Tag Archives: Freescale Semiconductor
AMD Ontario to Compete with Intel’s Atom in Mobile Devices
Posted on 19. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
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Lilliputing has a report out that Intel’s oft-pushed around little brother in the semiconductor space, AMD, will be releasing a chip aimed at mobile computers. AMD has always been a lower-cost solution to Intel’s chips, and the release of this chip called Ontario offers both manufacturers and consumers better choice in processors for netbooks and tablets.
This information was provided to investors during a recent AMD earnings call. AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said that the performance and power consumption of the Ontario chip would be comparable to the Atom, although graphics capabilities would be better than Intel’s chip.
While having both the Intel Atom and now AMD Ontario as mobile computing options for processing is good, we’re still convinced that most Chrome OS devices will eventually run on an ARM solution. ARM offers more flexibility when paired with cloud computing and low-power capability than traditional processors.
Noticeably absent from the list of official Chrome OS partners is Intel, although many manufacturers that produce Intel-based solutions are taking a part. There is an overwhelming amount of ARM processor developers on the list such as Qualcomm (Snapdragon processor), and Texas Instruments (OMAP processor). Freescale Semiconductor, an ARM-licensed developer of the i.MX series of processors whose Taiwan office I had a chance to visit while I was at Computex, is also a part of the official list, which must mean something, right?
Freescale Semiconductor Working on Chrome OS
Posted on 03. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments
The folks at Freescale Semiconductor were kind enough to invite us to their offices yesterday in Taipei to show off the fact that they are actively working on Chrome OS for ARM processors.
I learned a lot during my time at Freescale, and I now better understand that it is taking a good deal of work to port Chromium over to the ARM architecture as opposed to x86. They had a version of Chromium running on their iMX515 processor that was from last year’s Google open source build.
I happened to have the latest spring release of Chromium on a USB drive in my bag while I was there. However, the build that I had was specifically for x86 and the reality is that a lot of work has to go into making Chromium compatible with ARM’s low power, mobile specific platform.
Here are some pictures that they allowed me to take, giving an indication that they are working closely with Google to ensure that Chrome OS will not just run on Intel processors. My time at the Freescale office in Taiwan yesterday gives me an indication that there will probably be ARM devices running Chrome OS in the first quarter of 2011.
More Chrome OS news will be coming in the closing days of Computex, keep checking our RSS feed or follow us on @thechromesource if you’re a Twitter addict like I am.
