The Hindu Business Line : An ‘ARM’ed laptop? IT’s on the way!

Bangalore, Nov. 19 With ARM’s processor cores fuelling 10 billion devices around the world - and growing at 90 new ones every second - one would think the Cambridge, UK-based chip design leader would consolidate rather than expand. But in the words that titled a James Bond movie, it believes, apparently, that ‘The world is not enough’: ARM aims to get under the hood of a host of new portable computing-and-communicating devices.

And for the last two days, dozens of its top designers, including 11 ‘Fellows’ of the company, have been ensconced at a Bangalore hotel, engaged in brainstorming sessions, which will decide its future techno-commercial roadmap.

Coincidentally this has been a week when ARM announced two significant alliances - one with Canonical, mentors of Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution, and the other with Adobe, makers of the Flash media player. The latest versions of both these Web tools will be enabled on ARM processor cores - opening up the possibility that lightweight computing platforms which can surf the Net and exchange e-mail, may be fuelled soon, entirely by an ARM core or two - doing away with the need to build devices around a conventional PC chip.

Taking time off from the in-house conference, ARM’s Chief Technology Officer, Mr Mike Muller, briefed Businessline about these developments. “We are approaching mobile Internet devices, ultra mobile PCs, call them what you will, from the opposite end of the road that mainstream PC processor makers follow. They look to shrink the desktop PC to a laptop and a laptop to a handheld device".

“ARM, on the other hand, hopes to add browsing or e-mailing as an added layer on top of mobile phone applications”, he added. “And we aim to create a friendly new experience for millions who might never have used a PC before - and never have to.”

And ARM may reach out to more than just handhelds; they may fuel full sized laptops any day now; typically the cross over product will run an ARM core alongside a conventional CPU; the default quickstart option will run off the ARM to provide long battery life for basic browsing and e-mailing; but if you want the full functionality of a system like Windows Vista, the main processor will kick in, explained Mr Muller

ARM’s India Managing Director, Mr Anil Gupta, said key development in areas such as 3D graphic drivers, validation of high performance features and optimisation of Web2.0 code was being undertaken in the Bangalore end of the company’s R&D department.

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