CUPP crams ARM inside of a MacBook Pro, makes it run Android with a button press | Hacker News Reader

CUPP crams ARM inside of a MacBook Pro, makes it run Android with a button press

engadget.com

28 pointslotusleaf198732 comments

I would prefer if they just make a ARM laptop. Seriously, why aren't there any decent ARM laptops? I know there are a few ARM/MIPS laptops out there but they are all either old(new platforms are much more powerful) or comes locked.

Seriously, why aren't there any decent ARM laptops?

Because demand is extremely low? If it can't run a mass-market OS, anything you make is going to be an extremely niche product.

I like the idea of an Android laptop, but I wonder how well off-the-shelf Android applications would perform on a 16x9 landscape screen with a hardware keyboard and a hard-to-use touch surface.

I think Android is more optimized for touch-screen devices but I was hoping Chrome OS will bring more ARM laptops to the market. Now it seems like that's not gonna happen, but Windows 8 being ARM compatible should bring more ARM laptops to the market. Sadly that won't happen any time soon.

This.

My laptop doesn't need to be a CPU monster. I'm mostly using it for SSH, vim and surfing the web. And I hate it when the thing heats up like an oven - especially in the summer. (No AC + summer temperatures + aluminum case = inconvenient).

Just give me an ARM-book pro - without an optical drive but with an enormous battery ;)

This is what I'm waiting for:

http://armdevices.net/2011/01/07/nufront-arm-powered-laptops...

I've looked into this before and believe the core issue is that the power to light the screen dwarfs any savings possible from ARM vs x86 so as device and screen size increases, you're getting less and less benefit from ARM power saving and losing compatibility, speed and mass production benefits of x86. Even the iPad screen is after all only 10 inches, which is tiny for a laptop, the iPhone is a ninth as big an area to light up.

I think you're right. In Gingerbread, the power graph shows Display as the top user of power (probably by a factor of 3 or 4, at least), even with the display brightness down to 30. I don't have an AMOLED screen, but it'd be interesting to compare.

The google cr-48 comes to mind.

Dell tried this with the LatitudeON feature which shipped in several variations on Latitude laptops. In their version, turning the ARM OS on automatically hibernated the Windows OS. In any case, for some reason, it has not caught on (Dell has also had trouble meeting shipping dates, as they are using a custom Linux distro from DeviceVM, rather than using Android). I almost bought a new Dell just for that feature, and in polling other business users whose machines had the feature in one form or another, I have yet to find someone actually using it. Poor marketing and perhaps targeted at the wrong market. One challenge is whether to power up the hard drive. If you leave it unpowered and just have the ARM and some RAM, you lose the ability to access data on the hard drive, but powering up the hard drive increases the power load materially.

> In any case, for some reason, it has not caught on

It's Dell. How passionate are people about new features in Dell products? I don't even know who Dell's CEO is. Dell is boring office stuff.

On the other hand, if Apple would have introduced such a feature we would be hearing from it on TV news. And all tech bloggers would jerk in a circle, etc.

Hint: he founded the company and named it after himself.

> I don't even know who Dell's CEO is.

Er, Michael Dell?

I fully expect Apple to begin doing this across their entire laptop line as a precursor to a full migration to an ARM-based MacOS/iOS hybrid.

Assuming that you're being serious, I doubt that they would make such a move. While Apple markets their computers as being simple enough for anyone to use, they have a large section of power users that use their laptops heavily for things like Photoshop and video editing. I don't think that either of those will be performant in the near-term on ARM.

Actually he is totally serious, Apple has already stated that this functionality is on the Lion OS roadmap, just replace android with iOS

It would be nice though for the Intel CPU to be some place other than my lap, so the thing in my lap did not get as hot.

nVidia's Tegra 3 (due this year) is a quad-core ARM with a GPU capable of accelerated 3D, HD resolution, and 13800 MIPS which I believe is faster than a Core 2 Duo.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/1/23/nvidia-thinks...

The 64-bit ARM chips will be better.

> full migration to an ARM-based MacOS

I'd love that :]

Am I wrong in assuming that if you don't power down your x86 system then it will still draw power when you toggle the switch? It seems more like a nice solution for people who dual boot win/osx and linux.

I applaud the novel use of the optical drive space and I'm excited for the time when hardware shrinks past the usable threshold and we can cram more components in a 13" laptop form factor.

What components though? I think that the reduction in size would be used to make the form-factor even smaller (possibly just thinner/lighter if they wanted to keep the screen size).

Batteries.

Why Android and not Arm desktop linux (assuming there are some)?

Just install Debian. I have been expecting apple to do this for a while. Why pay $125 for an intel cpu when apple can stick a A4 in for $10.75?

As I stated in another post, because the A4 probably won't do as well at high-end tasks like photo/video editing. If Apple were to make such a move they could only attempt it on the low-end (i.e. the MacBook line), but then they would be segmenting their products between two architectures, which wouldn't go over so well with developers.

> but then they would be segmenting their products between two architectures, which wouldn't go over so well with developers

hmm, my os x apps ran (until recently) on x86 and PPC ... and my extra work was: just test it on my old powermac g5.

So you are claiming you can only do photo editing if you have a multi-core, gpu accelerated less than six month old computer? For most people photo editing means stuff which we have been doing with _way_ less power than the A4 (photoshop ran on my P133). The hard part of video editing for most people means transcoding from one format to anther which takes forever anyway so if it runs in 1 hour or 5 really doesn't matter. The A4 is perfectly fine for photo editing and video editing. The A4 is more powerful than my wife's iBook G4 (which she loves) that does just fine for photo and video editing (which she does).

Apple is pimping full screen applications for the next version of OSX. I would not be surprised if you someone isn't already playing around with 'launching' full screen apps off an iOS+A4 and not managed by OSX. The advantages are just too big to ignore.

Because Android is more mature as a consumer operating system.

(Yeah, I know.. Unix is 30+ years old and Android is 3. But you can't get Angry Birds for Linux, and the power management on Linux isn't great etc etc..)

Android runs on Linux.

Do you seriously think that either I or the OP didnt realize that? The OP even says "why not desktop linux"!

The question is why Android rather than Linux. Saying Android is Linux doesn't explain anything at all.

I don't know, it's hard to say what you don't realize, but I'll expound upon my comment. Do you really think the power management would be all that different in a laptop (rather than a phone) running Android? They'd both be using the Linux kernel, and people already complain about their Android phone battery life (but people complain about every phone's battery life). And if one really wants to run Angry Birds on their Linux laptop (or any laptop that the Android SDK runs on), it is entirely possible to wrap the emulator and/or port Dalvik, to run Android apps as first class desktop app citizens. In fact, I'm surprised no one has done this already.

Because Android is hip and the XML of mobile ...

And the arguments against getting rid of the optical bay just got more interesting...

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