Single-Chip x86 Chipsets Around the Corner?

An anonymous reader writes "Kontron, a giant among industrial single-board computer vendors, yesterday revealed a credit-card sized board apparently based on a single-chip x86 chipset that clocks to 1.5GHz and supports a gig of RAM. It targets portable devices — not x86's usual forte. Kontron isn't saying whether the board uses a Via or an Intel chip(set) — both vendors reportedly have single-chip chipsets in the works, part of their respective missions to drive 'x86 everywhere.'"

Comments

Re:Great idea

[spirit of reason]

I am still waiting for a revival of the handheld computers

You mean something like the Pandora?

Also, more information here.

While it's technically meant more for a gamer market like the GP2X, the arm + linux + wifi + usb host + decent resolution screen might make it a more general purpose machine.

x86 programming

[neapolitan]

It's a shame that the x86 is such a complex instruction set; this means that the age of the handheld computer as an easy programming platform for hacking is over.

When I was programming for Apple //e, I had a good majority of the opcodes for the 6502 chip memorized, laying out assembly by hand. I later learned 68k assembly, and again, it is very "understandable" to a person just sitting down in front of the computer looking at an assembly printout. In the early 90's, pretty much x86 dominated and I stopped doing pretty much all assembly programming.

In 1996 I was delighted when the palm pilot came out, using a 68328 (68k instruction set). It was like a renaissance, again programming in assembly and hacking other things for fun. Now, once again, it appears this will be dead!

As a question to the slashdot community, is it possible to program "naked" x86 assembler? I have never really put in the time to learn it, but it just seems exceedingly complex and tedious to program for this chip without use of a higher level crutch (C compiler...) I am sad that once again everything I know is becoming outdated... :)