Linux on Arm conference prepares to kick off

Back in the day, everything was all about DOS or CPM on Z-80. That was replaced by an era of Windows on Intel, but on 28th May the new world order prepares to feel smug and enjoy the new noodles in Hong Kong. KitGuru prepares to check into the Gold Coast Hotel and tries to gauge which way the South China ASIC Sea is flowing.

While the FABs at TSMC are still echoing with the news that the Taiwanese manufacturing giant has managed to pass 3.1GHz on an ARM design that was actually aiming more at the 2.5GHz market, the interest around the Cortex A15 is certainly ramping up.

One of the more interesting questions surrounding ARM's future products is “Does anyone care?”

The various graphics manufacturers have been battling it out with multi-million dollar marketing budgets, for years, to ensure we all care about DX9, 10, 11, HDR and a variety of other technologies. Against that background of in-depth discussion and analysis, Apple comes to town with a new iPad that has something called ‘quad core graphics' and consumers cream their collective jeans. Maddening stuff.

Intel's approach has centred more on ‘Pentium' and ‘Core' as names you can trust – but if you ask most store assistants, then they will struggle to tell you why the 4 cores in an i7 differ from those in an i5 [KitGuru straw polled a dozen on Saturday and none of them had a clue – Ed].

So can ARM move from A6 to whatever to A15 etc and actually have people (a) care what the differences are and (b) specify a CPU preference ?

At Linaro Connect from 28th May to 1st June, over 200 of the most influential people in the Linux on ARM , from hackers to CEOs, will congregate in Hong Kong and discuss:-

• A15 Virtualization
• ARM big.LITTLE implementation
• ARM for the Enterprise: Servers and Beyond
• Multicore power management & scheduling
• SoC BSP maintainence, cost reduction and upstreaming
• SoC Unified Memory Management

Key to the event is that the focus of everything that's said and done will be the Linux kernel, Android, Ubuntu and other non-Microsoft flavours of operating system for non-Intel processors.

KitGuru says: The pincer attack of ARM coming at Intel in the mobile space, while at the same time attacking the web server market, must create a worry for the chip giant in the ~10 year time frame. Every mainframe giant fears the death of a thousand nano-servers. Will TSMC's o/c boost to ARM technology create an upset?

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

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