 So here the LinarConnect, so you with the Vero Apparatus, what is that? It's essentially a group of seven of us, eight of us at the moment, who set up a small company with the aim of producing an ARM V8 powered laptop. The reason we set up a company is because most of the SOC vendors expect to deal with a corporate entity. So we ended up with this so they could serve non-disclosure agreements of bits and pieces. So you want to do ARM powered basically like this, right? You want to do a good keyboard, good mouse, and good display, but also performance, very high performance ARM processor, right? Well, yeah, I mean I want something to be, I'd say, your day-to-day work machine. We're not interested in having a mobile device. We're looking at something that really is a replacement for your day-to-day desktop. Now, the initial concept is we're not going to be able to produce absolutely everything, so we're going to take probably something like an X220, an old Lenovo laptop. So this is an X220? This is an X201 actually, it's slightly older. No, no, about the same size, just a slightly newer model. So you're going to buy some used ones? Buy the used ones. Take the PCBs out? Yep. Well, just take out the motherboard. Take out the motherboard? So we leave the screen, we leave all the peripherals in place, and we want to use them. So what do you do? So who are you? Hi, I'm Steve. I'm one of the very guys as well, as well as being an ARM employee and a Lenovo engineer. So I'm one of the team, I'm going to be working helping to do the software for the laptop. As Andy says, we're looking to make a proper workstation out of these things, just like one of the existing ThinkPads that we all carry day-to-day. We want to be able to actually replace that with something powered by ARM, because hey, that's what we're all passionately working on every day. We want to be able to use that ourselves. It's a dog food exercise. So around here in this room, there's some pre-powerful stuff. So if we look over here, we're going to check it out. Here's the Cavium Thunder X, 48 core 64 bit. It'd be pretty nice if it could fit, right? 48 cores and laptop might be a bit more than we can deal with firmly, but we'd love to try it. You'd love to try it. What do you think you're going to get? What kind of thing do you aim for? Well, primarily it needs to have a reasonable memory bandwidth. The mobile device is a bit too small. It must have V8, absolutely must have V8, so we could have sufficient memory footprint to build large applications. Do you have lots of RAM also? Yeah, like AGB, what do you think? I think Pad has 16GB today. 16GB? Yeah, so we should be at least that. At least 16GB. So you're talking about right now a Linaro Connect, a bunch of ARM Linux guys? It'd be good if a bunch of them had ARM laptops, right? Absolutely. I mean, this is absolutely our target audience. I suspect if we were able to turn up with a laptop and say, right, who wants one, I don't think price would be the major issue. I think it would be, can we deliver them fast enough? We spoke to a number of the guys around here, say some of the ARM guys I work with, the Linaro engineers, and we've asked them, what would you say to a decent ARM V8 powerful laptop? And quite a number of them have already said, where can I give you money? They're that interested. How much money do you have to give you? That's the thing we don't know. So what's your background? So I'm a hardware engineer. So yeah, I guess I'm going to be the person putting the PCBs together. In UK? All basically in the UK, yes. Everybody's in Cambridge? In and around Cambridge at the moment, although, we announced this at Dead Plump in Portland last year. So we're having offers of support and help. Realistically, until we've got a working prototype board, until we've actually got a final agreement with one of the chip vendors, we're not going to go anywhere. As soon as we've got that, then yes, we could stop putting the PCB together. We're going to have to implement bits that are not here. The sort of chips we're looking at are designed for servers. So they don't have USB. They don't have video. They don't have all the integrated things that your laptop chipset will have. So we're just going to attempt to re-implement that probably over PCI Express, which they will have. So we'll have to add a USB ecosystem. There's a good chance, I would expect this year, for some very powerful ARM processor to be designed for laptops specifically. I think we should be at that time, no? I mean, let's face it. If somebody had this laptop or a powerful enough machine on a laptop today, we wouldn't be doing this. We'd be going and buying that. And until that arrives on the market, I guess we're going to have to do it ourselves. So you said the eight guys, the eight people? Yeah. Do you have the talents required to get this done? We've got everything from the very low level hardware. We've got people working on UEFI and possibly a completely open secure boot all the way up through to kernel guys. So, yeah. And then we've got people with distro experience. We've got people with experience of doing device testing and all that kind of thing. We think we have all the skills needed. It's just purely a case of going and finding appropriate hardware and making things work. So when you have the SOC and somebody says, okay, how long do you need to get it out and how many are you going to ship, you think? How long is a piece of string? What do you think? Okay, assuming everything works, we're expecting to go through one or two spins of PCB to start off with. We probably won't even try and fit into the laptop form factor for our first board. Once we've got that board, we'll learn from our mistakes, but that'll be one spin. Hopefully the second iteration of PCBs will be enough to feed the immediate developer base. So maybe we build 10, 20 units because by then I would expect VA will have grown to sort of 20 on people. Do you need investors? Not yet, no. Not yet, maybe later. At the 20 when we've all got everything running, then a baby then. The point when we start trying to get them into a laptop form factor is the point when we expect that we're going to get more people wanting to work with us and starting to give us money. And fingers crossed, that'll be where we get to. So you need to be able to compile the kernel faster than half fast and stuff like that. Is it called compiling? The developers need to do stuff fast, like how fast? Faster than the fastest Intel? We're not just going to, we're not going to try and compete just on out and out speed. Those are numbers that we know, people can always throw bigger things at us. What we want to be able to use is have these comparable with the workstations and the fast laptops that people are using today. Core i7 stuff. Absolutely, that's the kind of thing we're looking for. If we can match that with ARM powered so people are doing native development for their day to day ARM stuff, we've won. That's exactly what we want to do. All that in our engineers will be dog fooding ARM. You'll be actually using that for everything. We hope so, yeah. That's exactly what our plan is. I mean, the key is to be able to compile native your own application. At the moment, much of that is done across compilation. Yeah, each of our dog food.