New-Tech Europe Magazine | July 2016 | Digital edition

and experience in low-power design and high performance compute and graphics capability. For consumers, it means those rich mobile applications they’ve embraced in the smartphone and tablet form factors are moving to large-screen devices, where they will transform the traditional laptop experience. For OEMs, the benefits of the ARM ecosystem coupled with Android on Chrome mean new and compelling design opportunities to deliver robust experiences in thin, sleek and low- power form factors for new users. For developers, Android on Chrome unlocks new markets and scalable opportunities for use cases based on the form factor, performance and low-power attributes that the ARM ecosystem is delivering to OEMs. Large screen mobile devices are expected to grow from 230 million units in 2014 to 330 million units in 2019, according to the research firm IDC. That’s a healthy rate that echoes the growth that forecasters anticipated in 2009 when the ARM ecosystem and the Android apps developer community joined forces to change the mobile world. Seven years later, that ARM-Android partnership is transforming the mobile world again.

need to incorporate binary translation technology. The Chromebook will experience the same performance degradation and increased power consumption because of the code translation required. The advantage of Android apps, most of which run natively on ARM, can be seen in solutions such as Pocket Code and Lightbot. These are very popular apps for educators, who tend to favor Chromebooks, but to date the apps have been available only on Android. With Android app ecosystem being enabled on Chromebook, a new world of solutions opens for users. And since Pocket Code and Lightbot are written natively on ARM, users won’t have to worry about performance degradation or increased power consumption by using these apps on ARM. Conclusion The same ARM ecosystem innovation that changed the mobile world in 2009 is at work again, this time in Chromebooks. Android on Chrome eliminates the features gap between clamshells and traditional laptop operating systems and unlocks a vast new potential for designers and apps developers. At the same time, it provides a fresh opportunity for the ARM ecosystem to contribute to and influence the large-screen compute segment, bringing with it expertise

translate the ARM native code into their own instruction forms within their architectural constraints. This comes at a cost in terms of performance, energy use and user experience. Efficiency, the work done per unit of energy, is heavily impacted where translation between architectures is required. A third of the top 200 Android apps need their code to be translated at run-time to execute on non-ARM- based devices. This can translate to an unpleasant user experience (as well as cost engineering time and effort). For example, searching for a text string in a PDF document can take four times longer on a non-ARM-based device. These sorts of slowdowns can lead to additional re-engineering time and effort. However, the good news is that nearly 1.6 times the number of native apps runs on ARM-based devices than any other mobile processor. As Android moves onto Chromebook, this binary translation of non-ARM apps will continue. On ARM-based Chromebook hardware, Android runs on top of the same ARM Linux kernel as Chrome OS and uses Chromes OS to filter user events such as mouse, keyboard and screen updates through to the Android OS. If the underlying hardware is not ARM- based, the version of Android that runs on the Chromebook will still

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