Dell's hybrid laptops: Intel + ARM, Windows + Linux
Dell is offering Windows-Linux hybrid laptops that use both Intel and ARM processors. Though the user would never know it.
As pointed out in this EE Times report, entitled "Dell has dragged the Linux-ARM Trojan horse inside the Wintel PC," Dell is offering a processor-plus-OS subsystem separate from the main Windows-Intel system.
The goal is to give users instant access to e-mail without booting up the operating system and extend battery life by running Linux on a very low-power ARM processor. Basic ARM processor designs are licensed by U.K.-based ARM Holdings to companies like Samsung and Texas Instruments, which then manufacture the chip.
This ARM presentation slide indicates Linux is running on an ARM processor in Dell laptops.
(Credit: ARM)Warren East, president and CEO of ARM, highlighted this subsystem while discussing the company's 2008 financial results earlier this month. "(There are) interesting hybrid products where PCs are adopting ARM technology alongside Intel technology for functions such as the Internet and e-mail because that gives you much longer battery life as a user," East said during a 2008 earnings conference call.
Here's Dell ad copy for its Latitude ON feature: "Dell Latitude ON, a new technology that will enable near-instant access to e-mail, calendar, attachments, contacts and the Web without booting into the system's main operating system (OS)...on the Latitude E4200 and E4300, Dell Latitude ON uses a dedicated low-voltage sub-processor and OS that can enable multi-day battery life."
Hewlett-Packard offers an application called Quick Look 2 (PDF) but this works differently than Dell's system. HP describes it as giving the user "immediate access to information from your Microsoft Office Outlook program...by proactively capturing information and storing it outside your computer's operating system."
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
- by ArtInvent February 12, 2009 8:23 AM PST
- This is really not quite the same as Splashtop. The possibilities for this are pretty cool. Perhaps they can engineer it so that the Win OS goes to sleep quite often, leaving the Linux OS on with web and email. If you need some heavy Win app, it wakes back up fairly quickly. <br /><br />The question is, how is it done? Can both OS's be active and windowed at the same time? If so, how is this achieved? Is there some kind of VM hypervisor doling out screen space? It would probably be easier to toggle between the two OS's with what is essentially just a keyboard-video-mouse toggle. But if you do it that way, can you cut and paste between the two?<br /><br />If they can make it simple enough and stable enough, it would sure be cool to have a completely capable laptop that runs for 2-3 days on a charge, IMO.<br /><br />Though it does beg the question of why you just can't use a quad core processor and a single OS and power down all but one core and reduce it's CPU cycles most of the time for mere internet and email work, thereby saving a similar amount of power. They already have this to a large degree, and it surprises me a bit that they haven't got a lot more aggressive about scaling CPU's
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