[Arm-netbook] Selecting the right Soc for out ARM Notebook project.

krasi gichev krasimirr at gmail.com
Sat May 5 20:32:23 BST 2012


Agree with you. But think about rest of the system. Having "fast"
network and SATA means that you need SATA storage - probably HDD - it
will be insane to believe that somebody can use this netbook with 4 or
8GB of NAND. This HDD adds 100 USD to the device.
13" displays are not cheap too - if you on the tablet market, you will
see that even for 10" device (same display as most of the Atom
netbooks, so cheap one) you have to pay near 200 bucks. Adding bigger
battery, physical keyboard and so on, and you will hit 300USD final
price. Removing touchscreen will help to reduce the price, but then
you loose a lot of functionality of Android.
Nobody will pay this kind of money for single core, ARM device. As far
as I know, even dual core Tegra-based Toshiba netbooks are not selling
very well. This is the price range for x86 devices. Using ARM probably
will help gaining better battery life, but as far as I know, CPU is
not the biggest power consumer, it is the screen.

At the end, what will be the final target group for this netbook? How
it is better than tablet or x86 netbook?

2012/5/5 Dr. David Alan Gilbert <dave at treblig.org>:
> * krasi gichev (krasimirr at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>> Newer iMX6 are tempting but too early to know much about them. I know
>
> I think this is one of the other difficulties when picking SoCs; there are:
>
>   * a whole pile of chips that are available now, and which there is good
>      kernel support for.
>   * a whole pile of announced chips that are due any day which sound nice,
>     but don't yet have good kernel support and may still be under more NDA
>     than the others.
>
> If you use the 1st set you'll get something to work, but given how long
> it takes to produce a system and get it out you'll end up with something
> that's behind the curve by the time you've finished.
> If you use the 2nd set you'll have more work to get it going and it's
> more risky, but you might be competitive when it's out.
>
> I'd also second the dislike for USB-ether; having real ether and
> SATA on chip is one of the nice unusual features of the A10
> and will make a heck of a lot of difference to usability.
>
> Tricky.
>
> Dave
> --
>  -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code -------
> / Dr. David Alan Gilbert    |       Running GNU/Linux       | Happy  \
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>
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