War with Wintel
Surely Intel isn't putting all this effort into MeeGo - including the acquisition of Wind River - only to see it running on ARM-based SoCs. Intel wants to take on ARM, not just in phones, but all other embedded applications, such as set-top-boxes, where it recently scored a major win against ARM with its inclusion in Google TV.
HP meanwhile, has made it clear with the acquisition of Palm and its webOS operating system, that it wants to be heavily involved in the embedded world and it doesn't think the future is Wintel. Palm's signature phone before the acquisition was the Pre, which used the Texas Instruments OMAP SoC. TI is one of the founder members of Linaro.
In a recent blog post Linux product manager for OMAP products at TI - George Martin - said: "Our team is focused on supporting the developers and designers behind open source. We joined Linaro in this spirit, because it will spur a common foundation of software components and tools that will help developers best address multiple market segments. Linaro initiatives will unleash next-generation creativity by providing improved, far-reaching tool sets based on ARM's proven architecture."
In promoting Linux embedded distributions, ARM has necessarily excluded Apple as well as Microsoft. But Apple is a law unto itself - it chooses to operate in its own close environment and that has done very well for it so far. Apple will continue to do its thing and it's already shown its commitment to the ARM ecosystem with the development of the A4 chip.
To conclude, we asked Cade what will constitute success for Linaro. "I would like Linaro to be enabled on at least all of our founding platforms," he said. "And I would like a number of distributions to be saying they're using Linaro and it's helping them."
This is a big bet by ARM on the future of embedded computing being intertwined with Linux. Windows is the major OS alternative in this area and Intel aspires to be the dominant chip player. That's why we think Linaro is ARM's most direct attack on the Wintel paradigm yet.
