Last week saw this year's annual Computex Taipei computer trade show go down in Taiwan. The second largest computer trade show in the world, it's traditionally a source for many product announcements from the major manufacturers. Most of the time these announcements are of x86-based products, but this year it was ARM's turn to take center stage, delivering on last year's announcement that ARM were to make a big push into the netbook market. Although none of the products listed here are in stores at the moment, all announcements point towards a good number of them being made available before the year is out.

 

Qualcomm Snapdragon

Qualcomm's Snapdragon line of Systems-on-a-chip feature single or dual ARM cores at speeds of 1GHz or greater, a 600MHz DSP for audio/video encoding/decoding, 3D graphics acceleration, 3G/wifi/bluetooth networking, and essential I/O hardware such as audio, video, USB and SD/MMC controllers. The Snapdragon SoCs will be at the heart of Qualcomm's 'smartbook' product range - a series of always-on, always-connected mobile devices including netbooks, internet tablets, and smartphones.

TI OMAP3

Although perhaps not as many OMAP3 products were announced as I would have liked, it does look like there are at least a couple of OMAP3 powered products on their way to market this year.

NVIDIA Tegra

NVIDIA have revealed that they want a slice of the netbook/smartbook/smartphone pie, with the announcement of their Tegra platform - a hardware platform comprising an ARM11 CPU, GeForce GPU, HD video decoder, HDMI output, USB, and all the other bits you'd expect from any modern system-on-a-chip. According to their presentation at Computex at least 12 Tegra-powered devices are on their way this year. But then again, they also claimed that Qualcomm's Snapdragon fails at HD video playback and only gets 5fps in Quake, statistics that seem to have landed NVIDIA in some hot water judging by the fact that (almost) all pictoral proof of the slide in question has vanished from the internet. At the moment only Windows CE is supported by Tegra, but support for Google's Android is in the works.

Freescale

Although Freescale's i.MX range of ARM-based SoC's don't appear to have as much grunt as some of their rivals, they still showed off a few products at Computex.

Other

Whereas most of the above has focused on ARM based products announced at Computex that could one day run RISC OS, it's important to remember that there are a load of other ARM based devices out there. Such as...

• OpenRD-Client - A small computer akin to the A9home, the OpenRD-Client is powered by one of Marvell's Sheeva brand of ARM-based chips, and supports clock speeds of up to 1.2GHz
• VIA are entering the ARM based smartbook space - just not much concrete information about products yet. See also here for some more details.
• Skytone's Alpha 680 netbook - It's got an ARM CPU, it runs Android, and it features a swivel screen for converting to tablet mode.
• x86/ARM netbook/tablet combo - A HP mini 1000 with the screen removed and replaced with a removable ARM powered tablet. Like a Touch Book, but with extra x86 compatability (providing you don't mind the fact VNC is being used to communicate between the two halves!)
• IAC's Prodigy e-reader - Although you probably wouldn't want to run RISC OS on an e-reader due to the typical 0.5Hz screen refresh rate, it's worth listing just to show how many devices use ARM CPUs nowadays. See also here for another ARM-based e-reader.
• Snapdragon powered smartphones - Acer F1, Toshiba TG01