Submitted by MeeGo! Nokia’s hope for the future is developing at a quick pace, and considering the rather lukewarm reception of Nokia’s Symbian^3 devices, that quick pace is more than justified. MeeGo got a big boost today with AMD announcing support for the platform. The company puts its money where its mouth is, too.
AMD announced at the MeeGo conference that the chip maker will join The Linux Foundation’s MeeGo project, pledging not just encouragement but also engineering expertise – which hopefully means developers and plain ol’ cash.
“MeeGo represents an exciting, open-source mobile operating system we expect to be adopted by mobile and embedded device makers over time,” said Ben Bar-Haim, AMD’s corporate vice president of software development, “We are glad to provide engineering resources to joint industry efforts like MeeGo and expect that this operating system will help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units.”
Of course, this is not entirely altruistic, as Bar-Haim already hints at. AMD pretty much missed the netbook revolution, doesn’t play a role in smartphones, and they’re not playing much of a role in the tablet frenzy either. By expressing support for MeeGo and maybe even dedicating some actual resources to it, they are probably hoping to grease the wheels a bit in this department.
Altruism or no, The Linux Foundation is rightfully happy with AMD’s support. “Built from the ground up for a whole new class of mobile computing devices, MeeGo gives companies like AMD and its partners unlimited opportunities to accelerate innovation for the next generation of computing,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, “As an existing Linux Foundation member, AMD will be an important and valuable contributor to the MeeGo Project.”
Hopefully, this will help MeeGo mature even faster. New platforms means more competition, and more competition is always good for us consumers.
AMD have released programming specifications for most of its family of graphics chips, so that open source developers are able to write Linux drivers for AMD/ATI graphics chipsets.
http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
AMD have recently announced the AMD Fusion^a"c Family of APUs.
http://sites.amd.com/us/fusion/apu/Pages/fusion.aspx
AMD have even deomnstrated the first fusion APU chips:
http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-demonstrates-2010jun…
In particular, the Falcon APUs seem to be targetted at the low-power segment of the market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion
It would seem that this announcement from AMD joining the Meego effort is entirely in line with the Falcon APUs target market.
The only strange thing is that Meego is aimed at netbooks, mids, tablets and handhelds. Intel is involved because most netbooks use Intels Atom CPU in conjunction with Intel’s GMA graphics accelerators. AMD’s Fusion APUs will probably become a direct challenge to that combination of Intel chipsets within the meego target market.
Intel and AMD both involved in Meego: strange bedfellows it would seem.
Edited 2010-11-16 00:22 UTC
Speaking of meegoconf, if you feel like trolling or biseshedding in person, bring it over. I’m there, still with to hair.
http://blogs.amd.com/press/2010/11/15/amd-joins-meego-linux-open-so…
So there you go, a quote from the horses mouth so to speak.
As for competing against Meego partner Intel in the Meego target market, this snippet of information from the same article might explain it:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/node/5887
Edited 2010-11-16 01:59 UTC
I am so glad to finally see some very serious efforts to push Linux on mobile platforms. Although it would be wonderful if this was pure altruism I think we all know it is not. So long as the market remains competitive and all players still feel as though there is the possibility both to grow if resources are invested and fall behind if they do not continue to invest significantly, we the users should be pretty well set to benefit from some serious innovation. Hopefully the Linux Foundation will carefully cultivate this good fortune and make sure no one player comes to monopolize while all others are marginalized.
Android has been on the market for 2 years and in development for more than 5, that doesn’t count as pushing Linux on a mobile platforms?
What did Android bring to other linux systems?
Edited 2010-11-16 19:51 UTC
“Droid Fonts” seems to be something that can be used outside Android as well.
When saying “linux”, people generally mean GNU/linux with Xorg and all the stuff.
Indeed, as asserted by others, I generally think of Android as a “sort of” linux. While Linux is a kernel. I think of Linux as also including a large ecosystem of tools and infrastructure that make me a happy camper. Personally, I am eagerly awaiting the Nokia N9 with Meego sometime early next year. I am from the SuSE camp and having Zypper for package management is right down my alley.
AMD opted not to play in the netbook arena. AMD has finite resources, when compared to Intel, and they have to pick and choose their battles. At the time, they were hemorrhaging money, integrating ATI, and had a server focused core which was behind the performance of Intel equipment, so it wasn’t pressing AMD release an Atom competitor.
The plan was to let the market develop, and then release a chip which was competitive. Even now, netbook, smartphones, and tablets aren’t where the money is. AMD needs to play in the arena, but it’s not going to be a giant profit center for them. This is evident in the Bobcat chip. The Bobcat chips will be able to be used as a desktop/laptop chip and as a netbook/nettop/tablet chip.
x86 chips are still pretty far away from being used in smartphones. They are too big and too hot right now. In a few years they maybe, but not at the moment.
FWIW, I’m starting to see netbooks for sale with Athlon Neo CPUs.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODc5Mw