It is interesting the way that ARM and LINARO work closely together in developing ARM chipsets and Android/Linux, so closely that a LINARO developer conference presentation can spell out the next 4 years in ARM implementation so very very clearly and succinctly.    And you get the strong impression that they know today what is going to be in Android 5 and Android 6, items that haven't even been announced yet.

This is a download presentation, so you will find it on your desktop or your download folder.   There is a yearly time line in there, which after 1 year shows all signs of tracking 100% true to form.

http://cs.dogpile.com/ClickHandler.ashx?du=http%3a%2f%2fwww.linaro.org%2fdocu...

Now, Intel and MicroSoft are ARM licensee companies, so none of this is news to them.   They had people sitting there at the conference.

Google is getting ready to combine Google OS into Android (or share the feature sets, same difference) and Intel is readying their Medfield low power chips and Microsoft is getting Win 8 for Arm ready and Ubuntu already has their combined desktop, tablet, phone software already released and ready to go.

That's on the bigger guy's end of the pool --- on the shallow end you have 40 nanometer dual core A9 chips shipping from Rockchip and Media with Allwinner laying back on the dual core stuff while pulling together their very first 28 nanometer quad core A7 chipset.

What is Allwinner up to?   The license for the brand new A7 chipset is one set price, you can put 4-6 of them on the same dieset you have been using, they support Mali 400 graphics (license already paid for) and .... here is the kicker, they are part of the new big LITTLE setup and you know the A15 shared calls and Mali 6xx GPU calls are already built into that A7 license design that you just bought this summer.  

You can pick up the A15 license after a year of making money with 4 each A7 cores on your old dieset, run cooler, draw less power and still break the 2 gigahertz performance wall and sell the shite out of them.

And you can kick everybody's ass for a whole year at a cool running over 2 gigahertz with 4 of the little A7 suckers on the exact same die set everyone already has a spot for in every phone design and tablet design.  This makes it easy for them to drop your new chip into their existing Mali 400 designs.

Watch all the Chinese phone and tablet makers scurry about like crazy over the next year ....   the low end of the pool is where the real progress is marked.   Tegra 3 is a 1.5 gigahertz short lived freak high end chip, a nice short lived freak chip as are all the custom Apple chips, but not part of the main long term processor world really.   Them high end boys get $500 a device getting there a year or so earlier than everyone else, but if you wait until it becomes fully ripe, widespread technology like big LITTLE will be very very sweet.

And then comes the new generation of 64 bit ARM chips .....

 
TI's main ARM system on a chips are generally expensive high priced stuff, and are generally right at state of the art level.   Their OMAP chips are right up with the first wave boys.

This Stellaris stuff however, is the M series microcontroller level stuff, and yes they are state of the art and are selling the stuff cheap to get folks to switch over to their more efficent, more powerful microcontroller chips.

If I were an Arduino person, I'd be eating this up -- but I'm not Arduino level at all,  I'm watching the lowest level of PC space and cheap Chinese tablet space slowly become the same space.   I'm watching "set-top box space" as the tiny processors become more powerful (gigahertz speeds, memory size and speed, GPU speeds) than what I am using now.

I am waiting and watching for my next desktop box (it must be double of what I have now on all counts) and it must sit in the palm of my hand and use a 5-10  watt phone charger for a power supply.

It amuses me, this watching and waiting.   All the time running a 150 watt 120 volt power supply on my white box with separate fans running over the top of my main AMD  Athelon 1.0 gigahertz CPU and a separate little fan over my GPU, these two little fans each pulling more power than my new yet to be bought PC will take in total.  Not to count the big assed fans that cool the power supply and the case in total, each of them will pull 4x the power of my new PC.  My old white box puts out enough waste heat to warm my feet a little bit on a cold morning .....

And my new 4 core mini PC will run at 2x the specs of my old big white box .... and cost less than $100 to purchase.

 
My daughter was of an age to play when "Modding your PC case" was all the rage.   This was back before water cooling was invented, the golden age of the big assed heat sinks with the custom fans.  No heat pipes, just fins and air.

We did one together, then I had to buy the White Box for her to take into the dorm because her super PC was too noisy for her dorm room mate to take (kept her up at night).

Her boyfriend upgraded the modded case machine and made it his, he now uses the replacement for the white box that I bought for her and he sold the "Ultimate PC" to one of his gaming buds.  Too noisy for him to take.

At that point in time, she was running her main University CAD program on her new laptop, the very first 64 bit laptop available with a whole GIG of memory that could run Solid Works Professional faster than the University's computing lab workstations could do .....

            Computer time runs in reverse dog years, I guess.

Now my needs are really minimal, Linux is great for what I need and use and I can run my world on a full size flash drive configuration "set-top box" and use that for my main PC ....

It is funny, when you think about it.          

Yep, and the dummy who said that became one of the richest people in the world.

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 10/02/12 at 20:11:37:


Hmmm, I could answer that question logically, but when has MS ever been logical?   It wouldn't surprise me to extend the , eh em, extended support for WXP.  Of all Windows versions, XP is probably the most predictable and robust version ever, and it's surprising how many people still cling to it (IMO).  I have even installed WXP on brand new hardware, where folks didn't like the Vista or Win7 that came with it, and wanted to go back to something familar that worked well.

The C64 was a fun cumputer, and the coprocessors did amazing things for sound and video.  I wrote several graphic games for mine.   I also had 2 Amigas (68K based) which had an OS kernal with a direct C interface.