ARM to enter netbook fray
Intel has been coasting along fat and happy in the current netbook craze, pumping out as many Atom processors as they can. It’s not been enough though given their recent financial picture and things may get a bit rockier for the chipmaker as rival ARM has told Laptop Magazine they intend to enter the netbook market. ARM processors have long been used in smartphones and PDAs so the netbook segment is not that big a stretch for them. They plan to have a version of Ubuntu optimized to work with their chips and hit the market next year.
ARM chips are very low power consumers so we could see a netbook with a near all-day battery life which just might get some folks excited. We’ll have to wait and see how much an ARM-based netbook would cost compared to Intel powered ones as current netbook prices are already about as low as they can go and maintain full computing capabilites.
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This sounds great, but it is going to cause me more anxiety. Netbook prices are falling all over the place and I can’t decide whether to buy one now or wait for the next generation, which would likely be faster, cheaper and with better battery life.
A couple of years ago I was at a presentation where one of the speakers was from ARM (so not exactly unbiased). Anyway, this individual half-jokingly said, in an aside, that a computer running an an ARM chip would be a lot better than one running on the usual chips, but sadly it was not possible to use an ARM chip in that way. How it would be ‘better’ was not spelled out, of course. I would guess power consumption had a lot to do with it.
Debian already runs well on ARM Cpu’s , i don’t understand why they want Ubuntu instead ? really what does Ubuntu bring to the handheld table that isn’t availabe to Debian ?
I am using Ubuntu from 2005 and I am very much satisfied with it. Since 2005 I had given or installed Ubuntu to/for almost 20 people. None of them went back to Windows or migrated to any other OS.
I know very well that there are some specific fields where Linux distros have limitations, but neither me nor the other people to whom I had given Ubuntu, use their machines on those fields.
I am not interested to know the type or name of the processor as long Ubuntu or any other hassle free Linux distro runs on it. The processor may be a Chinese Longson, or an Intel x86 or ARM. I am not a technical person and all I know about ARM processor is – 99% mobile phones run on ARM processors. I am also happy with my mobile phones as I am happy with Ubuntu. They give the value for the money I paid for them… in fact I paid nothing for Ubuntu.
So I shall surely spend money for the device that combines two of my favorite pieces of technology.. ARM and Ubuntu. (If the price is low)