First off, I’ll note that this will probably sound horribly uninformed, and is probably wrong. I’m not a hardware designer, and I’m not a programmer. I may get some facts horribly wrong. Please correct me if they’re wrong.
But, I’ve got some ideas about what’s in the 3DS, based on the rumors that are out there, and what is known about both it and previous DSes. Continue reading “Speculation on the Nintendo 3DS’s tech specs”
Looks like things are about to get interesting. ARM has owned the phone market for quite a few years now, with very little competition.
Sandeep Vij, CEO of MIPS Technologies, has said that penetration of the cellular market is his top priority, and there are two customers of MIPS that are working on chips for the cellular market.
In addition, MIPS has released a port of Android to their CPUs. Android is a good choice, as almost all Android apps are compiled to run on the Dalvik VM… recompile Dalvik for MIPS, and all of those apps will run, unmodified, with no emulation penalty (well, no additional penalty over the VM penalty.)
So, now we’ve got MIPS and Intel both aiming at smartphones, Renesas has a SuperH chip that has the processing power for a mid-range smartphone (although it has on-board RAM, and not much of it,) and the rumor mill is saying that Apple wants to buy ARM (although, admittedly, that one’s not likely.) Interesting times indeed, and this time around, we won’t have the pain of having to know what CPU’s in your phone to run an app, unless it’s Windows Phone (and Microsoft will likely require ARM for the foreseeable future, there,) iPhone OS (and Apple will stick with ARM, I suspect,) or Symbian.
First thing is, I’d like to stress that this is all extremely speculative, hence the title change for today.
However, the rumor mill is claiming that Apple is going to buy ARM.
This would, obviously, give Apple control of the ARM architecture – and it means that Apple could use that control to shut its competitors out of the smartphone market, or turn to Intel’s latest attempts at smartphone chips.
Some may compare this to Google’s purchase of Agnilux today. However, that’s a very different thing, with Agnilux being a company consisting of engineers with ARM experience, and having no control over the ARM architecture and who can use it. Not only that, but Google may not even be intending this for phones –
If Apple were to buy ARM, the smartphone market could be set back by a couple years, as it may have to switch CPU architectures. The most popular smartphone platforms in the US, outside of the iPhone and Windows Mobile, are mostly architecture independent (BlackBerry using Java, Android using Dalvik,) but there’s not much in the way of good non-ARM smartphone hardware. Intel’s certainly trying, but their attempts look to be slow and power-hungry.
Keep in mind, this may very well be BS. If it’s true, then things are about to get really bad. It may well be false, however.
Source: The Register
If you follow this blog, you may remember that I’ve mentioned RISC OS, the OS used on ARM-based computers made by Acorn Computers. The OS has a very loyal following, and as an “outsider,” I found it (and the hardware, for that matter) interesting.
However, as Acorn pulled out of the personal computer market in 1998, the community has had trouble obtaining hardware since. Many users still use circa 1997 RiscPCs with 200 or 233 MHz StrongARM CPUs, which just don’t cut it today. While there were a few clones made after the fall of Acorn, most notably the Iyonix (with a 600 MHz XScale,) and the A9home (with a 400 MHz Samsung ARM9-based system on chip,) these machines are expensive for what they are, and the Iyonix is no longer in production. It’s proven to be difficult to make custom hardware specifically for this market, as the RISC OS community can’t afford custom chips designed for RISC OS machines, so they’re required to use embedded chips that provide suboptimal performance, and the low volume causes extremely high hardware prices to make up for development and tooling costs.
But, ARM is now pushing their architecture into the netbook and nettop spaces, countering Intel’s attempt to move into ARM’s traditional smartphone and embedded spaces. This means that there’s now PC-class ARM hardware. And, the best part is, someone else is paying for the development, and ARM wants the volume to be huge.
Not only that, but Castle Technology, the company that makes the Iyonix, has released their version of RISC OS under a shared source license, to RISC OS Open. This has allowed developers to take advantage of the new ARM platforms. Right now, there’s a port to the Beagle Board, although it’s arguably not well suited towards desktop applications, due to its lack of any form of ATA support, and poor 2D graphics capabilities – the OMAP3530 chip that it’s based on is essentially a cell phone chip. Also, it’s a developer board, so there’s no good case for it. But, there’s an ARM platform that’s low-cost, commercially available, and does offer SATA, good 2D graphics, and a case. Continue reading “HP t5325 thin client, RISC OS, and maybe combining the two. Or just running Linux on it. Either way.”
So, let’s start with the computer stuff…
I managed to get an Acorn RiscPC. For those not familiar with the machine, it’s an ARM-based machine running RISC OS (a cooperative multitasking ROM-based GUI OS originally developed by Acorn.) My particular machine has a 233 MHz DEC StrongARM, 96 MiB of EDO RAM, 2 MiB of VRAM, an ethernet card, and a DMA IDE card (faster than the on-board IDE, and more compatible.) I’m currently running it with a 4 GiB CompactFlash card for storage.
It’s amazingly useful, despite the fact that this CPU came out in 1997. Word processing, e-mail, all that. Hell, even web browsing – it’s not great, but it works, with NetSurf. There’s also a Firefox port, but it’s uselessly slow, unfortunately – Firefox bloat plus a twelve year old processor equals dog slow.
Oh, and with a program called Murnong, it’s actually possible to watch YouTube videos. Of course, it takes almost half an hour to convert a 5 minute video to be playable. 😆
But, it’s still a quite interesting platform to use… best bet is to read the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club’s introduction to RISC OS.
Now, what else is there to talk about… oh, yeah, amateur radio. So, I was at Notacon 6, and they had amateur radio exams. Decided to go for my license, and now have a Technician class license. (Next year, I’ll probably go for General, but I hadn’t studied for it this year.) KD8KXK is on the air. 😀
I think that’s all for now…