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Software and hardware entrepreneurs
around the world have extended
the Android smart phone and apps
ecosystem into productive and
clever new applications in a variety
of industries, from construction to
industrial, entertainment, mining and
medical, education and the physical
sciences. In short, there is arguably
not a single industry that hasn’t
benefitted from this innovation.
Indeed, this ecosystem, coalescing
around the Android operating system
and the ARM architecture, has created
profound change:
• In 2009, 180 million smart phones
shipped; today we’re shipping 1.5
billionsmart phones annually.
• The related silicon revenue is $26
billion annually.
• On the software side, more than 1.5
million apps have been developed.
• In the first quarter of 2016 alone,
consumers downloaded 11 billion
items from the Google Play store.
New era dawns
This mobile ecosystem, echoing 2009,
is now fundamentally influencing
large-screen compute, including
Chromebooks. Soon, users will
enjoy Android apps on Chromebook,
bringing the mobile experience, the
diversity and innovation of the Android
ecosystem and ARM technology to
large-screen devices.
This is occurring in part because
consumers now demand more of their
smart phone “mobile" experience
on those large-screen devices -
experiences including the ones
mentioned above (long battery life,
rich graphics and media content,
widespread apps availability and so
forth). The ARM ecosystem will help
deliver technology to enable that.
Since their introduction in 2011,
Chromebooks have set a foundation
of speed, simplicity, security and
shareability, and Chrome has
established itself as the best operating
system for the web. Android apps
build of top of that foundation to
provide additional functionality across
productivity, entertainment, games,
social and messaging. With the
addition of Android, Chrome is now
on par with other operating systems,
erasing the features gap with
traditional laptop operating systems.
With Google Play, Chromebooks get
one of the fastest growing, mobile-
first app ecosystems in the world.
In short, consumers will soon begin
to engage with big-screen devices
in ways that echo the satisfying and
productive experiences they have
enjoyed on their smartphones.
For developers, the availability of
Android apps on Chromebooks
creates new markets. It will open new
vistas for developers to push their
apps into the large-screen form factor
and to develop new sets of apps and
use cases that leverage newer form
factors and system performance.
The scalability opportunity is clear.
Microsoft, for example, is supporting
Office productivity suites on Android.
System design
implications
Android apps on Chromebooks will
significantly influence form factor
design. OEMs, therefore, should
consider how:
• Convertible form factors and Android
apps deliver a full tablet experience in
a clamshell device.
• The convertible form-factor
encourages users to hold the device
much more than traditional clamshell,
which makes the materials much
more prominent and important
to the experience and to design
considerations.
• Weight and thickness determine
whether the user is using the device
in a tablet mode and therefore getting
the full potential of Android.
• Keyboard and mouse input will
influence consumers’ use cases.
ARM has worked closely with its
partners to deliver compelling designs
on Android devices—thin, sleek
devices that offer long battery life and
compelling performance such as:
• Game console-quality graphics
performance on 2.5K and 4K resolution
screens.
• Support for 4K video content.
• Support for multiple camera sensors
with resolutions and frame rates more
typical of a digital SLR.
Performance gains
What can OEMs expect on the
performance front? If the history of
mobile innovation is any guide (and it
is), they can expect a lot. Stretching
back to the dawn of the Android
smartphone era in 2009, with the first
single-core ARM Cortex-A8-powered
device, CPU performance-per core
has jumped 15x since then, while
multicore performance has soared
49x.
These types of technical benefits
have helped the software ecosystem
flourish in the past decade, making
ARM ubiquitous with Android, to the
point where
• 97% of all games are ARM native.
• 40% of top 100 apps games are
ARM native only.
• 89% apps & games target the ARM
architecture.
This success is tied to Android apps
running natively on ARM. As the smart
phone industry started to ramp, it was
only natural for Android developers
to write to the hardware that was
powering the smartphone revolution.
As the market opportunity exploded,
other architecture companies wanted
to exploit the market growth.
Native advantage: ARM
But for other architectures to try to
be competitive, they have had to
28 l New-Tech Magazine Europe