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by phh 975 days ago
Well, I have the first model of laptops using nVidia Arm chip, it's called Toshiba AC100, and rocked a nVidia Tegra 2 in 2010.

It launched with Android, but I helped put GNU/Linux on it (got my first mainline author-ship with it), and daily drove it for a year at university (back then not everyone had laptops)

It was a hell of a device, and to this day I'm still missing anything close to it. 10 inch, 900g, 10 hour battery life (which was unthinkable on PCs back then), removable battery so when traveling I just had two batteries, extremely sturdy (I used to launch it in the air, and failed some times without worrying) [1]. That being said, even back then it was seriously limited, and I would max out the RAM just by doing ssh + quasselclient. By killing quasselclient I could have enough RAM to launch firefox to a simple web page, but that's it.

[1] It wasn't made to be sturdy, it's just that there was basically no weight, the pcb was very small, and it had pretty huge bezels

2 comments

The Tegra series is still ongoing, its just marketed at self-driving vehicles.

You can get dev boards, but they are hilariously expensive, and I'd guess the idle/low load performance pales in comparison to other vendors these days.

The tegra series also still exists in all the nintendo switches of the world ;)
It's also used in the Nvidia Shield, which is basically an overpowered Android TV stick.
I had tegra 2 tablet. Couldn't play video my year older phone could. Also didn't have NEON so was stuck using old versions of everything.