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Re: [LUG] OT: [Fwd: Tech changes 'outstrip' netbooks]

 

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009, Neil Williams wrote:

***Mobile devices don't need a desktop OS!***

You're right... However Jo Consumer has been brainwashed into the whole idea of the "desktop metaphor" that it's hard to get away from it.

ARM is doing well for Linux right now though and (currently) the chipset is lower power than intel in terms of mw per mip. Intel are catching up though - the basic Atom chip is under 4 watts and hopefully getting lower, and the AMD Geode platform is lower still. Most power goes (IME) on things like display, wireless, networking and so on - and this is where windows will have the advantage - the chip makers will tell MS their internal secrets, but the Linux world has to prise these secrets out of their tight fists the hard way, so it really needs someone in control of both the hardware and software to make real power savings, and we're seeing this now - with things like the Ardriod platform and Nokia's N900. (And Apple, although I've heard they're not particularly clever about power savings in-general)

The original N770 got 3 hours on a battery with 'active use'. The latest N900 is reported to go over 24 hours and it's got much more in it, so it shows that when you have control over the hardware and you know how to write the software drivers to support it, there is a lot you can do.

My own recent experince with a battery powered portable device - not running Linux, but with a display & buttons, and with the full hardware knowledge, it's been possible for me to get it down to microamps in standby mode - and that's with the processor still waking up 128 times a second to perform some tasks, and to dramatically reduce current consumption in run mode too. This is obviously much simpler than a general purpose platform to run userland code, but with time and knowledge a lot is possible.

It's a problem of the Windows monoculture - desktop Windows needs to be
stripped down to something a bit bigger than Windows Mobile but that
seems impossible and Windows Mobile isn't compatible with desktop
Windows.

Symbian, anyone?

Users appear to want the same bloated software on their netbooks as on
their desktops when what most really want is the same core
functionality as the desktop equivalent but without the bloat that
nobody uses. What should have happened is that netbooks had a selection
of Lite versions that were compatible with their desktop equivalents.
(Sufficiently compatible that selected users can upgrade selected apps
to the full version without needing the entire OS - kinda like running
some GNOME apps under XFCE as I do on my notebook running Emdebian
Grip.)

And who is responsible for the bloat? I know I've whinged about this before here - login.c used to be a dozen lines of code (if that), what is it now?

Instead, what happens is that MS cannot scale down so the hardware has
to scale up, defeating the original objective.

I fear (desktop) Linux now can't scale down either - but there are vendors who are doing it though - Marvel and Axis are supplying embedded ARM + Linux devices - e.g.

http://www.skpang.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=83_84&products_id=216

But people are throwing hardware at tasks now - because they can. My current embedded project uses a PIC microcontroller and has 96KB of flash amd 3KB of RAM... The company that makes it have a new one... It has an ARM processor and 2GB of Flash. Same physical size, same battery life, but look at all those megaflops I now have to play with!!!

Ah well, back to the grind... I suppose that technically it's a work day today... :)

Gordon

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