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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."
The x86 CISC instruction set is so convoluted and ancient that x86 CPUs spend a lot of die area (and power) dealing with it and the weird ways that extensions have been tacked over time. The fact that it's old also means the CPU requires tons of logic because the instruction set was designed for simpler, less well performing CPUs. Newer techniques to speed things up usually work best with software support, while x86 CPUs have to implement these older techniques and then add a compatibility layer to make them work seamlessly with the old instruction set and old OSes that know nothing about them.
One large difference between ARM and x86 that people rarely realize is that ARM only (usually) guarantees compatibility at the application (usermode) level, while x86 has to maintain compatibility down to the OS (kernelmode) level. ARM is free to update their architecture, add features required for modern performance, and require that the OS deal with them. This is hardly an issue because OSes adapt fast these days and the ARM market has no dependency on ancient OSes. x86 still has to deal with the fact that some nutjob might want to run Windows 3.11. Even when x86 does implement newer stuff, like the SYSCALL and SYSRET instructions that aim to replace the ancient and slow software interrupt system call mechanism, OSes are slow to adapt and the CPU still has to carry around the logic for the old crap. Forever.
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.