RSS feedsIntel, my sources tell me, may be frightened of Arm PCs running Linux. I saw several of these at the Mobile World Congress, and they were impressive. They are smaller and lighter than X86-based machines, have their own battery built in for a day (or two) of use and they are fast.
The unexpected factor in the Arm architecture is the decision of Qualcomm to license the instruction set. Not the design at all. Just the instruction set. It will run any code written for Arm processors.
The machines I saw were Snapdragon designs, built around a core processor called Scorpion. Apparently “Snap and Dragon sounded fast and fierce,” confessed one senior executive from San Diego.
Some benchmarks had to be attempted. They demonstrated one dual-core Snapdragon chip running at 600MHz, but capable of reaching 1.2GHz during 2009. Some of the speed must have been due to the exclusion of Windows Vista.
Compare the Linux performance as seen on some X86 engines in netbooks and it’s fast. Faster than the X86 chip could be.
Intel makes an Arm-based design, the X-Scale family – originally built by Intel itself and then, when the company finally accepted that its silicon skills were not appropriate, the fabrication was sold to Marvell.
Can X-Scale compete with Snapdragon? I would say not this year, and maybe not even next year either.
Inside Intel, my sources tell me of rage and fury, at the news that several popular Linux distributions are going to pre-install on these hand-sized boxes, with Arm-based silicon.
That isn’t what Intel has been sponsoring Linux for, and the sense of betrayal is deep, say insiders. “Why should we pour money into Linux developers just to see them divert the effort into stuff without X86 chips?” asked one engineer.
Many people I interviewed about Snapdragon were hostile to Qualcomm and felt they were being over-charged for Qualcomm-owned patents, but they are impressed with Scorpion cores, and amazed at Qualcomm’s roadmap for twin and quad-core devices on 45nm silicon.
