With Moblin 2.0, Intel is integrating in an open source technology called Clutter. Clutter is an open source animation framework that allows for the development of applications in the same way you would develop games. The underlying complexity is abstracted such that intricate UI can be built with a minimum of code. “Because it’s developed like a game engine, all the graphics happen on the GPU, freeing up CPU do to application work,” he said. “When combing with Atom and the various GPU’s we use in Moblin supported platforms, you end up with advanced UI platforms. We really think it will create a huge opportunity for application innovation on top of Moblin.”
see this is a really smart move, more and more CPU intensive UI stuff on the GPU is great. The question is, will it make a big impact on battery life for these smaller devices?
seeing as the gpu is a specialized processor, having it do the graphics in theory should be more efficient in terms of energy consumption. However I doubt that it would use less energy than having no gpu. But developing guis as one would a game does make it more or less imperative to use the gpu.
Edited 2008-10-29 22:43 UTC
as long as a device does not update the UI constantly, the battery life should be pretty much the same. wifi and bluetooth are surely more power-hungry than a GPU.
but if you want proof, just measure the time an ipod touch lasts without wifi enabled.
I have Ubuntu Netbook remix and the main application launcher is done in clutter. It performs nicely on my eee 1000.
I’m really hoping that the GTK devs consider using clutter as a basis for their toolkit in GTK3. Its pretty freaking awesome to use if you ask me.
I don’t want any moblins near my linux. Their spears are pointy and hurty.
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Moblin
I love the idea of using Clutter; firstly it allows flashy interfaces, secondly it’s very easy to write a Clutter-based UI (especially in Python), thirdly it runs on desktop as well as mobile so you can write a program once and have it run on both platforms.
The only problem is that there’s very little in the way of Python-Clutter tutorials! I managed to find two very basic ones, but none about how to get the meaty stuff happening. Intel definitely needs to supply more Clutter documentation so we can start using it on the desktop.
http://www.clutter-project.org – The Clutter homepage
Hasn’t this been done before, a la the RISC architecture? Video code sent to the video card, audio sent to the sound card…..etc?