Cloud services, Adobe Flash hold keys to success for ARM in the netbook market.
Complete article:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/show ... =216500372

Interesing article, Dr. Ovtavious, summing up all of my fears in Genesi going ARM:

1.- By the time the i.MX 515 netbook hits the market, nobody is any longer interested in a non x86 netbook, because a new Intel Atom has taken all market, accompanied by a certain operating system that makes "everybody" very happy.

2.- Adobe Flash is evil:

2.1.- A closed standard should have never taken the internet by storm. Alright, it's pretty, and related tools must be very suitable for dumb programmers, hence "all" is done with Flash.

2.2.- Adobe really has no intention of porting Flash to a different CPU. Hell, it's too much work, they already are very busy supporting such a monster environment for several operating systems.

2.3.- Hypothesis: Microsoft is pressing Adobe NOT to have Flash in other operating systems, thus giving them an unsurpassable edge.

2.4.- I might be wrong, but didn't I read "this new CPU has Flash acceleration" somewhere? That's over the top, really.

There's fear for new ARM computers being underpowered, but that's secondary to me (I consider it a gratuitiuos claim), compared to the software problem. For me, the ONLY advantage of ARM is that it has a lot of momentum in the market. And that it's a clever chip. But I guess we all here know about superior technologies failing.

The sad part for me is that Genesi changed to ARM plainly because freescale shut down PowerPC development. There was no choice. That would mean Genesi being just some kind of "public relations" department of freescale, but I don't think reality is so simple as I want to see sometimes.

Intel have no hope of creating a chip with the performance metrics the i.MX515 have using Atom architecture, at the same sort of power levels (~2W). An Atom's total system power budget hovers consistently at around 10x that.
Gnash is being written using the open specifications for the Flash format.
The article is wrong; they are porting it.
Microsoft doesn't care because they have Silverlight. Which is being ported to Linux via Mono... Moonlight actually runs pretty well if you give it a try.
Vector graphics are really CPU intensive, as are the common video codecs used in Flash (H.264!). OpenVG and an H.264 decoder would be required to get decent performance out of the thing.

Flash isn't accelerated *at all* on Windows platforms, the entire thing has to go through the CPU, which is why the performance sucks.
Nope.

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Matt Sealey

i will most likely buy an arm computer. i have no interest in using proprietary flash and i am not a fan of the x86 monopoly.

Wow... You have some very strong convictions, then. What choices are left for you?

not using flash? my ibook is powerpc?

Considering most of the people here are developers, there are lots of choices. A lot of people kept using PPC Macs because they liked the PPC architecture better, or had jobs where they worked on PPC chips.

I have no qualms about working on x86; I have decent Pentium-level assembler skills and a good understanding of SSE but I wouldn't take a job coding it.

And if I needed a platform that I would use to natively develop applications.. it wouldn't be x86 (although with things like Qt and iPhone apps, or QNX for that matter, you can build it on x86 and copy it across to a simulator or the target machine anyway :)

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Matt Sealey