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Intel and LG Team Up For x86 Smartphone
gbjbaanb writes "I love stories about new smartphones; it shows the IT market is doing something different than the usual same-old desktop apps. Maybe one day we'll all be using super smartphones as our primary computing platforms. And so, here's Intel's offering: the LG GW990. Running a Moorestown CPU, which gives 'considerably' better energy efficiency than the Atom, it runs Intel's Linux distro — Moblin. Quoting: 'In some respects, the GW990 — which has an impressive high-resolution 4.8-inch touchscreen display — seems more like a MID than a smartphone. It's possible that we won't see x86 phones with truly competitive all-day battery life until the emergence of Medfield, the Moorestown successor that is said to be coming in 2011. It is clear, however, that Intel aims to eventually compete squarely with ARM in the high-end smartphone market."
How can they do that when producing an ARM processor cost only ARMs royalty + costs added on from many producers (Texas instruments qualcomm et al).
Maybe one day we'll all be using super smartphones as our primary computing platforms.
Oh I sure hope not. Sounds like hell to me, and I'm an aetheist!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Has anyone made a scatter plot of benchmark score vs watt, for a given benchmark and various x86 and ARM processors?
Here we have a platform where there is no reason whatsoever to have an ass-backwards-compatible architecture in order to run legacy Windows apps. There is zero reason to use x86 here other than marketing and Intel. Please go away, we're perfectly happy with a modern RISC architecture (ARM), thank you very much.
Here's to hoping that ARM will permeate its way up into the netbook market and beyond, instead of the other way around. We've been tortured by x86 long enough already.
uh Mooresville is the latest iteration of the Atom.
ARM: Low power.
x86: Runs most desktop PC applications.
For a desktop PC the ability to run most PC applications is extremely important. For a smartphone, who cares? I don't want to run Paintshop Pro, Word, or Call of Duty on my smartphone. The apps that I do want to run already work on ARM. I do want low power. The improvements Intel has made are barely significant next to ARM's huge advantage here.
Needs to be open no APP store lock / sim locks as well.
You seem to be saying that Intel doesn't innovate. I beg to differ. I see a fair bit of innovation coming from Intel, even if not all of it ends up taking the market by storm.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This solutions to this are simple. This took me about a minute, not counting proof reading.
1) The charging device also has a small hard drive built into it that always syncs the data - just like iTunes already does if you have an iPhone.
2) The unique data - contact, calendars, documents - are constantly backed up to a server over the internet connection. Program data can easily be preloaded or reloaded onto a new phone.
3) As far as monetary risks are concerned, there is something called insurance. You may want to look into it.
The line between what a cell phone and a laptop and a computer mean intrinsically will continue to blur. Soon it will be simply the size of the interface. You'll have a mobile. Maybe the mobile will dock into a laptop or tablet style chassis to provide extra power and a full keyboard and larger screen - just like Lenovo just demonstrated at CES. The mobile can also be docked to your desktop system if you really need some extra horsepower or a fiber connection to the net. Meanwhile, your data is always with you. Doesn't sound so bad.
When humans get to the point where the technology of Star Trek is reality, the spaceships computers will be running x86. That makes me sad.
The BCD instructions are insignificant. They are nothing compared to stuff like vector floating point and crypto. Despite the waste, x86 instructions are still really compact compared to normal RISC instructions.
A dirty little secret about RISC compilers is that they seldom use more than a few registers. No kidding. Disassemble a wide variety of things and you'll see.
Modern x86 gives you 16 integer registers, the same as ARM. Old x86 gives you 8, the same as ARM Thumb. If there is a difference worth mentioning, it's that x86 chips are often designed to dynamically map the architectural registers onto over 100 hidden implementation-specific registers. This can even be done for memory in some cases.
In the end, it's about the implementation. Intel has the best foundries (best silicon). While optimizing x86 isn't easy, Intel has the money to throw lots of excellent engineers at the problem. In other words, a pig will fly if you provide enough thrust.
No it doesn't.
You want it to be.
However, as the market has shown, it doesn't have to be and it can be very successful without being 'open' as you define it.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't have some ideological battle against the man to fight, they just want their phone to work.
If it needed to be open with no lockin, then it would be or they'd lose money.
You guys really need to wake up and smell reality. Learn the difference between 'It needs' and 'I want' at the very least.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You'd rather run Win 3.11 than a modern Linux distro streamlined for a phone? You're either a huge MS fanboy or a troll.
In any case, MS has already killed and buried all the OSes you mention, so the choice is already made for you.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Keyboards can be bluetooth, they don't need to be built into the device. Most modern TVs have HDMI input. Add a power port next to that, and you can just drop your phone in a dock next to your TV and pick up a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse when you are at home, but then pick up the computer when you leave.
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Do you even have to ask after all the articles on slashdot? Nokia N900. (Not Ubuntu, but meets all your other criteria.)
My Sig: SEGV
I own a phone that will never be popular. It will never be the iphone killer that it could be given 6 more months of hardcore development and polish. The nokia n900 runs similar hardware, but improves on it in many places (slide out keyboard, comes with tv-out cable right out of the box, ctrl+shift+x brings up xterm, integrates skype which means that skype calls are just as easy as phone calls), however, it will never be as popular as the iphone because it is so damn open, is without a major carrier's blessing/store shelf space (who orders a phone online? well, besides This Guy!), and, really, is rather unpolished (needs 6 months of hardcore development and polish).
People don't want open, they want easy. They want to be able to walk into a cell phone store, say "ooh! That looks pretty!" and they want a sales associate to come up to them and say "Yes, not only is it pretty, but look at all these widgets and e-doodads you can install on it with the touch of a finger! They will be useful and enhance your life in ways you can barely imagine!" and then the customer will say "Please sir, but it looks so expensive!" to which the associate will reply "But not as such! Thanks to this sim lock-in, you can pay $2000 over the course of 2 years to save $400!" and the customer will end the conversation with a triumphant reply of "Please, kind sir, relieve me of my hard earned currency!"
The end.
I don't think you understand. It's the Debian *setup tool* that's alpha quality. What it installs is 100% Debian quality, with the full Debian repos available. After it's done, you use synaptic or apt-get. In fact, apt is how you install Maemo software too.
There are two major showstoppers left: some GUI programs don't get keyboard input, and PulseAudio doesn't work as it should. Once that's patched on the N900, I'm sure the installer will be in the main repo within weeks.
If you still insist on Ubuntu, you can probably replace the Debian image with an Ubuntu image you've made yourself without much trouble.
And I'm not trying to sell you anything. You complained about not getting what you want, and I'm trying to tell you about my experiences with the N900.
My Sig: SEGV
OK, I now want a version of vmware that runs on that phone Linux. I know that there is a desktop Linux version of vmware, but does it run on phone Linux?
VMWare is closed source and is only supported on the platforms that its developpers choose to (so you would be restricted to Linux running on one of those x86 monstrosities). On the other hand, there are plenty of open-source emulators which are only a recompile away to be run on whatever platform you choose. QEMU is an exemple of such an emulator. And DOSBox is an exemple of emulator which HAD ALREADY been ported to esoteric platform, just to enable access to old games while on the move.
Now, just why would you need a full blown emulator in a smart phone ? Given the input/output and battery life limitation, VMWare on a smart phone sounds like a pointless overkill. Are you trying to play WoW on your phone ?!?
Also, OS is not a tape recorder - you can still use it the same as before even if blank tapes are no longer made.
On the contrary. Closed source OSes are much more quickly deprecated than anything else once the developers drop support : The reason being : DRIVERS. You could, in theory run Win 3.11 on a smartphone x86 compatible processor. In practice, the rest of the hardware will hardly ever look like anything remote to a PC. You just won't be able to use anything else : keypad, screen, GSM/UTMS chip, etc. Everything is hardware which came years after the latest Windows 3x and there's no way at all that a drivers was written back then that could be still useful today.
You would need not only a x86 compatible chip, but also dozens of other legacy devices (the keypad had to be communicating through PS/2 with the system, the GSM/UTMS chip should communicate serially over what is exactly an old era UART COM port, for the screen you would need something which behave exactly as a legagy VGA, etc.)
That's why open OS are much better in the longterm and are getting so popular in the embed world (pretty much all of modem/routers, multimedia players/disk enclosures, home NAS, etc.. seem to be running some variation of Linux+Busybox) : because their are much more customisable.
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An x86 chip has weird instructions for things like string manipulation that no compiler will ever emit, but which have to be supported by the decoder just in case.
Sorry, that's just wrong. Lots of compilers will emit those instructions, especially when optimizing for size or when the string is known to be small or unaligned. Both gcc and Visual Studio will do it. The string instructions perform very well for small strings, and decently for large strings.
Even if compilers wouldn't emit those instructions, they are sometimes used in C library assembly.
ARM instructions are incredibly dense. Most of them can be predicated on one or more condition registers, which means that you often don't need conditional branches for if statements in high-level languages.
In the real world, compilers almost never do this. (way too difficult) When they do, it's almost never anything more complicated than a conditional move. You can get conditional move on x86 now.
More importantly, there are things like Thumb and Thumb-2, which are 16-bit instruction sets suitable for a lot of ARM code, but which get very good cache density. Unlike x86, these are separate instruction sets.
That tosses out your beloved conditional execution and so much more. Thumb code is nasty shit, full of jumps and PC-relative constant loads. It makes x86 look almost... beautiful. :-/