The main advantage of a pre-loaded OS...

[Thomas Milne]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 04:20:40PM -0500, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> and drooling like crazy over them. I was _blown away_ by the demos at
>> CES, what they could accomplish in a device the size of a smartphone.
>>
>> This was definitely NVidia's year.
>
> The new ones being dual or even quad core ARM Cortex chips with rather
> impressive 3D graphics support will be impressive.  Vastly more so than
> intel's pathetic video on their atom systems.  Of course anyone that
> wants a good atom buys one with an nvidia ion chipset.  Gee, seems nvidia
> hasn't completely left the x86 chipset business after all, they are just
> focusing on where there is demand for efficient high performance graphics
> and especially video playback support.
>
> Anyone that thinks what happens in the PC market is particularly relevant
> is just not aware of the reality.

Yes, I read that smartphones outsold all PC's combined last year. By a
huge margin, I think. I know quite a few younger people who don't own
a PC, which is of course a huge change from a few years ago. At most
they have a notebook, but some of them might only have a smartphone,
and that's their entire experience of computing, it's all they need.

Literally everyone I see with a mobile has a smartphone, either an
iPhone or an Android or Blackberry. I rarely see people with
'primitives' anymore.

I have needed a new PC for a few years now, but I keep spending my
money on other devices, PS3, iPods, NAS, and other specialized units.

> When Apple went from PowerPc to intel
> people went "It's the end of the powerPC".  It didn't even make a blip.
> Apple was completely irrelevant to the PowerPC market.  The x86 is
> completely irrelevant to the electronics market as a whole.  There are
> more ARM devices sold in a year than there have been x86 machines
> ever made.

Jeez.

> There were 6.1 billion ARM chips sold in 2010.  95% of smart
> phones (and a fair number of the not smart phones) are ARM based.
>
> If nvidia could manage to grab 10% of the ARM market for cell phones and
> such especially the high end models that do lots of multimedia stuff,
> they are going to be making some decent money.
>

People are going to buy those Tegra-based things like they're the
secret to eternal youth, no doubt.

-- 
TBM
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists