Lol, I'm running Win 7 at work on C2D with 4Gb of ram. It occupies ~50GB of HDD. And it still sluggish. I have to admit that it's best desktop OS MS ever produced and I'm impressed with results of my "Windows uptime experiment" that is currently at 119 days point. But I can't imagine someone sane will want it on underpowered in order architecture like Intel's Atom. It will be nightmare. ARMs are better in every way. Especially because they are NOT x86. It is legacy that wasting huge part of Intel's Atom silicon (it is ~10% of desktop C2D if i remember correctly). And Linux is not as bad as MS wants you to think about it. It is actually much better :) You will always have something like Android to say "It's not Linux" :)
I hope you accidentally added another 0 in there. A Win7 install (even 64-bit) is under 10 gigs. You can't count 40 gigs of stuff in your User folder against Windows...
As it stands though I agree, it shoudn't be anywhere near a smartphone/sub-netbook.
Why not ask work for an SSD? You could easily justify the cost in terms of time saved.
I think the idea with the Atom processors is that a few generations in, they won't feel particularly performance-constrained (for web browsing anyway), so why not make it nice and easy for people to run whatever OS and applications they want on it? In the meantime, just bear with these early prototypes.
Anand you seem pretty hyped on Intel going up against Arm but to me it looks like a dead end.
Intel's Moorestown allegedly needs a highly optimized software stack (hence MeeGo) in order to reach it's power targets, who's going to want to run a slow Oaktrail processor with limited battery life running Windows ???
Google's ChromeOS is really the only viable option for Arm smartbooks as Google has the power to push it as a platform (vanilla linux has no chance), as it's processor agnostic there is little point in putting anything x86 in what should be a very cheap computer with limited capabilities.
If you really need x86 you can buy a netbook. I cant see why most manufacturers would want to trade an Arm SoC for an Intel SoC, sure there will be a few and "it's faster" may appeal to tech nerds but that is a sure fire way to go out of business.
The EE times article you linked to is armchair speculation. The author hasn't seen the terms intel wanted and was just guessing at possible reasons why it might've flopped. If you have an actual citattion for the terms or of a hardware vendor balking at them please provide it. Otherwise don't state your guesses as fact by backing them up with someone elses guesses.
My suspicion is that it's v 1.0 platform issues both software and in that Intel's implementation used 3 more discrete chips than competing arm platforms and the SoC companies wanted someone else to take the risks in fully integrating it first.
Hey! First of all, Android is based on Linux ;). Secondly, if you have a C2D and 4GB of Ram and it still isn't running well, I would look into an HDD upgrade. Or possibly check if everything is configured correctly.
Personally, I look forward to all the development being done with Tablets, Smartbooks, ARM/Tegra2 vs x86, Touchscreens etc. and will wait till there is a good variety of devices around with a few reviews as well. The theory surrounding Andorid 2+ and Win7 on those things is pretty intriguing. But no one should get their hopes up too high :D.
I know what Android is, but the average Joe does not :) "Linux" as a term, used for frightening housewives by some groups of people. So Android marketing was to keep it's Linux backbone as quite as possible. People like it :) I don't think that there any problem with HDD, as at home i do dual boot (Win 7 with Gentoo). The home monster is liquid cooled C2Q @ 3.5GHz + humble 8GB of DDR2 1066 and an SSD. It still sluggish in my eyes. Probably since I'm used to responsiveness of Linux in general and my very optimized Gentoo build :) I just hate that moment when "it decides to think about something" . you can make a cup of coffee, come back and it will be there again for you.
O yes, they do ... :( and it hurts ... But the real killer is MS Office 2010. If you leave open document, next morning login will take forever. Anyway it's better then XP. So it can be considered as real upgrade by all means.
I have the same configuration and my windows 7 PC is blazing fast, tried Linux on it once and changed back faster than it took me to install it... but then again on the realm of the internet anything is possible!
I'm running win7 on an atom without any problem; and have ran it on systems as low speced as a p3m-800 with 768MB of PC133 ram and a vintage HD. The only problem I had on that system was that the ~5% CPU idle kept the CPU out of its most efficient power savings states and took about 40% of the tablets battery life. The 10% performance hit from the Z6xx's low power process does not strike as a major concern.
I did it to X31 - became useless piece of plastic :) It's not important if you can install it (You can install Linux on 386/486). The question is how usable your installation compared to other options ;)
Aside from the power consumption level on the tablet (IIRC the handwriting recognition module was the primary offender here) I had no complaints about usability on either system.
The conclusion: "The ARM Cortex-A8 achieves surprisingly competitive performance across many integer-based benchmarks while consuming power at levels far below the most energy miserly x86 CPU, the Intel Atom. (...) However, the ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited. Memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz. Languishing across all of the JavaScript benchmarks, the ARM Cortex-A8 was only one-third to one-half as fast as the x86 competition. More troubling is the unacceptably poor double-precision floating-point throughput of the ARM Cortex-A8. (...) However, new ARM-based products like the NVIDIA Tegra 2 address many of the performance deficiencies of the Freescale i.MX515."
As far as I know it's pretty much the state of the art when it comes to timing? Especially on mobile platforms, where cpu-clock varies a lot, a fixed HPET-clock is quite a boon. I suppose what you mean is that these previously desktop only features/interfaces are no being ported to handheld platforms, but "legacy" goes quite a bit further.
No matter how you approach it ARM is bound to win in all categories upto (including ) netbooks. all these machines are about browsing and Always-On/Always-Connected and some low end integrated HW features like video ... you need: 1. simple , low cost , low power architecture 2. performance good enough. no one wants to run matlab or spice on a netbook or a smartbook 3. and finally - away from monopolistic x86 policies that we witnessed over and over again by intel.
This last item is the biggest reason why so many companies turn to ARM even for the gray areas( like pads). If you are an OEM , the last thing you want is to get your hands chained to the intel monopoly.
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n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Lol, I'm running Win 7 at work on C2D with 4Gb of ram.It occupies ~50GB of HDD.
And it still sluggish. I have to admit that it's best desktop OS MS ever produced and I'm impressed with results of my "Windows uptime experiment" that is currently at 119 days point.
But I can't imagine someone sane will want it on underpowered in order architecture like Intel's Atom.
It will be nightmare. ARMs are better in every way. Especially because they are NOT x86. It is legacy that wasting huge part of Intel's Atom silicon (it is ~10% of desktop C2D if i remember correctly).
And Linux is not as bad as MS wants you to think about it. It is actually much better :)
You will always have something like Android to say "It's not Linux" :)
7Enigma - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
I hope you accidentally added another 0 in there. A Win7 install (even 64-bit) is under 10 gigs. You can't count 40 gigs of stuff in your User folder against Windows...As it stands though I agree, it shoudn't be anywhere near a smartphone/sub-netbook.
n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Of course i'm talking about 7 + Office and other stuff :)Clean installation is almost 20GB (including page file)
dananski - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Why not ask work for an SSD? You could easily justify the cost in terms of time saved.I think the idea with the Atom processors is that a few generations in, they won't feel particularly performance-constrained (for web browsing anyway), so why not make it nice and easy for people to run whatever OS and applications they want on it? In the meantime, just bear with these early prototypes.
yanfei - Sunday, July 25, 2010 - link
======= http://www.fashionshoppong.us=======Rainman200 - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Anand you seem pretty hyped on Intel going up against Arm but to me it looks like a dead end.Intel's Moorestown allegedly needs a highly optimized software stack (hence MeeGo) in order to reach it's power targets, who's going to want to run a slow Oaktrail processor with limited battery life running Windows ???
There is also the many issues surrounding Intel's SoC's as they are positively draconian compared to Arm's licensing terms
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht...
Google's ChromeOS is really the only viable option for Arm smartbooks as Google has the power to push it as a platform (vanilla linux has no chance), as it's processor agnostic there is little point in putting anything x86 in what should be a very cheap computer with limited capabilities.
If you really need x86 you can buy a netbook. I cant see why most manufacturers would want to trade an Arm SoC for an Intel SoC, sure there will be a few and "it's faster" may appeal to tech nerds but that is a sure fire way to go out of business.
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
The EE times article you linked to is armchair speculation. The author hasn't seen the terms intel wanted and was just guessing at possible reasons why it might've flopped. If you have an actual citattion for the terms or of a hardware vendor balking at them please provide it. Otherwise don't state your guesses as fact by backing them up with someone elses guesses.My suspicion is that it's v 1.0 platform issues both software and in that Intel's implementation used 3 more discrete chips than competing arm platforms and the SoC companies wanted someone else to take the risks in fully integrating it first.
Death666Angel - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Hey!First of all, Android is based on Linux ;). Secondly, if you have a C2D and 4GB of Ram and it still isn't running well, I would look into an HDD upgrade. Or possibly check if everything is configured correctly.
Personally, I look forward to all the development being done with Tablets, Smartbooks, ARM/Tegra2 vs x86, Touchscreens etc. and will wait till there is a good variety of devices around with a few reviews as well. The theory surrounding Andorid 2+ and Win7 on those things is pretty intriguing. But no one should get their hopes up too high :D.
n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
I know what Android is, but the average Joe does not :)"Linux" as a term, used for frightening housewives by some groups of people. So Android marketing was to keep it's Linux backbone as quite as possible. People like it :)
I don't think that there any problem with HDD, as at home i do dual boot (Win 7 with Gentoo). The home monster is liquid cooled C2Q @ 3.5GHz + humble 8GB of DDR2 1066 and an SSD.
It still sluggish in my eyes. Probably since I'm used to responsiveness of Linux in general and my very optimized Gentoo build :)
I just hate that moment when "it decides to think about something" . you can make a cup of coffee, come back and it will be there again for you.
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
That sounds like jack booted thug security software corporate IT loves to blight systems with.n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
O yes, they do ... :( and it hurts ...But the real killer is MS Office 2010. If you leave open document, next morning login will take forever.
Anyway it's better then XP. So it can be considered as real upgrade by all means.
Strunf - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
I have the same configuration and my windows 7 PC is blazing fast, tried Linux on it once and changed back faster than it took me to install it... but then again on the realm of the internet anything is possible!n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
It can happen :)Each cooking pot has its cover.
That is the best thing about freedom. You have the freedom to try and choose what is best for you :)
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
I'm running win7 on an atom without any problem; and have ran it on systems as low speced as a p3m-800 with 768MB of PC133 ram and a vintage HD. The only problem I had on that system was that the ~5% CPU idle kept the CPU out of its most efficient power savings states and took about 40% of the tablets battery life. The 10% performance hit from the Z6xx's low power process does not strike as a major concern.n0nsense - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
I did it to X31 - became useless piece of plastic :)It's not important if you can install it (You can install Linux on 386/486). The question is how usable your installation compared to other options ;)
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Aside from the power consumption level on the tablet (IIRC the handwriting recognition module was the primary offender here) I had no complaints about usability on either system.ajuez - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
You can find a comparison of an Atom processor vs an ARM Cortex-A8 in Bright Side Of News:http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/4/7/the-...
The conclusion: "The ARM Cortex-A8 achieves surprisingly competitive performance across many integer-based benchmarks while consuming power at levels far below the most energy miserly x86 CPU, the Intel Atom.
(...)
However, the ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited. Memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz.
Languishing across all of the JavaScript benchmarks, the ARM Cortex-A8 was only one-third to one-half as fast as the x86 competition. More troubling is the unacceptably poor double-precision floating-point throughput of the ARM Cortex-A8.
(...)
However, new ARM-based products like the NVIDIA Tegra 2 address many of the performance deficiencies of the Freescale i.MX515."
michael2k - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
ARM will have dual and quad core ARM CPUs (well, Samsung, NVIDIA, Apple, etc) to fight off Oaktrail.Everyone wins :)
Rick83 - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
As far as I know it's pretty much the state of the art when it comes to timing?Especially on mobile platforms, where cpu-clock varies a lot, a fixed HPET-clock is quite a boon.
I suppose what you mean is that these previously desktop only features/interfaces are no being ported to handheld platforms, but "legacy" goes quite a bit further.
carlosminem - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - link
No matter how you approach it ARM is bound to win in all categories upto (including ) netbooks. all these machines are about browsing and Always-On/Always-Connected and some low end integrated HW features like video ... you need:1. simple , low cost , low power architecture
2. performance good enough. no one wants to run matlab or spice on a netbook or a smartbook
3. and finally - away from monopolistic x86 policies that we witnessed over and over again by intel.
This last item is the biggest reason why so many companies turn to ARM even for the gray areas( like pads). If you are an OEM , the last thing you want is to get your hands chained to the intel monopoly.