Analysis: Dell has dragged the Linux-ARM Trojan horse inside the Wintel PC

By Peter Clarke
dspdesignline.com (February 10, 2009)

LONDON — The idea of adding smartphone capability to the conventional notebook PC may seem like a bit of a gimmick at first sight. But the idea of doing email and other basic operations while increasing battery life by a factor of ten compared with the same operations on an Intel processor certainly appeals.

And that seems to be what Dell and some other computer makers are doing when they adopt a hybrid Intel-ARM twin-processor approach.

The Dell Latitude E4200 and E4300 laptop computers run a version of Linux as an "instant-on" operating system on ARM-based hardware with flash memory. This subsystem is separate to the main Windows Vista or Windows XP operating system running on an Intel Core2 Duo processor. In theory, users can do email and other light applications under Linux, Mozilla and so on, and only need switch to the Windows operating system and the Intel processor for the heavier applications.

It seems to be universally agreed that games are amongst the heaviest applications.

As you get closer to the idea, it becomes apparent that the twin-OS/twin-processor arrangement is clever — including as it does access to application databases while bypassing the Windows operating system — but is slightly more fraught than is ideal.

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