The Arm Invasion
Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge grab a hammer and a screwdriver and de-construct the current fascination with the ARM architecture. Boasting tempting reports of battery life, promising opportunities in the netbook space and oodles of work going on in various Open Source projects, are we at the beginning of an ARM invasion or a hype smackdown?
Listen to this latest shot and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
75 Comments to “The Arm Invasion”
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Though I love the thought of using a free format, my portable player can’t play ogg vorbis. With the last two posts you’ve used mp3 for the feed, which is fine, but with this one you’ve used the ogg for the feed.
That means I need to download the episode manually to get it on my device.
It wasn’t deliberate; the feed should include both. Trying to fix it…
OK, I think this is fixed.
Thanks for checking into this, Aq. Can anyone verify if it works for them now?
This is actually the first time that I have heard about ARM. Yos<–n00b Sounds very interesting and exciting though especially if Linux can corner this market.
-Yos
Intersting but I have two points to raise
Aq “Windows dont have a windows 7 story for netbooks” WTF? Are you smoking crack ?
no flash? the iPhone seemed to do ok without flash dont you think ?
looking forward to the next episode of wrongness
That is all
Ade: the iPhone does OK without Flash because iPhones are popular enough that “flash-only” sites like YouTube and BBC iPlayer are prepared to do separate extra work to enable their content on iPhones. If ARM-based Linux netbooks get popular enough that that happens, then I’m happy. Note that the iPhone-enablement for those video sites is all about H.264, which won’t work out-of-the-box on a Linux netbook, because of software patents.
By “Windows 7 story on netbooks” I meant “Windows 7 story on ARM netbooks”. I haven’t seen anything about a Windows 7 port to ARM; if I missed something about that, do please fill me in!
Linux based arm netbooks would surely come with dsp decoders for the big codecs out of the box. Of course this means updating your Linux distro on the netbook, would mean you potentially losing those. However unless someone is benevolent and releases them all under an MIT style license, they will not be free software.
Windows 7 on a netbook is news to me. Is it going to be available?
You can buy netbooks with MS Windows 7 right now. That is, for sufficiently large values of “netbook”. Today’s idea of “netbook” seems to be what we would have just called a laptop not that long ago.
Futureshop in Canada lists 3 on their web site: MSI Wind 10″ Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz 9-Cell Netbook $350, and two models of HP Mini 10.1″ Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz Netbook $330, and $380 (I don’t know what the difference is between the two). All three have a 1.6GHz Atom, 1 Gig of Ram, and a 160 Gig hard drive.
All three also come with Windows 7 Starter Edition. I think that’s the version with all sorts of limitations on what you can do with it (e.g. I think you can’t even change the desktop background).
If you can’t watch video on one of these things, then it would have to take the hybrid approach you mentioned.
The iPhone supports Youtube (using H264 versions of the videos), so that can’t be beyond Arm chips. (Apple & Google seem to be backing HTML5 rather than Flash, so Flash per-se isn’t such an issue.)
However, isn’t the main hardware destination likely to be ’slates’, ‘iTablets’ whatever they are going to be called. An oversized iPhone device like the Star Trek 2nd Gen things they used to carry around. (We may not see this from Apple first, HP are looking at it, and Windows 7 has a lot of touch stuff built in.)
The iPhone doesn’t decode video on the processor; it has a DSP chip to do audio and video. Part of the reason that Google gives for not supporting HTML5 video on YouTube is that there aren’t Ogg Theora DSPs available like there are H.264 DSPs.
That argument is now out of date after Mozilla funded ds to work on theora dsp decoder for OMAP3 (Arm Cortex A8 + dsp + other stuff System on Chip made by TI).
Agreed that the argument’s out of date, I’m just relaying what Google said when asked “why not use HTML5 Theora video for YouTube”? That was one of their reasons. I’d like to see more devices coming with that DSP or that DSP firmware be downloadable…
You can’t say that ARM is just hype the wiki facts don’t lie!:
“As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than a billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor.”
“As of 2009, ARM processors account for approximately 90% of all embedded 32-bit RISC processors”
ARM laptops are hype. Not ARM chips.
With any luck by the time ARM has 55% of the market YouTube will be using HTML5 and Ogg Theora, so no worries about Flash
As to the question of whether it’s actually going to happen – I don’t see why not. Netbooks sold like hot cakes when they were first out – before MS started putting XP on them – so I can’t see why there’d be particular resistance to Linux-only ARM machines.
flash 9.4 already on n900 (has an arm cortex a8), flash 10.1 coming for n900, palm pre, android (all on arm)
Zaheer: that’s really interesting! I didn’t know that; I thought reports of “Flash” on Android etc were just the Flash Lite thing, not actual proper Flash. That’s one major impediment to ARM laptops that is perhaps not so much of an impediment, then
It’s pure unadulterated real flash. Fortunately you can install adblock on the n900 too to block the shitty flash ads messing up your browsing experience!
The N800 & N810 also have ‘real’ flash. They just don’t have the horsepower to use it smoothly. Hopefully this is something that the new generation of chips will solve. I am waiting for my N900, so I will report back when it arrives.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned Chrome OS. The Chrome OS is being made so that it will run on ARM from day one, and has the marketing power of Google behind it. Google has already got Android out there in a fairly big way and I reckon they’ll get Chrome OS out there aswell. Given that you can’t run WINE or anything else on Chrome OS, why wouldn’t you just use ARM for your Chrome OS netbook? (Well Flash is the obvious answer … but maybe google can twist Adobe’s arm to support ARM).
And if a netbook can run Chrome OS it should be able to run Ubuntu (though with rather limited disk space).
Bring it on.
My first thought upon hearing this podcast was how I would love an Arm netbook with an SSD running Chrome OS. 5 second boot, 40 hours battery? Count me in.
Nobody is going to release a netbook on ARM unless Windows gets ported to ARM. Even if they’re not selling them with Windows on them, they’ll want to make sure that they have a fallback to Windows.
I don’t like it. But it’s true.
Mr Ben is right – they just wont be released unless Windows 7 can run on them. Thats just business – sad but true
I don’t agree. I believe Linux is getting to a point feature and price wise to justify dedicated netbooks. After all, netbooks are basically appliances.
I’m with Jon in disagreeing.
As netbooks are primarily geared towards using the web the OS it runs becomes less and less relevant as long as it provides a good browser and good clients for common web services.
Netbooks with Linux and no Windows were a runaway success long before Microsoft panicked, brought XP back from the dead and hit their bottom line bringing the price down and bribing the vendors to kill Linux.
Give me a list of netbooks that were sold that could not run Windows. As far as I know, the list is 1 – the Elonex One.
There are a lot of niche business uses where battery life and cost are more important then flash and windows, and then theres the “chrome” use case where everything is in the cloud and the machine architecture/OS are irrelevant, and then theres the hobbiest camp (including me!) that will buy an ARM netbook because they have a geek cool factor.
The question is wether that lot combined is a big enough market to force microsoft to port windows7 (or xp) to ARM, which is doable if MS think they need to to keep linux from gaining control of the market segment. Without it arm wont achieve 55% market share, probably not even 5.5% but theres still enough of a market for them to happen.
I don’t think that’s true. Viglen makes (and sells!) ARM based machines running Linux, for desktop use. I wouldn’t be suprised to see them make a similar netbook offering.
Fail. I that was a massive lie, the use AMD Geodes which are x86. Even so, would Windows run on them? If not and they’re still selling, the point still stands.
It’s not true
… it might be possible … But when you have ARM and Google banging on the doors with a sledgehammer things might change. Those two companies are both huge players in the mobile market and up until now they didn’t actually push for the netbook. Any ARM based netbook was something done independently by small companies. Wait till you see what happens once some real money starts flowing.
mrben: What if Chrome OS ran on ARM? Which it will.
Im really excited about ARM the one thing I learned that makes ARM awesome is that you can have a load of processors on one board doing specific jobs. Like there is a 5 inch netbook with touchscreen and HD graphics (1024×600). That is completely insane (in a good way)
ARM offers some really nice opportunities. Has anyone see the Touchbooks from Always Innovating. They have detachable touch screens!
https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/
One application is to hang the screen on a metal surface using magnets (they have a video of this that is very intriguing).
I don’t know if they will be a success, but they are definitely leveraging ARM and embedded Linux to think outside of the box.
Just listened to the first three shots. I guess I must be getting old and losing my hearing but it always sounds to me that you are saying “shut up jack” and I keep wondering who Jack is and what he is doing that is so noisy. Do you have a new pet?
Getting old, pal.
Arm chip powered netbooks – all well and good, but are the OS hackers writing light/efficient code so that the end result is a fast and responsive system with cpu efficient operation? Don’t forget, these chips are still crap compared with typical home computer cpu’s open a few web pages and your Arm will freeze at the elbow! Flash working on Arm based units -that’s the last thing you need if you want battery life and nippy system function!
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/27/sharp_linux_arm_netbook/
it might not look like your typical netbook, but it is one none the less and you can buy it.
There are also some MIPS based netbooks kicking around, that are priced around £100, but they are almost universally bollocks. If an Arm based machine with a similar performance to a Modern smartphone, running Ubuntu with a 9 inch screen, priced for less than £200 it would probably sell well. The current crop of netbooks seem to be creeping upwards price wise, all for the same machine, Atom N280, 1GB Ram, 10″ screen and a 160gb 5400RPM hard drive. A lot of this is due to the Microsoft hardware restrictions so that the OEM’s could buy XP Home for peanuts.
Just a small thing, Windows Mobile and windows CE are not the same thing, Windows mobile is built off CE, with a UI for PDA/Mobile phone use.
mish has it right imo. ChromeOS nicely sidesteps the big issue (porting applications) with pusing out a new hardware architecture because it is an appliance not a computer. Netbook/T+L laptop battery life has been climbing recently to around 5-8 hours. If they can stretch it just a little farther so you can get a whole day’s work done then people will be satisfied with that. Those extra hours become a diminishing return. Also Linux is slowing gaining market share but ARM+Linux still won’t appeal to average joe over x86+Windows no matter how good the battery life. People stick with what they know.
Hmmm I would like to see a viable ARM based netbook next year, if its cheap enough I would certainly pick one up
I’ve also noted that ARM based microservers may also be available for Linux based web servers which would also be nice to pick up…obviously it wouldn’t be comparable to an intel i7 or anything, but not all tasks require such a beefy processor…
Iirc the ARM cpu was beeing targetted at netbooks, not laptops or workstations, as it isn’t a powerbeast which we want in there. It just doesn’t have the bogomips.
ARM does certain things efficiently, like for example multimedia. With the right ARM cpu you’ll be able to play 1080p video’s.
However to me the most important things are: no fans and less heat (much smaller and thinner netbooks without holes), and a much longer battery life.
One example here is the Touchbook, but that’s too fat and too much cruft for my taste. Real 8 to 16 hours of battery life though!
Gnash will play YouTube and it runs on everything with less power consumption than Adobe Flash.
Indeed, and they are really targeting low-power environments like netbooks.
I’m sure I saw a cheap netbook for sale in HMV back in October running on an ARM processor in the 200Mhz range. I wasn’t impressed, I must say and it was running some form of Windows (presumably Windows Mobile) which looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1998. Really, really ugly.
It’d be good to see a decent small netbook running on ARM with something like ChromeOS or Ubuntu on it. I’d consider buying one!
Hey Aq, I got your cheeseburger right here.:)
As I understand it (i.e. I was told by some bloke in the pub ages ago) ARM processors are hard to program for because there is no “ARM” processor its actually a family of processors that are all just different enough from each other to make low level code written for one not work on the others.
Plus (and here my knowledge gets really hazy) the lack of a standard bios layer means you have to do all the low level initialization of the chipset yourself, great if you want highly tuned code that gets everything possible out of a slow processor (where slow == low power consumption), bad if you want your code to be portable. This is why you dont get “linux on ARM” you get “linux on this specific piece of hardware that has a arm processor”.
Although maybe if all arm netbooks have cortex A10 processors (or whatever) with a standard design motherboard then maybe thats not a big problem.
Of course I may be completely wrong I Am Not A Low Level Arm Hacker (IANALLAH)
Ian Allah… So many potential bits of wrongness, so little time.
First, great to see one half of LUGradio back in action
I’ve been using Linux and ARM very happily for a few years now: Debian on ARM in the form of the “slug” (NSLU2). The ARM CPU of the slug is probably the main factor in achieving low-power consumption. It consumes something like 4 watts and is on 24/7 in my home thus eco-friendliness is important. The slug has been credited with putting Debian ARM in the top 5 most popular architectures for that distro.
Anyhow, if they can enable this low-power goodness in a netbook form-factor and (this is the killer) keep performance snappy then I’m interested. I’m interested in what Chromium on netbooks will offer on this front.
Jono mentioned WINE on ARM a few times. You can’t run Windows programs on ARM for the same reason you can’t run Windows on ARM. WINE Is Not an Emulator. It just basically translates Windows OS calls to Linux OS calls. The actual instructions run natively, so x86 programs won’t run on ARM (and full software emulation would be much too slow).
I assume you want WINE in order to run games. Games on an ARM netbook would have to be written (or ported) for it. The screen size and resources are closer to an iPhone than they are to a gaming PC. You might want to talk to the people who write iPhone games as to what would be involved in getting games written for Linux ARM netbooks.
+1 WANT linux on ARM netbooks, but they’ll need to sort out the media side of things first to make it a consumer item (which they’ll do I’m sure).
I just hope they’ll sell linux variants in Australia. Linux netbooks are like hen’s teeth around here. Mind you, the exchange rate is just about good enough to buy them direct from the US at the moment.
Sorry I don’t have anything more interesting to say.
)
I wasn’t interested in ARM netbooks before, but now I am.
Dell’s Atom netbooks are fanless, so that’s not a feature unique to ARM. Having a silent laptop is great.
I don’t know why the other netbook manufacturers use fans. Perhaps a fan is cheaper than heatsinks? Or perhaps there’s no demand for quiet computers, so they don’t bother?
This is going to be a DISASTER for the open source community! Micro$uck has gotten people to think of “netbooks” as mini “notebooks” and stuffed the non atom versions full of ram and huge hard drives so when they get these super underpowered arm versions the cry will go out “see Linux sucks! it dosn’t do ANYTHING!”
Three years ago, you were different and weird if you owned a netbook. While it does seem wild to believe that more than half of all netbooks could be running ARM in three years, it’s really not that far fetched. We all know how quickly technology is developing, and it won’t surprise if it really does happen.
There are plans for flash to work on ARM:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2334753,00.asp
There’s already a version that works. I know there’s an interface for mobile phones based on flash for windows mobile and that certainly runs on ARM. And on the other hand HTML5 is here for the most part so hopefully a few years from now you won’t even need flash.
From my point of view if I can get a netbook that has 12 to 16 hours of battery life (for real not just on paper), can stream audio, video and browse the web, I’d buy it right now. All I need is an over-sized cheap smart phone with a proper keyboard.
It’s is achievable but only with proper marketing. So that those 99% people can turn into 20% of people who would buy such a thing and would know what are they going into.
I firmly believe this will happen. firstly Google’s chrome OS combined with pervasive 3g networks will mean that you will be able to get one of these for less than £100 or buy on contract like a phone.
That will drive huge numbers to make the economies of scale that to enable these sort of prices.
Even if the claims for battery life don’t end up a spiffy as they’re being hyped up to be. If they significantly improve on current battery life, that will surely be a good thing won’t it?
And BTW, ARM Netbooks already exist. And boy, do they suck monkey balls big time!
http://www.cnmlifestyle.com/
Do you notice a trend here? The only apps we are talking about not working on ARM/Linux and holding people back are the last few proprietary Linux apps. Pretty much everything else in the entire Linux desktop stack works on Arm already and has for ages. Only the ports of proprietary windows software is holding us up, the likes of Flash, and Skype. And this again hi-lights the problem with proprietary software. Even one or two pieces still in the Linux desktop can hold up an entire emerging market: arm netbooks. And sadly the companies don’t see that opening up would give them a team of Linux enthusiasts and arm netbook companies willing to help out on the port. Thankfully Google is big enough and with it’s new Arm/Android platform it can push Adobe around into doing the port. As for the other few hold outs like Skype, we can only hope.
I am not convinced at the moment if flash is a show stopper. If HTML video tags take off, then I think most devices would have hardware on board to decode video codecs etc, this would then take the load of the relatively low speed CPU.
Now comes and extremely dumb statement. I expect to be severely laughed at for it.
I remember using the family’s Acorn A5000 and various other Archimedes computers at primary, and early secondary school. (Please note, I only left school 10 years back
)
How much have ARM processors developed since those days? Our old A5000 had a clock speed of 33MHz, compare that to the netbooks mentioned early with 200MHz, and the increase in clock speed isn’t that great (not compared with x86 clock speeds anyway)
Are we in effect looking at something a bit too stagnant to enable us to use the processors now, and in the future? Are the ARM developers content with making chips for phone etc?
mattmole
@mattmole Well for one thing I think it’s a little higher than that now, but two, megahertz isn’t the only determinant of processing power. It just measures how fast, or how many instructions per second the cpu can perform. Arm is an entirely different architecture and I believe you can get a lot more done on arm per instruction, so even if you get less instructions per second, you can keep pace work wise. This is the whole mac PPC vs Intel X86 argument all over again. We need to move past this and find a more useful computational work metric.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the information. Thats the sort of thing I wanted to get out of someone. Why is ARM so good (apart from low power usage of course).
Ahoy. http://audio.lugradio.org/shotofjaq/shotofjaq_thearminvasion.ogg doesn’t play for me here. I kind of expected it to in Firefox but that presented a grey area with a large X. So I downloaded the link. The result was 254kB gzipped, so I gunzip’d it, but then there were only 16 seconds of an intro.
Corrupted file?
Jono & Aqs supposition that there are no ARM netbooks is incorrect… Hell, Maplins of all people have been selling them for over a year…
The Maplin “Web-books” are very much like the Elonex Onet+ that I got one of ages ago. It was crap, I spent £120 on that bugger.
Great show, gents. I do have a couple of comments. As morlockhq mentioned, there is already an ARM-based netbook called the touchbook. This appears to be a very cool device in concept. The display separates from the keyboard, and can act as a large internet tablet with touchscreen capabilities, and appears to be about the size of a Kindle. It can also plug into the keyboard in the traditional laptop style, as well as being able to flip it like a traditional tablet.
One area of ARM processors you did not mention, one that spans the gap between phones and netbooks, is the Internet Tablet, such as the Nokia N-series or the Archos 5. I have an N810 that is never very far out of reach. It has an ARM processor, is slightly larger than a smartphone and sports a full Linux distribution. Admittedly the Archos sports a crippled version of Android.
However, on the Nokias, the operating system, Maemo, is based on Debian, and an up-and-coming project, called Mer, is based on Ubuntu. I believe the Mer devs goal is to have a large portion of the Ubuntu software catalog available for the Nokia devices. Maemo is sponsored by Nokia, but has a heavy open source component, and Mer is completely based on Ubuntu. I have run the Gimp and OpenOffice on this tablet (albeit slowly), as well as watching movies, reading books, playing games, nearly everything I can do on my desktop. The latest addition to the N-series stable, the N900, also has a mobile phone built in.
On my N810, I have limited Flash support (flash8, as I recall), so I can do youtube and all of the other social networking type stuff as well as making and receiving SIP calls (through gizmo and skype), and I can do secure networking through wireless using traditional VPN tools.
The TouchBook can, run Maemo as well as the smaller tablets. I personally think that this is the direction that ARM-based netbooks need to proceed, throwing their resources into already established projects like Maemo and Mer to improve them as much as possible.
I love Android. It’s absolutely fantastic and yes I have a G1. At the time I didn’t want to wait around for the second wave of Android phones. My contract is up next June and I plan to get a beefier phone with better battery life. So what if the apps are written in Java? A good a app is a good app. Do you think an end user’s gives a rat’s ass what language the application is written in? I do agree that python should be supported. The more the merrier. The whole point of davlik and their bastardized version of java was a way to get a lot of developers on board quickly. Believe it or not there a ton of Java programmers out there. I’ve coded java for years and this year got into python and absolutely love it. You can do the same thing in python as java in about 1/3 the amount of code. No kidding.
[...] The Arm Invasion (66) [...]
ARM for netbooks is great. Put it with a decent DSP and you will have a great little productivity system that can also play videos and music.
To me the main reason Linux on netbooks is not so well received is because it is too much like Windows. This sets an expectation that it will work like Windows. Give them Ubuntu Remix or something else that operates a bit differently and the expectation of the Winodws Experience is gone.
We don’t have people complaining that their mobile phones don’t work like Windows or their PVRs. It’s because no such expectation has been set.
The Always Innovating Touchbook is the first on the market (that I know of) http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm First Looks say it is interesting and works, but I cannot find anything more detailed.
I’m looking forward to the Arm machines, if they can deliver the performance to power consumption ratio they claim. I have an enviro-footprint itch I hope Arm can scratch. Intel certainly thinks Arm is going somewhere, as they keep miniaturizing and lowering the power requirements for the Atom in an effort to cut Arm off.
I’ll try to present my points in the form of an analogies:
When ARM netbooks/smartbooks arrive, are they going to be dvorak keyboards to intel’s qwerty keyboards? Studies may show that they are somewhat more efficient than Intel’s 2nd-3rd generation Atoms, but I feel that unless the ARM machines give slightly better performance for radically less money, they will suffer the fate of the dvorak… better for those that use it most, but not so much better that the mass make the switch.
I guess my other analogies come from records and tapes vs CDs and Beta vs VHS vs DVD vs Blu-Ray. Are ARMs going to be a substantially different than what we already know? Netbooks are already being pushed into the lowend laptop space, are the arm books going to provide a different use experience to make consumers feel that paying the same or more than intel netbooks is resulting in something remarkably better? (ie. VHS tapes vs DVD disks, a clearly better experience, and a different format) That looks unlikely hardware-wise, they’re just more mini-laptops. Like Aq pointed out, ARM wants to dominate a market in 3-5 years. Few things have done this except for the switch from VHS to DVD and the switch to digital cameras from 35mm film. Both cases where the replacement was radically better for the non-experts and their wallets compared to the original technology. Even MP3s, for all its ease of replication and transportation didn’t kill the CD in 5 years. It (arguably) took 7-12 years.
BlueRay is arguably not all that much better than DVD, and some people will resist replacinga disk with just another disk. Why should people get a smartbook that’s a lot like my other netbook?
So, really, all that is to say that ARM has to really provide a substantial improvement to the netbook/laptop experience, AND be cheaper, for it to meet these grand market share projections. Or else it will suffer beta vs VHS: technically better, but undercut by price.
Never underestimate price. Why do you think the technically superior big iron is being undercut by commodity hardware?
If you start to look into the low level aspects of computing it is blatantly obvious that the X86 architecture is a real dump. X86 is just a complete mess of extensions, at the most obvious level its a 64 bit extension to a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit architecture, then on top of this are the host of things like MMX, 3d now, SSE* etc.
X86 is a CISC(complex instruction set computer) architecture, The way it is implemented now, and basically always has bean implemented is through microcoding, at the lowest level is a simple RISC-ish CPU which is actually doing all the work, on top of this is a bunch of microcode marking up something which is effectively an emulator like QEMU which actually runs the X86 instructions. X86 processors are wasting a huge number of the underlying `microcycles’ emulating an outdated messy instruction set, which is obviously extremely power inefficient.
On top of this is the whole IBM PC derived platform, which is seriously showing its age. For example the BIOS, which still runs in 16 bit mode, and is for all intents and purposes completely and utterly useless to a modern 32 or 64 bit OS, which implement there own drivers for low level functionality bypassing the BIOS so that IO can be done without switching the processor into 16 bit mode. The BIOS would be much better discarded and replaced with something like Coreboot.
Backwards compatibility is a good thing, however it can be taken too far, all modern computers are still capable of running DOS and its divided OSs like windows 95/98, which NO ONE uses these days. This takes backwards compatibility far beond the point of actually being any use to anybody.
ARM is a RISC architecture, which is essentially tacking an CISC design and throwing away all of the layers of emulation, this massively improves the power efficiency as it is no longer necessary to waste cycles running microcode, the code is actually executed by real hardware, not a low-level emulator. This also has the side effect of improved performance.
Developing for ARM is not difficult, at a higher level the compiler does most of the work for you and at a lower level(assembly language) things are a lot easier because of the much smaller instruction set without tuns of hacked on extensions. Generally the only problem is that ARM chips often don’t have an FPU(floating point unit) or have a slow preforming one, requiring floating point operations to be converted into fixed point ones.
On a side note, WINE WILL NOT EVER run on the ARM architecture because it is essentially passing through instructions directly to the CPU, WINE is not an emulator. It may be passable to get it working in combination with QEMU but the performance is going to be none existent.
Additionally traditional desktop OSs do not work well on a netbook simply because they waste far to much screen space with useless GUI stuff. When you only have a tiny screen, screen real estate really is a precious resource, not something that can be freely wasted with GUIs that have massive empty gaps in them, or useless things like window bars. Tiling/Tabbing window managers are much better sooted to small screens becouse you basically have to have everything maximised all the time anyway.
Also from my point of view, mice on laptops/netbooks are an anti-pattern, you have those awful twitchy touch pads or these `mini joystick’ things. Which results in having to carry around a extra hardware mouse as well, which should not be needed. Laptop/netbook interface design should be treated as a stand-alone entity much like mobile phone interfaces are.