Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by ajross on Thursday June 18, 2009 @01:14PM
(#663768)
It's all just FUD, sadly. They need the MS cooperation to get the sale, and MS wants something back. So the business guys cooperate on a technical-sounding press release. Boring.
I counted only two technical points in the article. The first is that Android's icons are too big (?!). The second is that "all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.
Edit: I should probably elaborate. Android on the G1, at least, does video decoding using the Qualcomm DSP cores on the chip. 3D work has access to an ATI-based OpenGL ES 1.1 part, with relatively good texturing performance. The media frameworks are in C++, and available to native code. Only the UI library and top-level application framework is Java/Dalvik.
Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by wmf on Thursday June 18, 2009 @03:57PM
(#664031)
"all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.
NVidia is saying that on Tegra the rendering is done in software because NVidia hasn't written a Linux 3D driver. Clearly that isn't Android's fault. I wonder how many months or years it will take to get the driver written.
Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by ajross on Thursday June 18, 2009 @05:43PM
(#664189)
The port of their windows Geforce driver to linux was reported to have taken a few months. As I understand it, they're still maintained from the same tree and share essentially all code but the minimum necessary glue (much to the annoyance of the linux kernel folks, it should be added).
Tegra is, no doubt, based on the same hardware components they're shipping in their other products; and its driver is surely similarly portable. This isn't a technical point, it's just FUD.
Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by sadiq on Thursday June 18, 2009 @01:12PM
(#663765)
Wow, Nvidia's guy is really full of crap.
"The world soundly rejected the first netbooks that came out with Linux," he said. "Printers didn't work, and devices didn't get recognized. The whole thing was a mess."
So their master plan is to ship Windows CE? An OS with even fewer drivers?
I'm also not sure where he got the "soundly rejected" from. The first generation Linux-based Asus Eee were sold out for months here in the UK.
I'm also not entirely convinced on Android on a netbook. I own a G1 and absolutely adore it but while it's a great fit for the size of the screen and capabilities of the phone, i'm not sure i'd want the same thing on a 10" screen.
Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by rbanffy on Thursday June 18, 2009 @05:41PM
(#664183)
When companies act insane like this it's usually to ward off threats. I wonder if it's that they supply their chips to Microsoft for their newer Zune thingies of because they want to sweeten any deal with Intel regarding their patent disputes.
I also wonder if it is not the same mechanism we saw in action with Asus a couple days ago.
Re:Nvidia prefers Windows CE over Android for netbooks
by ilyak on Thursday June 18, 2009 @03:21PM
(#663969)
Windows CE on a netbook
downsides:
- No software that can work more than on 800x480, also every program thinks it's on a tiny touch-screen, full-sized, with two control buttons.
- No drivers. Maybe USB storage would work. No serial cables, no webcams, forget all of that. Irony: I doubt there's a Host ActiveSync, so no Windows CE smartphones syncing.
- Operating system sucks, therefore everybody beefs it up with proprietary "shells".
- The only descent browser, costs 30$.
upsides:
- It's Windows, so tehre should be PROFIT!
I counted only two technical points in the article. The first is that Android's icons are too big (?!). The second is that "all video and graphics rendering in Android is done today by the operating system's Java code", which just plain incorrect.
Edit: I should probably elaborate. Android on the G1, at least, does video decoding using the Qualcomm DSP cores on the chip. 3D work has access to an ATI-based OpenGL ES 1.1 part, with relatively good texturing performance. The media frameworks are in C++, and available to native code. Only the UI library and top-level application framework is Java/Dalvik.
NVidia is saying that on Tegra the rendering is done in software because NVidia hasn't written a Linux 3D driver. Clearly that isn't Android's fault. I wonder how many months or years it will take to get the driver written.
Tegra is, no doubt, based on the same hardware components they're shipping in their other products; and its driver is surely similarly portable. This isn't a technical point, it's just FUD.
"The world soundly rejected the first netbooks that came out with Linux," he said. "Printers didn't work, and devices didn't get recognized. The whole thing was a mess."
So their master plan is to ship Windows CE? An OS with even fewer drivers?
I'm also not sure where he got the "soundly rejected" from. The first generation Linux-based Asus Eee were sold out for months here in the UK.
I'm also not entirely convinced on Android on a netbook. I own a G1 and absolutely adore it but while it's a great fit for the size of the screen and capabilities of the phone, i'm not sure i'd want the same thing on a 10" screen.
I also wonder if it is not the same mechanism we saw in action with Asus a couple days ago.
That said, it's a dual-threading 32 bit CPU with 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and a slow, but spacious, 160 GB hard disk.
This was good for a beefy server a couple years ago.
upsides: - It's Windows, so tehre should be PROFIT!