ARM powered OLPC XO-1.75 laptop is faster than x86

Here’s an article from Slashdot that made me sit up and take notice. ARM runs Fedora faster than x86 and for half the power

Neat. :)

I like the part where he says that switching from x86 to ARM allowed them to cut the power consumption in half, and because of this, you could actually charge the battery with a hand generator. :)

Very nice when you’re in the middle of nowhere, far from power sources…

I came across this one, today, as well: Nufront 10’’ and 14’’ ARM Cortex A9-powered laptops, expected to be available within six months.

It seems the ARM laptops are starting to grow up… :)

That is very impressive :) Hard to believe the speed coming from the Nufront offerings! It’s great to see that we shouldn’t have a lack of significantly faster H/W stifling options for future RISC OS hardware.

Going off an a different tangent; how fast does a Beagleboard ‘feel’ in use compared to an Iyonix ? And has anyone used a BIK from A4com ?

As far as ‘feel’ is concerned, I’d say the Beagleboard xM and Iyonix are very similar in speed. The Beagleboard is much faster when reading from, writing to or copying to the Hard Drive, but much slower with the pen drive. Netsurf was effectively unusable until I moved !Scrap from !Boot on the pen drive to the Hard Drive and file-ran it from there, so the lack of speed seems to be an issue with the pen drive, rather than the system as a whole. Roll on being able to boot from the Hard Drive!

Netsurf was effectively unusable until I moved !Scrap from !Boot on the pen drive to the Hard Drive and file-ran it from there…

Interesting – I moved !Scrap to the RAM disc (I don’t have a hard drive connected) and noticed no difference in speed with NetSurf.

The speed increase with Netsurf was huge. There have also been similar increases in speed with !Organizer and !Messenger when !Organizer and !NewsDir have been filer-run from the hard drive.

It’s great to see that we shouldn’t have a lack of significantly faster H/W stifling options for future RISC OS hardware.

One issue, however, is how open the hardware will be, and how supportive they will be of a new port…

It worked quite well (with a lot of work by Jeffrey and ROOL) to port it to the BeagleBoard, because the hardware details are open and well-documented (except the PowerVR graphics accelerator). Hopefully, it will be possible to get sufficient low-level details for some future ARM-based platforms, as well, making a port possible.

A few weeks ago (December 15), I sent a mail to the Nufront sales department (the only publically available email address I found), telling them about the RISC OS community, and how we’re continually looking for better platforms to support our beloved OS, and how this could constitute a new market for them. I said that we could do the porting work ourselves, but that we need sufficient details about the hardware to be able to write boot code and device drivers for it, and I ended the mail with:

“After this rather long introduction, I’d then like to ask: Would you consider providing enough technical details about your NuSmart-based PCs (when they arrive), to enable enthusiasts to port alternative operating systems, like RISC OS, to the platform?”

No reply yet…

However, note that this was before the CES announcement, so that’s one reason they might not have wanted to discuss details.