2016 might be the year of the ARM development machine

Oct 10, 2015 19:22 GMT  ·  By

Freshly returned from the LinuxCon Europe Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel project, has just published a short continuation of the interview with Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and Open Source technologist at Intel.

We reported earlier this week that Linus Torvalds claimed while talking with Dirk Hohndel at the LinuxCon Europe conference, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, between October 5 and 7, 2015, that next year, 2016, will be the year of the ARM laptop.

According to Mr. Torvalds, most tech news websites misunderstood his point of view on the matter of computers powered by the ARM architecture. What he was really trying to say was that he would like to see a real ARM computer that you can develop on, preferably one powered by an ARM64 (AArch64) processor.

"So I'm back home from LinuxCon EU in Dublin, and notice that most tech news sites who reported on me being on stage took the whole 'Next year is the year of the ARM laptop' at face value," says Linus Torvalds. "Which is fine, but it kind of misses the whole point I was trying to make (and clearly failed at). I've been waiting for widely available ARM kernel development machines for years now, but it seems to always be 'next year.'"

A real ARM development machine is missing

Everyone knows that Linux kernel comes with great support for the ARM and ARM64 hardware architectures, and that there are a number of ARM boards out there that sell good and are fun to play with, including the popular Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard SBCs, as well as Chromebooks and smartphones, but a real ARM development machine is missing from this nice picture.

So with this in mind, Linus Torvalds can only hope that hardware manufacturers will start to consider producing powerful ARM computers that can be used by developers for development purposes. Maybe next year, who knows.