Destination Moorestown. Due in the second half of 2008, this Intel chip is slated to bring the power of todays desktop computers to your portable devices.
The article also has an interesting post script on the inevitability of the x86 architecture.
Back in the late 70's, early 80's I was irritated by, and then grew to loath Intel processors. (I was in part influenced by the really crappy micro-computer architecture IBM put together.)
Now I dig it. It still lacks "elegance", but it's got a cluster of technology and market power that transform it into something different than a "processor". An off-the-shelf x86 motherboard plus Linux provide a building block that would take vast amounts of time, effort and money to create from scratch. And it's cheap. And there's a better one coming right around the corner.
The consistent march forward is pretty impressive. Seems like they got side tracked for a while trying to produce the successor to x86 (and other things like xscale,) but now they are really focused and just churning them out. AMD has provided some good competition that I think went a long way toward forcing that focus. But I wouldn't want to play AMDs hand from here. If I was building a server today it would be on Intel. And certainly my next personal machine will be Intel.
(For some reason this made me thing of my first computer, which had an 8088 CPU. After that they were all Motorolla for a long time.)
And the challenger: A group of seven companies including Mozilla Corp., Arm Ltd. and MontaVista Software Inc. are hoping to grow the market for a relatively new device category that sits in between a smartphone and a laptop.
The companies are collaborating on a Linux-based open-source platform that encompasses chip design, operating system and some applications.....
The group, which also includes Texas Instruments Inc., Samsung Electronics America Inc., Movial Corp. and Marvell Technologies Group Ltd., expects to complete the platform's development in the early part of next year, said Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances in Arm's connected mobile computing group. The devices should hit the market in early 2009, she said. They've got the hardware manufacturing firepower, and they've got linux, and they've got Mozilla on Gnome. All the pieces are just sitting there. But so far it has proven really difficult to put them all together in a whole that doesn't suck.
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The article also has an interesting post script on the inevitability of the x86 architecture.
- jim 10-01-2007 9:47 pm
Back in the late 70's, early 80's I was irritated by, and then grew to loath Intel processors. (I was in part influenced by the really crappy micro-computer architecture IBM put together.)
Now I dig it. It still lacks "elegance", but it's got a cluster of technology and market power that transform it into something different than a "processor". An off-the-shelf x86 motherboard plus Linux provide a building block that would take vast amounts of time, effort and money to create from scratch. And it's cheap. And there's a better one coming right around the corner.
- mark 10-02-2007 7:40 am
The consistent march forward is pretty impressive. Seems like they got side tracked for a while trying to produce the successor to x86 (and other things like xscale,) but now they are really focused and just churning them out. AMD has provided some good competition that I think went a long way toward forcing that focus. But I wouldn't want to play AMDs hand from here. If I was building a server today it would be on Intel. And certainly my next personal machine will be Intel.
(For some reason this made me thing of my first computer, which had an 8088 CPU. After that they were all Motorolla for a long time.)
- jim 10-02-2007 3:43 pm
And the challenger:
They've got the hardware manufacturing firepower, and they've got linux, and they've got Mozilla on Gnome. All the pieces are just sitting there. But so far it has proven really difficult to put them all together in a whole that doesn't suck.- jim 10-04-2007 11:50 pm