Pinebook Pro: Betting it all on ARM – Part 1

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 11:00:00 +0000

During this lockdown, I have not been spending as much as I would typically with eating out and doing non-home bound activities, I have had a bit more disposable income for gadgets than I would usually have. With these extra funds, I decided to invest in two pieces of fascinating hardware. This blog post with be the first item I received.

My usual laptop is a Dell Latitude E7440, Intel i7-4600u, 16 GB RAM, 2 x 480GB mSATA drives, and a 14 inch 1080p screen. Currently, it’s running Windows 10, 2004 but in the past, it has run Linux, BSD and even MacOS a few times. It’s a nice machine, powerful enough to do most tasks and light enough to be in a backpack at all times.

I have used Raspberry Pis in the past as well as some “clones”. These have been used for server related tasks and not for personal computing. I believed x86 is the best platform we have but with the last few exploits in that hardware has shown that there are flaws with these closed-source, closed-designed implementations of this platform. The need for speed and performance has come at the cost of security and “simplicity”. ARM (other RISC platforms are available) I think will become the next architecture that will take over. It might have already done, so ARM is everywhere you look, phones, TVs, some fridges, VPSs and now my new laptop.

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Pinebook Pro: Betting it all on ARM – Part 1