Wannaplay.it

Credo importi ad una stretta fascia di lettori (già di per se stretta), ma si rivelerà totale nella massa formata da futuri utilizzatori di devices digitali.
Partendo da questo link, si può avere una piccola panoramica di come evolveranno devices tipo il super discusso iPhone, ma la vera cosa interessante è la riflessione finale, tratta dal forum MacRumors e cioè:

As an ARM assembly coder from back in the day (and by back in the day I mean for Acorn, who invented the ARM chip before they spun off ARM to handle it) I have a very positive feeling about this.

Apple has much experience with OS X on ARM, and likely has internal XCode with ARM as a checkbox option. Their use of universal binaries supports more than just two architectures. It would be trivial from Apple’s POV to use the forthcoming drop of PPC support to add ARM support.

One of the most attractive features of the ARM chipset is price. Back when I was designing boards around the ARM7500, one could be had for $5, or less in quantity. That is for the processor and entire chipset, including video. Granted, back then it was a 40 or 50MHz device, but it drew less than a watt. Now, we have 600 and 800MHz parts that equal the performance of the Atom, draw similar currents and have bluetooth, wifi, ethernet PHY and video on die.

So, picture if you will that Apple decides to support the ARM architecture with OS X… Think a simple line of low cost 10″ netbooks, think of possibly sub-$300 OS X based consoles (or STBs as we used to call them before we knew what to do with them!)

When thinking of some of the accomplishments of ARM, remember: ARM is the definitive architecture for STBs, embedded boards, controllers, and cellphones. ARM cores outsell EVERY other architecture. There are more ARM cores in the world than every other architecture combined.

They are cheap at every level: cheap to license, cheap to fab, cheap to design boards with (so many reference designs), cheap to manufacture (you can buy full ARM computers for under $100) and have very cheap power budgets – usually around 1W.

If Apple has an ARM license, a chip design house with ARM experience and two existing products with ARM cores and good OS X support, it would be simply good use of resources to use this IP more broadly.

Questa ovviamente è anche una ruffianissima manovra per far vedere che si, sto lavorando alla mia tesi sugli Embedded Linux Devices, ma girando e girando e girando e girando per il web. Ma a per nobili scopi!