors are positioned as the processing heart of a new generation of mobile internet devices that possibly address a very very focussed functionality rather than trying to be a general purpose processor/PC.

Linux has successfully been used in a range of devices with the real time version from MontaVista being successful in mobile devices and a range of appliances. This commercial grade release should help rapid design for connected devices with the Intel Atom processors. The release is supposedly optimized for programmed power management for longer battery life, 802.11n support that provides Wi-Fi connectivity and Bluetooth support for connectivity and speedy boot up. The power efficient Intel processors are expected drive a new class of devices.

Intel Atom Processor

Ultra portables or the UMPCs are taking off looks like. So does the Intel Atom processor. Engadget announced the Intel made Atom based UMPC. This is how it looks.












Couple of other machines are being shown off at the Intel Developer's Forum at Shanghai. Asus has announced a Eee based on the Atom, that is well known. But Thinno's Eee clone was a surprise item.
Register Hardware reports from IDF at Shanghai:

Intel was keen to show off its Atom processor in the run-up to Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and drummed up a trio of machines to show it off - including the 7in Asus Eee PC.

Asus' plan to adopt Atom is well known, at least as far as the upcoming 8.9in Eee PC 900 goes. Less well known is new brand Thinno, which was showing its unnamed Eee-alternative. Demo'd with two laptops - one running Red Hat Linux; the other, Windows XP - the Thinno machines were fitted with 1.6GHz Atoms and 512MB of memory.

It's worth keeping a eye on the UMPC developments as well as the Atom.