http://www.androidauthority.com/arm-a9-vs-arm-a15-87559/

Now, if you read the above and didn't get a glimmer of hope for the future, I'll try to explain why you should.

Cortex A-15 can run ANY operating system.   It can run Direct X, so normal games can run on it.   It is 30-50% faster than the fastest phone chip out there right now.   It can run a PC at normal speed, or a tablet, or a laptop, or a really beefy phone and still get longer battery life than what we have now.

Apple has already committed A-15 to their next tablets and notebooks (yes, long play times and power and increased glitz means Apple has already locked up the first year's supply of this new chip from their favourite vendors)

So, what happens in 2014-15?   MicroSoft either makes it big in phones and in computers and in tablets with Windows 8 or they become pretty much irrelevant in this same period.  

Android moves from phones to tablets to laptops and PCs.   Google won the lawsuit with Oracle over Java -- Android is unencumbered now and Google just bought Motorola Mobility so they now own 17,000 patents that can be swapped or counter-charged against any other sorts of Oracle type lawsuit moves somebody might make.  

Android 4.0 is free to use, open code that can run on phones, tablets and computers (yup, it has mouse and keyboard interfaces now all built in natural style).  You can finger stroke, tap, click and keyboard to your heart's content, it will sense what you have hooked up and let you use it.

Development of Android now continues  (lawsuit is over)  .....    5.0 might well be the "combine point" of Chrome OS and Android we were told was gonna happen way back from the very beginning.  

so ....

Look to the Far East and the Allwinner chipsets for the world shifting changes that are just starting to break.  

Allwinner lags behind like 1 generation to the ARM big boys and they are just now shipping their 1.2 ghz dual core A-8 ARM processors which are being shipped out TODAY in Android set top boxes that function like little $74 computers.   And yes, they cost $74.

Same little Allwinner A-8 chips are showing up in cute little Chrome OS boxes .....

..... and little Raspberry Pi like Linux stick computers .....

And MicroSoft and Intel are scrambling and floundering like crazy because they missed the wave completely and although they have lots of money to throw at it, right now they got no traction at all in phone space.

And, with the advent of the powerful enough to do anything/everything A-15 Arm chip, licensed to anybody that wants to build it -- phone space is rapidly becoming every space.

Good stuff, though it start making my head spin pretty quick.  Which is sad as I have been programming for over 30 years.

What would excite me is if theses things would show up in Home NAS boxes and bring down the price of devise Synolgy NAS boxes. I would love to a stack of these things in a home, one as a file server, one as a media server, one as VPN/firewall device...

Of course what I want seems contrary to where the world is going.. ie cloud stuff, with no data kept at home. I am backwards that way I guess.  

As for phones.. I ahve yet to jump on the smart phone bandwagon. Not becasue they arent cool, I just refuse to be ripped off by the current data plans.

They say your phone today has much more computing power than the on-board computers of the Apollo moon missions. Just amazing.

I don't really see it as a new wave swelling so much as a wave of technology that began around 1970 with the first single chip CPU (Intel's 4004), and steadily progressing from there.   The components just keep getting smaller and more powerful.   Speaking of which, remember the old Commodore 64?   Well here's the NEW one on steroids; about 1,800x faster than the original...

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx

These cute new little boxes keep rolling on out of the Far East faster and faster and faster.   Phone users in the orient understand the Android operating system totally, to them it is like giving them a little bitty XP box was to us.

http://liliputing.com/2012/06/mini-x-is-a-78-android-2-3-tv-companion-with-al...

They are not what you really want just yet, give them a year or so to roll up to the newly "cheap" A-15 dual or quad chips and the current version of Android, then they will have lots of horsepower to go with the tiny tiny size.



Android is showing the potential now to be accepted by billions of people (yeah, Indochina & Orient -- I know) as a mainstream OS.   But think about it, they have a cell phone data plan already and NO phone lines or cable lines in their area -- these were never put in as they were "old tech" when the industrialization wave came through their country in the last 5 years.

To all these brand new billions of tech users MicroSoft and Intel are way too expensive to even consider.

Plus, their governments are embracing Android and putting it (tablets) into primary and secondary schools as a way of avoiding the very high yearly costs of physical text books.

Kids are growing up on Android right now -- everything they need or do is on Android.

The last time I pieced a computer together I bought a $150 metal case, to be my last computer case in life, you see,   , because it had the standard "ATX" motherboard footprint.  Little did I know that there'd be these little things of totally different architecture that take 1/50th the power and don't sound like, and draw power like a vacuum cleaner.

As with all tech purchases, the longer you wait, the better the deal is.. not knowing when to buy is a great problem to have.. but I think I'll wait a liiiittle longer and let the nerds sort the bugs out.

Heh heh.  The last video card I bought (currently in use) has its own fan on it, the Nvidia ti4200 something-or-other, super badass at the time, and cost me about $200 and I was thinking "oh gee I'll never need any more video power than THAT!"     Of course, by today's standards it's crap.  At some point I realized that unless you value computers as a hobby, It is foolish to buy the latest and greatest hardware.. I saw a computer way better than mine on freecycle but I was too preoccupied to go get it.  

 
AMD is paying attention to the change wave and does get it and is on it completely !!!

Intel is still completely lost and floundering about, chasing Ivy Bridge this and that.   MicroSoft has bet their entire farm on Windows 8 and is busy locking it down so Linux can't be added on to a windows pc (anybody say "lawsuit" for that little trick?) and so you have to buy all new windows office stuff if you put it on an ARM chipset.

Sad, how far the mighty duo have fallen.

AMD on the other hand has come out with a line of very low power requiring BRAZOS chips that have very very good built in GPUs that are performing on par to Intel's mid line chips (and outperforming all the various Atoms).   You can run anybody's operating system as it is x86 compatible and is Linux friendly.

And looky here at the brand new AMD reference design for using these new low power high performance chipsets .....   doesn't require very much room when the video system is on the same chip as the CPU.