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.
It is expected that at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Freescale will show off a netbook built by Pegatron (an Asus spin-off), powered by the company’s i.MX515 processor, an ARM Cortex A-8 based processor which can scale up to 1Ghz. It will support 3D graphics as well as the playback of high definition video. Freescale’s marketing director, Glen Burchers, claims that the device will deliver a battery lifetime of 8 hours, which is quite a lot more than devices built around Intel’s Atom architecture.
More importantly, however, Freescale hopes to break the all-important 199 USD barrier, making devices based on their chip a lot cheaper than competing Atom-based netbooks. Freescal hopes to target teenagers. “”We believe the netbook is a device that is going to be primarily targeted at Internet access, that is a companion device to computers and to smartphones. It is not a replacement for either,” Burchers said. He further stated that the chips will ship in the middle of 2009, and that some computer makers are considering shipping the chip, although he didn’t state any names.
An obvious limitation – for some – is that such a netbook would not be able to run Windows. Instead, Freescale is focused on Linux, and the company is working with Canonical to develop an Ubuntu version aimed at the ARM architecture.
2009 Is going to be an interesting year for the netbook market. Various companies are aiming for this fast-growing segment, and it seems like there will be enough options to choose from. Whether or not the non-x86 contenders will be able to make any serious dent in the largely x86-focused netbook market remains to be seen. An important factor will be whether or not the ARM-based netbooks can live up to the expectations regarding battery life.
For diversity’s and competition’s sake, I sue do hope so.
They were notorious in the days as motorola and then freescale of not being able to supply the chips they promised quickly enough nor at the clock they said they would to Apple
Their new chip is ‘i.MX515 processor is based on the Cortex-A8 core from Arm’
The question is how ‘based upon’ is it? Compatible with ARM optimised distros? or require a recompile? Is it an ARM with an altivec style engine bolted on?
I’m not sure they will be able to stand up in direct competition with Intel, AMD and VIA in addition to the real wild card of the chinese chip
Actually, nobody was able to produce PowerPC desktop chips for Apple, not even IBM.
The cost of developing a desktop chip outweighed the relatively small volumes that Apple was willing to purchase. (And Apple was practically their only desktop client.) For every desktop chip that it sold, FSL was selling 2-3 orders of magnitude more in embedded processors.
Why spend all that R&D effort on desktop that can’t be leveraged for the embedded space? A 64-bit DMA core can only be used on a desktop machine but a great new timer core can be reused in several different embedded platforms.
It’s probably just an implementation of the Cortex-A8, not an alteration. ARM doesn’t manufacture anything, they just license their designs. Typically, manufacturers take an ARM core and bolt on other parts (GPU, various controllers) to make a SoC (system on chip). The only other current Cortex implementation that I’m aware of is the TI OMAP3 series. The CPU part should be 100% compatible.
With more and more lower-powered laptops shipping with non-x86 CPUs, Microsoft are going to have to port XP* or lose out
Having said that, it’s nice to finally see some competition.
* I can’t see Windows Mobile taking off on netbooks.
And how many netbooks shipping today or this year actually are non-x86? So far, ARM and Freescale have done a lot of talking, but little releasing.
So far, it makes zero sense for any software company to invest time in non-x86 netbooks.
i don’t understand why you were modded down, what you say is totally correct.
Ok we can get the OS ported to ARM however what about the apps? Unless the OS can do some emulation which in itself would be pretty pointless.
I think x86 will be with us for a long while.
I can see perhaps a sub-netbook market with the device sporting an OS and custom apps purely for the machine and architecture without the ability to install other OS’s, more a focused device like a phone etc..
remember windows NT was ported to PPC and MIPS (among others)
Microsoft could port xp to ARM tomorrow but I doubt any of the 3rd party devs would rewrite the parts of their software to support it
The same thing would kill XP(ARM edition) as did the NT system on different archs… no apps
Just imagine the return rate of these notebooks when customers realise they can’t put windows on them.
Not just Windows. While Linux does support diffirent CPUs there are problems with support for some software on Non-x86 machines if any x86-Binary-Blobs are included.
My OS of choice BeOS (hopeful soon Haiku) really on have good support for x86 at present.
A large number of the hobby OSes out there assume x86, and even if the authors offer support for non-x86 machines the number with good support are limited.
And let’s not forget all those who would like to shoe-horn Apple’s OS into a netbook.
what shoehorn? works perfectly well thanks (other than the headphones port)
Shoehorn, in the sense of the size of the OS vs size of the primary storage unit on a netbook.
BeOS (my present OS) can fix in 170MB, Haiku should be less than 500MB.
How big is a useable OS-X? I have assumed at-least 1.5 GB, but correct me if I am wrong. I am never too old to learn more.
Note 1: I mean the basic installation that includes all the apple services (search, I-xxxx, etc) you would normally use within a year. But not any of the additional apps that everyone needs to add to an OS to get the work done.
Note 2: Am I correct in saying that Windows XP can be shrank a lot because of the number of services included that most users don’t need/want?
Good! x86 is a bad architecture anyway (not dead end but nearly so), more so for netbooks.
It is the right time to dump it. The netbooks don’t need Windows and therefore they don’t need messy x86. We must put an end to that legacy ball and chain that x86 is on the netbooks before it is too late.
whoa!
x86 is here to stay, Intel itself tried to kill it and failed multiple times.
x86 scaled well in terms of performance per watt and price, and now we’ll see x86 in future GPUs (Larrabee), that might find its way in future game consoles.
Yeah, lets dump about 1.5 billion computers in the world, during a recession, because you say it’s a deadend. That argument is a deadend, because x86 is not going anywhere.
People and businesses care about their apps and their data, not whether the underlying processor architecture is pretty or not. They care about speed, and x86 is plenty fast. They care about price, and x86 is pretty cheap. They care about compatibility, and when most everything else runs x86, then that usually isn’t a problem.
You can complain about x86 all you want, but even Intel couldn’t replace it (they tried, with the Itanium), so ranting about it is the same as ranting about the weather, it might make you feel good for a bit, but it ain’t gonna keep you dry.
But now, it’s the right time to do it. There are enough open source software to support a netbook. Intel tried and failed at another time. Maybe if there is actually a netbook that is not x86-compatible and that it sells well (gdium?), maybe some software vendors will start to think portable again. That could get us out of this mess. The computing world could inovate again… x86 is not cheap and it’s not fast, it is just the only thing we know.
Edited 2009-01-06 14:55 UTC
it won’t sell well, I believe, for the reasons I already mentioned.
Who knows? A netbook can be cheap and fast AND non-x86…
Edited 2009-01-06 15:43 UTC
Sure it can, but does that mean it will sell? Hard to say. If I buy a x86 netbook, and it turns out I hate the linux distro it comes with, I can replace it with the distro of my choice, or XP or FreeBSD.
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.
“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.
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.
But a netbook is not exactly a desktop pc.
When you buy a wii, or playstation, or an xbox, you don’t complain that you can’t install windows on it!
Some people do install linux on them, but that is for fun. Actually most people are happy with what is installed by default and only geeks change the OS.
Xandros or linpus is what most people need on a netbook. You don’t want to play the latest FPS games on a netbook or to edit big pictures with Photoshop. You don’t even need the advanced features of MS Office. You need an email client, a web browser and an instant messenger.
it’s a bit different. A console is not a netbook, even a netbook is supposed to have some of the flexibility of a general purpose computing device.
Also, I modded my old xbox to the hilt, ran Debian on it, and used it as a media center, a webbrowser, and a game console. I enjoyed the fact that it DID have some capabilities to be changed, even if it was against MS’s wishes. And that was made easier by the fact that it was a x86.
You can get a couple of distros for the playstation, but I think (and I may be wrong) that it is a lot less compatible with the great majority of Linux distros, because it is either MIPS (ps2) or Cell (ps3)
The original xbox is almost off the shelf PC parts, so it may be one of the most versatile consoles ever, imo
At the moment, x86 is more versatile because you can install Windows only on it and most of its software. The problem is that the architecture is very slow for high performance 3D computation. Indeed, even on a desktop PC, you have to add some GPU from NVidia or from ATI to play games with acceptable performances, even with MMX and SSE, the performance still sucks. Indeed, the cell processor may not run Windows, but it can do 3D computations and much more. For instance when you compare opencv performance on a cell processor and on an x86 processor, the cell processor is 27 times faster at the same clock speed, even when x86 has the IPP instruction set enabled. Note that opencv is a library designed by intel to run fast with the IPP instruction set.
Actually, x86 is very bad design and is too slow and expensive for consoles which require high performance 3D computation.
On the netbooks, it is the same. We currently use x86 because only intel is capable of bulding processors with that small transistors that consume that few energy. Running Windows is a bonus, but imagine that intel was dumping Windows compatibility and was designing ARM processors. Imagine a netbook that you could use during 10 hours without plugging. x86 is just for legacy software, but I’m convinced it is not the best architecture for the netbooks and it is now the time to dump this architecture before all netbook software require it. It is now or never. I hope it is now.
Edited 2009-01-07 06:52 UTC
I guess you include the SPUs in the CELL figures, so it’s a bit biased to compare a PPC +8 DSP-like accelerators against a single x86. The SPU are fine for doing some DSP acceleration, they are of little value for a desktop plarform used for text processing or surfing the web.
now is the wrong time to do it. like it or not x86 is THE mass market proc and its fine for that. sure its not the best design on the planet but its still a pretty good instruction set and it is evolving over time.
I would imagine both Freescale and IBM could probably crank out something from the PPC750 line that is _very_ low power, but would perform better than ARM for most things….
The ARM instruction set is well optimized for power and compactness of instructions, not to mention small die size.
The Cortex A-8 adds in a vector unit and multi media specific acceleration hardware. It’s here today and it’s been beaten upon heavily.
I have an acer aspire one right now, but I’d personally be very interested in a netbook with 10-12 hour life on a 3 cell battery.
The ARM guys really must do something to protect their turf in the embedded or watch their market get slowly chewed up by the behemoth that’s intel.
I’d really like to see netbooks released that are full featured and not this current round of low power that’s being intentionally crippled by intel & microsoft in order to not eat into their more profitable products.
The PowerPC heritage comes from high end workstations, shrinked into embedded devices (like their engine control chips).
The ARM is quite the contrary, a cheapo RISC, powering more than 70% (in volume) of the 32bits processor market. They need to rise the performance to keep Intel out of their mobile business.
I have doubts that an superovercharged ARM will keep being a very low power platform : Adding superscalar units, a decent FPU, a deep pipeline for high frequencies, register renames, hyperthreading, or OOO execution will eat gobs of power, and may erase the avantage against the desperately bogus x86 but produced and tuned in the leading edge Intel fabs.
I’m convinced that the PowerPC, SPARC, or MIPS are more adaptable than ARM for high performance platforms, but, look at what they’ve done to the 8086 which was born as a 16bits evolution of a 8bits CPU (8080).
“An obvious limitation – for some – is that such a netbook would not be able to run Windows”
That is no what i call a limitation; I would call it a feature and an important one
I agree. I would like to see a fresh start myself, a nicely made processor designed to drain as little power as possible on these little computers. The fact that ARM doesn’t run Windows is a bonus to me.
I view netbooks as a different type of machine than desktops and laptops. While desktops/laptops aim to be as full-featured as possible, don’t seem to worry much about power savings, and have both been tied into Windows and Intel chips for who knows how long; netbooks aim to be extremely small, portable, good on saving power–and even make sacrifices in hardware such as the screen (size and resolution) to stay small.
The x86–a chip designed over the years for more and more megahertz and gigahertz–just doesn’t fit. It’s just relatively recently that they tried to tack on power saving features and call it an “Atom,” and I don’t believe it’s there yet (or that it ever will be, at least not for a long time). It just doesn’t fit as the right tool for the job in the case of something so small and battery-powered… otherwise, you’d find one in almost every cell phone or similar device.
You might, but not everyone does. Myself, I see the netbook as simply a very small and portable laptop, and allowing for the slower processor and small screen, expect it to be able to do most things a full-size laptop could do. From that perspective, the inability to run standard software would be a serious flaw.
…
Firefox and Openoffice are standard software, what more do you need.
when i see what we can do with a beagleboard who use a arm cpu à 600Mhz…
i think that could be a very nice choice
the first asus eee was selled very well and used linux… so i don’t think linux it’s a stop for people
I just wish they could jam more cores in there to make this more general purpose. I still like to compile.
Upsetting that the next generation Cortex-A9 maxxes out at 4 cores (I believe). And that’s purely paper at this point still.
Considering how small and low power the ARM cores are I wonder how many could be crammed onto a reasonable die and still thrash the current round of x86 stuff for power.
If ARM really wants to compete in this space they’re going to have to make some serious committments, that may mean pushing their release schedules a bit more.
To all those who say non-x86 devices won’t sell. Tell me, what will happen if Apple does sell a oversized iphone like device that runs on ARM with the Iphone version of OSX? For that matter, the iphone itself is really just a handheld computer with phone features. It has sold millions and it runs ARM.
The iPhone is a phone. A phone. A phone. A phone.
It is not a netbook. It is not a laptop. It is not a netbook. It is not a laptop.
x86 has sold billions. Not millions. Apple will not sell billions of anything, they like to keep prices higher than the mainstream is willing to afford. The don’t want to do mainstream, and doing a good job at it.
one of the main advantages of netbooks is price. a small cheap computer. Not a small moderately expensive computer. Steve Jobs has said as much. The strategy works. They make more money per unit, and all the power to them. But if they do make a netbook, it’s not going to be $359 cad, and it will sell well. But market share will stay lower than their competitors, and that’s fine, because they will make money hand over fist. But they won’t get the masses. Not like the ipod, and not like the x86 netbooks. Price and compatibility is a winning combination.
Price, absolutely.
But Compatibility, these days you need to compatible with MP3, JPEG and MPEG, You also need to be compatible with the mainstream apps, that’ll be Facebook and Youtube. Get those and you are fulfilling the needs of the vast majority of the market. ARM netbooks wont have problems with any of those.
Compatibility with a specific OS or specific ISA is simply no longer relevant in this day and age.
As for performance, only geeks care about that. Intel knows this, they know it because that’s how x86 got so big in the first place. They produced low cost processors in huge volumes that were cheaper than the competition and “fast enough”.
These days the shoe is on the other foot, Intel depends on high margins whereas ARM is the higher volume, lower cost, competitor.
If nothing else, it’s going to be an interesting battle…
—
Note: I work for ARM, but this my personal opinion.
Yeah. Chrysler, Ford and GM follow the same strategy. Don’t bother with low margin saloon cars; rake in the cash on high value SUVs instead. What’s good for the car industry is good for the PC industry too. Oh, wait…
Netbooks are completely overturning existing pricing paradigms. The cheapest generally available laptop in the UK is the gorgeously styled HP2133 – £190 with Linux, £260 with Windows. If an ARM device were £50 cheaper, the choice would be £140 for the Linux-only netbook or £260 for one with Windows. And the ARM netbook would have much better battery life.
These things will sell like hot cakes if they’re made by a decent manufacturer who understands product design and marketing. The laptop is about to become yet another impulse-buy, disposable consumer gadget.
in this industry, most of the other manufacturers are like ford and chrysler, they have product lines that span the entire market. Apple is like lexus, they don’t have any value lines. So it is kind of like the car industry, but not in the sarcastic way you mention it.
Last time I checked, Lexus was owned by Toyota. And almost every other luxury motor brand either has some value products (eg BMW also makes the Mini) or is owned by a cross-market company (eg Fiat owns Ferrari). R&D costs and the logistics of international distribution mandate these tie-ups.
Apple’s recent success is built on high-volume consumer products, many of which are very competitively priced. The laptop business looks much less appealing, especially at the outset of a possibly lengthy period of economic decline and massive private sector deleveraging.
You might remember this post in three years time.
Last time I checked, Apple’s business compared to the rest of the industry was decidedly low volume, at least as far as computers are concerned.
I think that you’ll find that financial analysts attribute less value to Apple’s low volume PC division than they do to its market-leading consumer elctronics products (ipods, iphones), its media division (itunes) and to its demonstrated ability to innovate and dominate in emerging markets.
But this topic is about netbooks. The Consumer Electronics Association expects worldwide shipments of netbooks in 2009 to generate 50% of the sales revenue of mainstream laptops (source: today’s London Financial Times), and the growth in this sector is phenomenal. The market share available to premium laptops is collapsing under the weight of stunningly cheap alternatives that offer acceptable quality and a level of portability that Apple refuses to provide.
I strongly believe that in three years time, Jobs’ statement that it’s not in Apple’s DNA to produce a cheap computer will look as stupid as the Detroit 3’s decision to focus on SUVs. And I drive an SUV.
Apple is the world’s 3rd largest PC vendor, and growing fast. They were small a few years back, but not any more.
It’s untrue that x86 OS can’t be put on it of course. The first thing anyone writes for a CPU that isn’t the compiler is an emulator/reprofiler (and that’s definitely before the fab mask allocations.)
The awesome thing about those ARM cores is that, like the PS3 chip, they’re pretty small. For our 1-3GHz trouble, we can at least order the chip package with more cores and accomplish the million-C64-march we care about and accomplish any 2 or more of:
– Productivity
– Ignoring the effect of background Flash ads
– Synaesthesia among HD camera/lighting/sound/data rigs
Some of the Atom netbooks with 6 cell batteries can get very close to (and maybe even exceed) 8h runtimes. Presumably the machine in question is also running off of a 6 cell battery, as Intel has improved power efficiency greatly, while OTOH Freescale hasn’t done much beyond what they originally had. Freescale simply lacks the funding.
Personally I’m finished with non-x86 architectures unless I have no choice in the matter. I’d MUCH rather have the capability to run Windows and be able to play at least some kind of recent games, apps, and quite frankly general software support(e.g. browser plugins) over having a few minutes more runtime if you even would get that.
AMD and Via ARE interesting in that they’d likely be using better 3D GPUs than what you typically get with current Atom based netbooks barring Asus’ N10J, but even that is only a slight step up…
Sorry, the thing about “minutes more” is truly crap.
Pandora runs 8.5 hrs full load with a 4000mAH battery, that’s less capacity than any 3 cell atom battery available.
So of course add a real 3 cell or even a 6 cell battery to a Cortex-A8 based system you’re talking full load processing for waking hours.
X86 won’t ever be able to meet efficiency levels of ARM, not unless there’s 3+ generations of manufacturing advantage. And normal desktop operating systems mostly don’t lend themselves well to these desktop appliances.
AMD has proven that they are only interested in lagging the industry by 2 years or so, they haven’t done much innovative aside from pricing for a while. Maybe AMD will get into the market 4th quarter….maybe…
VIA was happy building mini-ITX boards and charging an arm and a leg for them. Intel came out and sold their atom based mini-ITX system for $70 and have cut out via’s legs. I honestly don’t see much interesting on their plates either.
Have fun with your windows running behemoth. I am not happy with having to carry around an 8lb slab. And so far sales have shown most people aren’t interested in that either.
Btw here’s a new link:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/09/pegatron-and-freescale-team-for-…
Edited 2009-01-11 02:45 UTC