Re: Debian ARM success story: Debian desktop on a TS-7300
James:
In general I refrain from feeding the trolls, but... you caught me on a
day when my resistance is down. :)
> Aurelien Jarno wrote:
>
>> You're totally wrong! Intel has sold its Xscale division to
>> Marvell in order to concentrate on *ultra-low-power x86 processors*...
As I understand it, they only sold the PXA line to Marvell which is a
good move for both parties. But Intel isn't out of XScale completely,
they still have IXP for example.
PXA is well-suited for mobile applications, but those same applications
are often very price-conscious. Intel probably dumped the chip because
they could make more money focusing on more profitable product lines.
> Intel has many failures, some due to their close political alignments.
... perhaps, but mostly because they're in a very high-tech field and
that stuff is HARD to get right.
Very similar to why Bill cannot peddle his winbloz products in the EU, Asia and many other places.
Uhm, last I checked the main reason Microsoft is at odds with the EU is
precisely _because_ they're peddling Windows (ok, in certain apparently
unbecoming ways) in the EU and other markets. That's hardly "cannot
peddle" to me!
DRM, of which Intel has played a key role in, is a huge black eye for Intel. The rest of the world is looking at the arrogance of the MPEG (et. al.) consortiums and saying, why don't we just do our on thing in multimedia, hence, DRM is dead. Although manufacturers' will not publish details, many products and chipsets have the ability to work around DRM.
From the MPEG website:
"MPEG is a committee of ISO/IEC that is open to experts duly accredited
by an appropriate National Standards Body. On average a meeting is
attended by more than 300 experts representing more than 200 companies
spanning all industry domains with a stake in digital audio, video and
multimedia. On average more than 20 countries are represented at a meeting."
Wikipedia seems to concur. So who exactly is "the rest of the world"?
Note also that ISO/IEC != USA.
And I don't think DRM is a black eye for Intel, at all. They're
producing what their customers are asking for, and some of those
customers are large, multimedia conglomerates with money to spend and
specific objectives in mind. I'm neither for nor against DRM, and I
don't think Intel is either.
The mainstream, consumer-oriented press has been largely silent on DRM
especially as it relates to Intel AFAICT. So I don't see where the
black eye that you're referring to is coming from, except the activist
community... which has its own collection of baggage to haul around.
For the record, I'm a freelancer making a living doing Linux kernel
development for embedded applications, some on Intel chips, some on
others. So I'm hardly a shill for anyone except pragmatism, common
sense and Free Software/GPL. And no, my views on DRM don't conflict
with GPL. Sony/MGM/etc. have their sandbox, we have ours.
Low power is always important for density, cooling and mobile needs. If Intel is dumping xscale (arm) That does not effect ARM's overall appeal. TI now uses ARM cores with their DSPs in some hybrid processors. as do thousands of semiconductor companies. When you look at the mips versus power(consumption) arm processors are hard to complete with.
And the arms scale down to 8 bit uPs, very cost effectively, with hard to match performance.
ARM is exclusively a 32-bit architecture now, and was a 26/32-bit one
before that. It doesn't "scale down to 8-bit uP" chips at all. Just
doesn't. But in some instances it does indeed hold its own price-wise
with competing 8-bit chips. See Philip's line of ARM7 stuff.
b.g.
--
Bill Gatliff
bgat@billgatliff.com
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