The Open Source Laptop and the Golden Age of Open Hardware 93
An anonymous reader writes to this short feature featuring "Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang on why he decided to build an open source laptop, how the slowing of Moore's Law is making it easier for individuals and small outfits to compete against major corporations in the computer hardware market and what hobbyist hardware makers in the U.S. could learn from China's Shanzhai, famed for their cheap clones of the iPhone and other popular handsets."
Cortex A9 (Score:2, Informative)
Performance increases have indeed been quite slow in the x86 space for the past few years, but this is ARM based and there are still dramatic performance increases showing up regularly in that space. This is based on a quad Cortex A9 design (similar to the first-gen Nexus 7), and the current Cortex A15 core is roughly twice as fast. Whereas in the same timeframe Intel has managed only a ~20% performance increase, though they have been focusing more on power consumption than performance.
Re:I'd love to build laptops (Score:5, Informative)
I even tell people these days that Linux is easier to install than Windows. While very new hardware can still be problematic (Llano drivers a few years ago come to mind), in general the installation process is:
1) Hit next several times.
2) Enter a user name and password.
3) Everything works.
Hunting for drivers on Windows, especially for legacy devices, hurts my brain. When I plug my 15 year old webcam into a Mint box it just works. So in that respect I agree with GP :)