$50 Android smartphones are coming this year. They've actually existed for quite some time, but this year they will be more "mainstream", and you'll see a lot more models (in poor countries). The combination of the Cortex A7 CPU plus KitKat which is optimized for low-end will ensure they work pretty well, too, relative to other phones in that range with much fewer features and less functionality.
So I doubt Microsoft will have any chance at that market either. Android pours 1.5 million new units into the market every day, or about 500 million per year, and that's before these mainstream "good enough" $50 smartphones arrive, which I think will help Android double its unit grow rate within 12-18 months. Everything else will get drowned out.
It's amazing how many "full operating systems" want to support something as weak as Raspberry Pi, and how many things can be done with it. I can't wait for Raspberry Pi to come to a more powerful architecture like ARMv8 (at relatively the same price-point) and see what comes out of that.
Raspberry Pi is weak only by very modern standards, Linux and the BSDs were first implemented on much weaker hardware. And NetBSD famously runs on a toaster.
The embedded world has seen a massive performance boost in the last decade, the raspberry pi would've looked like a supercomputer in the 90s...
My point is that while the raspberry is not very powerful by today's standards it still has all the features of a modern "desktop" system: an MMU, SIMD, USB, graphic acceleration to cite a few. The line between embedded and desktop architectures is getting blurrier by the year.
I agree with your general point, but while the Raspberry Pi has some SIMD instructions, they are pretty useless in practice. They are integer-only, only work on 32-bit registers (so you can only work on two 16-bit or four 8-bit values) and they are implemented serially on one lane (each clock, the CPU does the work on one of the values) instead of the parallel way SIMD is generally done.
Yes, my criticism of the RPi is that it is too powerful... You might as well just use a desktop PC. For learning purposes, something like a FIGnition is much better.
Learning what? How to program the kind of machine that's already been obsolete for 10 years?
I know a couple of people with RPis who are using them as "home server"-type devices. Those are useful, and more power certainly doesn't hurt. Whereas the people I know who bought them with some idea that they would "start hardware hacking" or some such sit there gathering dust.
Learning how hardware actually works. I learnt on the BBC Micro, a 32k machine running at 2Mhz, powerful enough to run interesting things, simple enough that you could understand exactly how it worked, the memory map, how IO actually happened, etc. A serial port is great for this; USB or Ethernet, not so much.
Yes, for learning, simple can be better. Years ago as a teen my understanding of the basics of assembly and machine language and how CPUs worked finally "clicked" when I was playing with a very simple software simulation of a 4-bit microprocessor. I think it was called "picoprocessor" or something close to that. While useless as a practical architecture, the concepts I learned in that simplified environment were then easy to apply to real-world systems.
> Learning what? How to program the kind of machine that's already been obsolete for 10 years?
The RPi really is a very powerful platform. It's not a desktop computer. There are real-world devices that run things far more complex on far slower hardware.
I am not convinced that a more powerful architecture is as interesting as a less constrained architecture. I'd rather have and independent USB and Ethernet port, a better analog sound output and a VGA port. A better motherboard might hold more value for hobbyist. Not sure if it can be done in the same price range though.
For $40, or whatever it costs now, it's pretty damn powerful. The beauty of the rPi seems to be its a nice middle ground between a media-capable mini-PC and a I/O port laden project boards like the Arduino or Beaglebone Black.
Yet another reason for why electric cars have so much potential in the long run compared to gasoline-powered cars, and that's besides the fact that batteries themselves can double the storage capacity every 10 years or so, and therefore the range (or same range for lower price), or that electric cars can be charged for free with energy from solar panels.
This should hit home with those that read the Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution. IBM sold their PC business years ago to Lenovo because of "low margins", and they moved "up-market" to the server market. But now the PC guys are eating into their profits in the server market, too, and once again IBM is forced to sell this business due to "low margins".
It's interesting that while it's "low margins" for IBM because IBM has higher cost structures, Lenovo thinks it's actually a very profitable business:
“Lenovo has been trying to break into servers for a while as a new growth engine,” Moel said. “It could be good for Lenovo based on the right price.”
This is why Intel will never be safe in the server market, either, if ARM chip makers eat up the PC market (and they will do that), while also dominating the mobile market.
I get 1 Gbps for less than $20 where I live (Europe), and unlimited bandwidth, but I'm not bothering with the extra speed yet because I'm going to need a good 802.11ac router and an SSD-enabled laptop to take full advantage of it.
So I'll wait a year longer or so until 1+ Gbps Wi-Fi arrives in laptops and also in routers (second wave of 802.11ac routers will do that, first wave isn't quite there yet). By then SSD prices should be a little lower, too.
They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think more people are interested in Windows 7 than Windows 8. That would be a pretty silly reason to "get their name in the news", otherwise.
I don't think that's been their motto since Otellini took over. Look where they are now in the mobile market. Otellini put the profitability of their Core chips above improving Atom in the first few years, even when it came to netbook performance, which was already terrible. Combined with the fact that they forced OEMs to not buy AMD alternatives during the same time, Otellini just didn't think it's necessary to improve the performance of Atom too much.
They only started caring about power consumption when it was already obvious to everyone that ARM is going to pose a threat to them eventually. I think if everyone sees something that's by definition not "paranoia". To be paranoid, you have to see and believe something before others see it.
They only started caring about power consumption when
it was already obvious to everyone that ARM is going to
pose a threat to them eventually.
I'm being a bit pedantic, but it seems to me they refocused on power consumption beginning with the launch of the Pentium M (forerunner of the Core and Core 2 lines) which was released in 2003 and was surely in development several years before that.
Or do you think they were thinking ahead to ARM already in ~2001 or so? Maybe they were... although I think they were thinking about targeting laptop sales in general at that point, not ARM specifically.
That's true, the NetBurst syncope made them redesign toward efficiency, but still, the rise of ubiquitous mobility forced another inflection in their TDP curve. And they're still sweating over it since the PC market is shrinking and they need to get their foot in the smartphone/tablet market (see the bay-trail subsidize effort http://liliputing.com/2014/01/bay-trail-tablets-cheap-intels...)
Intel is one of the least ethical tech companies around. Have they even paid their 1 billion euro fine to the EU Commission yet for trying to force OEMs to not use AMD chips in their products?
I wouldn't be surprised if they had. Off the top of my head they made over $7 billion doing this and can consider the fine as a cost of doing business.
When companies do this, they should be fully audited and fined 300% profit, split evenly between the harmed company and the government. If that puts them out of business, so be it.
That would certainly discourage _getting caught_ violating the law.
It would also tend to kill off the older companies (weak law of large numbers: if a company violates any of the laws that will kill it, and it exists long enough, it eventually gets caught and killed).
It might even lead to some efforts at counter-legislation. For example, companies might lobby to _broaden_ the "get killed" legislation, which would result in lots of sympathy cases where companies were killed for "minor" offenses. Eventually the whole "kill the company" idea would fall out of favor.
There is plenty of space to the bottom though.. Intel at least publishes datasheets, technical documentation, etc. without requiring signing a NDA for most of their chips..
So in my books they still do quite a bit better than Broadcom, Realtek, etc.
I agree, although Intel is still not as open as they were back in the e.g. 8086 days - stuff related to the BIOS/memory controller init sequence is still AFAIK requiring NDA.
Better than AMD, at least - just try finding the pinout of socket AM2, which was released over 7 years ago.
This is one of the reasons I only purchase AMD-based systems. Well that and the fact that AMD's CPU/GMU combo has better graphics performance.
It's either that or support a company whose market advantage is based on anti-competitive practices and who will spend a significant portion of their profits on reducing consumer's choice of CPU (up to the point they no longer have to of course).
I have been having this trouble with all Tv shows lately. It's supposed to be the Golden Age of TV, and I have loved shows like Breaking Bad and Lost, but I can't shake the fact that the people producing the shows have no interest in anything other than ad views.
TV is just ads for ads. There's a reason Hulu sucks so much.
So I doubt Microsoft will have any chance at that market either. Android pours 1.5 million new units into the market every day, or about 500 million per year, and that's before these mainstream "good enough" $50 smartphones arrive, which I think will help Android double its unit grow rate within 12-18 months. Everything else will get drowned out.