Genesi Americas is presenting this awesome looking ARM Cortex A8 based Smartbook design, presented by Genesi who designed the hardware in collaboration with Pegatron of this latest generation of this Freescale Powered Smartbook design. For fun, we are running Microsoft Office through a high resolution version of Citrix viewer on the latest version of Ubuntu 10.4 for ARM processors. This could provide a one click online based software as a service solution. Want to run any X86 application on your ARM Laptop? Just click through the Citrix virtualization stuff and you can have it all running and smoothly. In theory, the apps could be processed by a grid and delivered much faster than on a single x86 processor based device.
Genesi are providing the hardware and software integration solution, in combination with Future Electronics, they can provide the whole solution to carriers, distributors, with the full bill of material, setting up the manufacturing and making the whole thing work and be sold to the market.
Genesi’s main IP is their Aura firmware solution:
Aura, the Genesi Firmware offering, implements a run-time, re-entrant hardware abstraction layer supporting the industry standard IEEE 1275 (OpenFirmware) and UEFI firmware specifications, with significant added functionality.
These additional features provide cost reduction of systems and faster time-to-market of hardware. Genesi provides board bring-up services and firmware for other Power Architecture and ARM hardware suppliers, up to and including a Linux desktop, based on our firmware.
Genesi is an active Open Source supporter, having donated a lot of hardware over the years to Debian, OpenSuSe, Gentoo, Crux and many other Linux distributions.
Genesi are very active in optimizing software specifically for ARM Cortex by porting libraries to the NEON unit in these devices resulting in large speedups.
Genesi has a developer forum: http://www.powerdeveloper.org
