Posted on 11/21/2012 12:47:45 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
So you are saying Open Office has be compiled for the ARM architecture?
We have:
Firefox Mobile on ARMv6 processors February 17th, 2012
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Now what about Firfox Mobile on the A15 Dual processor?
ARM Announces 64-Bit Processors Coming in 2014
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ARM’s Cortex-A50 series of processors are based on the ARMv8 architecture and take what ARM describes as “a fresh approach to 64-bit compute.” These chips are designed to be low-power, which means they’ll be perfect for smartphones, tablets and beyond.
ARM's practice of licensing its low-power CPU cores to practically anyone who wants to build a chip has been wildly successful in the past five years. It's had the effect of flinging computing power from a PC at the center of the network out to every node, from printers to routers to NAS boxes, smart phones, and tablets. As a result, ARM has become the biggest threat to Intel's dominance that we've seen in a generation. However, in order for ARM-based CPUs to step into even more roles, they have some catching up to do. For starters, they're going to have to transition to 64-bit memory addressing.
Plans are already in place to do so, of course, and David Kanter has taken a long, hard look at the proposed ARMv8 archiecture. His overview is worth reading, if you care about such things. Kanter mostly likes what he sees. Allow me to lift a bit from his conclusions:
Like x86, ARMv7 had a fair bit of cruft, and the architects took care to remove many of the byzantine aspects of the instruction set that were difficult to implement. The peculiar interrupt modes and banked registers are mostly gone. Predication and implicit shift operations have been dramatically curtailed. The load/store multiple instructions have also been eliminated, replaced with load/store pair. Collectively, these changes make AArch64 potentially more efficient than ARMv7 and easier to implement in modern process technology.
Among other things, ARMv8 should have a very direct impact on Nvidia's project Denver and, of course, the future of Apple's iDevices.
If you can put a regular Linux distro on it like Ubuntu et. al. then you can put OpenOffice or LibreOffice on it. You get all the same basic functionality of the MS Office suite but for free. Yes there can be formatting issues when exchanging files between the Open/Libre-Office apps and MS-Office apps, but if you stick to standard fonts and routine layouts/features you’re in good shape.
I bought a Chromebox a month or so ago, but so far I’ve only used it as intended, running the Chrome browser, and seeing how much of my computing I can get done “in the cloud”. So far, I’ve been able to do pretty much everything I need to do, but that also includes remotely accessing my work network, which includes all of the Microsoft productivity apps. At some point down the road, I’ll probably play around with loading a Linux distro on it to see how it would work. But even as intended, it’s a cheap, fast computer that can do 95% of what most people do on their home computers these days, and even work computers, to the extent that cloud computing is taking over the workplace.
This action is moving forward at a pretty rapid pace and I think there will be holes in stuff we know should work,....but things have to be done yet to get it to work.
You DO NOT move a binary BLOB from the X86 world to the ARM instruction set with out somebody doing some work....
In my old job many years ago,,,,we had a work out moving costumers from one OS to a higher level one on the SAME DAMN MACHINE..
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