

An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed - martincmartin
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed.aspx

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lvecsey
The common trend here seems to be a concern over not cannibalizing existing
markets. Two examples are the case of flash memory being delayed by a decade
or more, and also Microsoft releasing a bloated Vista with the expectation
that faster processors were on the horizon. Too bad there can't be some
legislation to encourage a synergistic effect.

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rbanffy
Hopefully, netbooks and FLOSS can free us from this x86-only world. I would
love to have an 8-core ARM in my netbook.

I remember my IBM z50. It used some parts that were used in a Pentium notebook
sold in some markets. Because of this part sharing with a Pentium notebook,
the MIPS processor in it could run for 10+ hours on a single charge.

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mattyb
Why do you prefer ARM over x86?

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blasdel
No ball-and-chain of Windows compatibility holding you back.

No possibility of being lazy and using a traditional PC BIOS + ACPI etc.
architecture. x86 doesn't even have mature alternatives: EFI doesn't really
help anything, and OLPC's OpenFirmware approach was implemented poorly. With
ARM there's already a bunch of well-implemented variant architectures from
multiple vendors with full support in dozens of operating systems.

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wmf
Yep, on ARM you don't have those problems; you have different ones: every
system has unique firmware and requires a special bootloader and kernel,
making it impossible to create one OS image that will boot on many ARM
systems.

<http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/>

There is hope, but I doubt it will arrive in time for the first wave of ARM
"smartbooks": <http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/>

Also, Ubuntu and Chrome OS seem to have divergent plans for firmware.

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rbanffy
If OLPC pulls the XO-1.75 off, there will be a reference design for ARM-based
notebook that is open-source from top to bottom.

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pronoiac
The print version was covered here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980927>

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anamax
FWIW, the January 6, Stanford EE380 is about Larabee. See
<http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/>

Yes, it's open to the general public and will be webcast. (The latter may, or
may not, work on "not Windows" machines.)

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rbanffy
Thank you. Can it be made available for download after the event?

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anamax
With few exceptions, all EE380 talks are available for download
"indefinitely". Often the slides are available separately.

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rbanffy
Thanks. It's great to know. I will schedule it so I can see as soon as
possible.

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rbanffy
With or without Larrabee, the number of cores and threads per core on x86
processors will not decrease.

