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Intel Porting Android To x86 For Netbooks and Tablets

Posted by timothy on from the which-dessert-will-you-have? dept.

According to Liliputing, Intel is bringing the sweet eye candy of Android to x86, which — if all goes well — means it will land on (more) netbooks and tablets soon. I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life, but the more the merrier, when it comes to breaking up the tight circle of OSes available for any given arbitrary class of computing devices. Given all the OS swings that the OLPC project has gone through, maybe it should be thinking of Android, too.

163 comments

  1. if you want to put it on your machine now by yincrash · · Score: 5, Informative

    1.6 has been ported by the community for some time now.
    http://www.android-x86.org/

    1. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by yincrash · · Score: 4, Informative

      oh, and i guess it isn't mentioned in the summary, but the port that intel is working on is for 2.2. (but it is mentioned in the article, as well as android-x86)

    2. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 0

      I tried Android-x86, but its hardware compatibility seems to be rather dismal. My netbook booted into 800x600, and I didn't have wireless connectivity at all.

      Hopefully Intel will do better.

    3. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I'd be willing to bet that most Android phones still won't be running v2.2 (or newer) by the time Intel gets around to release.

    4. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by bonch · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So what happened to Chrome OS?

    5. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Informative

      Probably not, but I hope they will at least write drivers for their own wireless cards that are in use in existing netbooks (mine has WiFi from Intel).

    6. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Insightful

      By the way, as far as WiFi goes, Android is just Linux, so far as I can see. At least I've spotted /etc/wpa_supplicant there. So it should just use normal Linux wireless drivers, no? And same for other stuff, except for video?

    7. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I say this an extremely avid Android and Linux user. Putting Android on a mouse/keyboard device makes about as much sense as putting Windows 7 on a tablet. Probably even less as although 99.999 percent of the Windows ecosystem will never work well on a tablet, at least win7 can be made to work well enough. Android and all of its 50000+ apps are designed with a capacitive touch screen and a finger in mind. Google gets this. That's why there are no official Google ports of Android to netbooks. Where is everybody else's malfunction coming from?

    8. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by yeshuawatso · · Score: 1

      So all those new netbooks with touch screens and optional keyboard/mouse setup will be left with no OS at all by your logic!

    9. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      A quick look at the repos should give you your answer; vaporware going nowhere. I think Chrome OS was a bluff, there is certainly no chance of a usable product coming out of it

    10. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      So all those new netbooks with touch screens and optional keyboard/mouse setup will be left with no OS at all by your logic!

      Where do I go to buy one of these? What you're describing sounds like one of those convertible laptops with the screen that flips around. They have almost always came with resistive screens and Windows and have been a decidedly niche product. Now, if you're talking about something with a capacitive multi-touch capable screen with some kind of detachable keyboard, I'd have to think about it. Though, off hand, it sounds like a job for Meego since it's more of a traditional Linux so older applications that are designed for a keyboard and mouse would work great as well as the new Meego only applications that would be good for touchscreen mode.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    11. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Em+Ellel · · Score: 1

      I say this an extremely avid Android and Linux user. Putting
      Android on a mouse/keyboard device makes about as much sense
      as putting Windows 7 on a tablet. Probably even less as although
      99.999 percent of the Windows ecosystem will never work well on
      a tablet, at least win7 can be made to work well enough. Android
      and all of its 50000+ apps are designed with a capacitive touch screen and a finger in mind. Google gets this. That's why there are no official
      Google ports of Android to netbooks. Where is everybody else's
      malfunction coming from?

      The funny thing though is that a basic touchscreen film for a netbook can be had for $20-$40 retail - sure it won't do multitouch, but most apps don't actually need that...

      --
      RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
    12. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by sznupi · · Score: 1

      Lenovo has such product recently.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
    13. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by yeshuawatso · · Score: 1

      If you're interested:

      http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5586709&SRCCODE=GOOGLEBASE&cm_mmc_o=VRqCjC7BBTkwCjCECjCE

    14. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      IdeaPad U1 and Skylight. Yeah, they were demoing it, then it got "cancelled" then the CEO was all like, no it's just delayed... and so on. I'll believe it when I can lay hands on it.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    15. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only basic chipset support is needed you insensitive, and obviously a luddite clod.

    16. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      That is interesting. The next time I'm in Chicago (where TD is located), I'll drop in and check it out.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    17. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do they have mouse support yet?

    18. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by lennier1 · · Score: 1

      HAve to agree.

      Chrome OS was a nice publicity gag but Android simply has more to offer and combined with the know-how from the Chrome browser it should make for a nice solution where a fully grown Linux distro would be too much for the hardware.

    19. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by English+French+Man · · Score: 1

      So... Chrome OS will be Android with a full Chrome browser? How did it change from what was announced? A relatively minimal OS with a powerful browser was all Chrome OS advertising

      --
      If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.
    20. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      What do you mean "basic touchscreen film"? EEE 701 and Aspire D250 are both $60 or more on ebay, which is typically well below retail. Where do I get them for $40 retail?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    21. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Em+Ellel · · Score: 1

      Google "touch screen film usb"

      But even at $60 or $80, converting x86 netbook to touchscreen its far from impossible or even impractical

      --
      RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
    22. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      If memory serves he's a bit too fond of unicode for my tastes, but generally I'd say that yes, he does.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    23. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Until Google announces otherwise, I'd assume it is still being developed and will be released on schedule this Autumn.

      If you want to try an unofficial build of it you can get one here.

    24. Re:if you want to put it on your machine now by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      There's no reason why a properly designed OS can't handle more than one input method. I agree that taking a conventional desktop OS and adding multitouch as "a bag on the side" might well feel and act like a kludge. But going in the other direction shouldn't be an issue - if it's designed that way from the start. Graceful degradation plus flexibility in event mapping.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Good by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As a Mac "Fanboy" as some would say here, I'm glad this is happening. I think the more competition in OS's the better. Apple changed the whole smartphone landscape with the iPhone, and Google challenged Apple to step up their game with Android. No need to start a flame war. When tech companies compete, the consumer wins because of more choices in the market.

    --
    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    1. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      When tech companies compete, the consumer wins because of more choices in the market.

      And when tech companies do not compete, the consumer becomes a slave to lock-in and 'the share holders bottom line'

    2. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      flamebait ... really?

      Pointing out that a lack of competition is bad for consumers is .... flamebait .... wow

    3. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      +1 idiotic/redundant.

      What does stating the exact opposite of a post do to a conversation? Absolute waste of time.

    4. Re:Good by technomom · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What's really fun about the Apple-Android fight is watching Steve Ballmer all the way out there in left field yelling, "Hey! Wait! We have cool stuff too! HEY! LOOK AT MEEEEEEEE!!!!!! REMEMBER US? HEY!"

    5. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What, exactly, did Apple change? The amount of money thrown at marketing for mobile phones?

      Seriously: before the iPhone, how many phones had any advertising? Apple did not a thing significant with the iPhone; their marketing alone was contributory to its success.

      There were, and have been, better products than the original iPhone. Arguably, WinMo is a better product as it stands in the 6.5 implementation. Maemo, Qtopia, OPE etc. etc - all significantly more mature and featureful.

      Marketing, and push-based sales technology: that's all the iPhone is.

    6. Re:Good by cerberusss · · Score: 1

      At a recent speech, Steve Jobs quotes Nielsen US smartphone market share numbers. RIM 35%, iPhone 28%, Windows Mobile 19%, Android 9%.

      Now there are good and not-so-good market researchers, but Nielsen is considered pretty prestigious. And 19% market share for Windows Mobile is a lot bigger than 9%.

      --
      8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
    7. Re:Good by StripedCow · · Score: 1

      And when tech companies do not compete, the consumer becomes a slave to lock-in and 'the share holders bottom line'

      Of course, this does not hold for google.

      --
      If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
    8. Re:Good by Vintermann · · Score: 1

      Browsing traffic is a much better indicator. We've had "smart phones" with Windows CE and its descendants for ages.

      --
      xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
    9. Re:Good by TheLinuxSRC · · Score: 1

      While that might be a good indicator of the current market (I cannot find any good statistics), Android is currently the #2 selling smartphone OS - trailing only Rim BlackBerry and surpassing iPhone sales. Being that the handheld market is extremely volatile I would not be surprised if Windows CE (or whatever it is called this week) becomes irrelevent.

    10. Re:Good by tlampen · · Score: 1

      accept Steve Ballmer is not all the way out in left field. Microsoft is more like the owner of the teams in your baseball analogy. They still make more money than google and apple combined. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/

  3. Response to meego by CarpetShark · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I guess this is a reponse to Meego 1.0 coming out for netbooks as a free download. I don't think meego will amount to much, but if it creates enough competition to push android ahead, that'll be cool.

    Still... regarding Android on x86, I'd really prefer to see an ARM/OMAP-3 release, to run on N900s etc. There's a hack available now, but device drivers are still an issue.

    More importantly... what's the status of Marketplace on this "port"? Is marketplace now open for anyone to use if they install Android? If not, this port will be useless, except as a dev platform or an interesting proof of concept.

    1. Re:Response to meego by CarpetShark · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Oh, wow. I read this as Google is porting android. Intel porting android is a much more interesting bit of news. Either Intel is so big that they have multiple departments with the same goal, and completely contradictory strategies, or they've decided that Meego is crap already, and are abandoning it for Android.

    2. Re:Response to meego by Minwee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or perhaps Intel is a company with more than a dozen employees, and is able to do more than one thing at a time.

      It doesn't always have to be Dilbert-style "Battlin' Business Units", but there's no reason why the left hand can't work on something different than the right hand is.

    3. Re:Response to meego by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would you say that?

      Perhaps the goal, and always has since the beginning of Intel, is to sell more devices with Intel hardware, and they think Android on top of Meego will help get them to that goal? Perhaps they don't have ports for everything is because they don't QUITE have the manpower to pull that off.

    4. Re:Response to meego by poetmatt · · Score: 1

      yes - companies can do more than one thing at once - however, business units are always in contention with eachother.

      everyone's issues are the most prominent/most profitable/biggest money savers and thus should deserve immediate attention. that's how every business unit feels.

    5. Re:Response to meego by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh, wow. I read this as Google is porting android. Intel porting android is a much more interesting bit of news. Either Intel is so big that they have multiple departments with the same goal, and completely contradictory strategies, or they've decided that Meego is crap already, and are abandoning it for Android.

      Or, they've done what any sufficiently large organization does ... Don't leave money on the table. If you can collect from both piles, do it.

      Intel wants to increase the market for all of their products. They're not going to let a little ideology about which is better stand in the way of generating money. There's a lot of hoopla surrounding mobile computing, and they don't want to get left behind.

      Large companies frequently want to have it both ways. You 'or' isn't an 'xor' -- 'a or b' can actually be both.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    6. Re:Response to meego by Urkki · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Oh, wow. I read this as Google is porting android. Intel porting android is a much more interesting bit of news. Either Intel is so big that they have multiple departments with the same goal, and completely contradictory strategies, or they've decided that Meego is crap already, and are abandoning it for Android.

      Hmm, I think it's more like, Intel is "afraid" of ARM processors, and wants to be an alternative for a device, no matter the OS. I bet they'd be porting iPhone OS to Intel if it was open... Also it doesn't sound too good for Intel imago-wise, if they aren't an option for both Android and Meego, but ARM is.

      Also, Intel involvement with Android is quite different from their involvement with Meego, as far as I can see. So I don't think this tells anything about Intel-Meego, one way or another.

    7. Re:Response to meego by iperkins · · Score: 1

      Meego for netbooks may or may not go anywhere, but there is an alpha for Meego for tablets out and it looks pretty sweet: http://www.liliputing.com/2010/06/meego-linux-tablet-edition-demo-video.html

    8. Re:Response to meego by MojoRilla · · Score: 1

      The irony here is that Microsoft lets ideology stand in the way all the time (.Net only for Windows, OpenXML versus ODF, etc). Come to think of it, so does Sony (crippling hardware platforms due to their music business). And look at where that's gotten them.

    9. Re:Response to meego by Patch86 · · Score: 1

      Once you factor Google's ChromeOS in too, it starts to look even more incestuous.

      Of course not all that surprising from Intel's perspective. They make their money from x86 chips, not selling software; they don't care what OS you run, as long as it runs on their hardware. If that means splashing a little cash on porting all the popular OSs to their hardware, I'm sure it's probably worth it for them.

    10. Re:Response to meego by yeshuawatso · · Score: 1

      "...but there's no reason why the left hand can't work on something different than the right hand is..."

      Dude, what you and your computer do in your free-time is nobody's business.

    11. Re:Response to meego by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Umm.... a response? You know Meego is largely an Intel project, right, the merger of Intel's old moblin and Nokia's old Maemo? I guess they could be responding to themselves, but I'd see it more as bet-hedging.

    12. Re:Response to meego by ball-lightning · · Score: 1

      In the PC world, Intel doesn't care whether you are running OS X, Windows, or Linux. What makes you think they are going to care which smartphone OS you are running, either? Advanced operating systems are complements to high-powered CPUs. By helping introduce a bunch of advanced mobile operating systems (that are compatible with their product, as opposed to iOS), they increase demand for what they actually make money off of, the Atom CPU. Meego was never going to make them much money -- its only purpose is another platform to drive Atom sales. Also, the marketplace should work on this port just fine. If I understand correctly, Android uses a virtual machine for this exact purpose, they are never stuck on one hardware platform.

    13. Re:Response to meego by marcosdumay · · Score: 1

      Microft wants lock-in. .Net only for Windows makes every software not portable, OpenXML makes other programs not open Office documents, etc. Sonny is a bit more complex, they are composed of two companies with oposite interests. None of this is ideology, unless you fit greed on the definition of "ideology" (i think you should, but most people won't).

      --
      Rethinking email
    14. Re:Response to meego by EEPROMS · · Score: 1

      I have an Android phone and I have seen and played with the Apple iPAD. To be honest the concept of putting a mobile phone UI on a tablet although good in some respects I personally found the experience limiting. I think there will be tiers of touch UI with Android being used on sub 5" touch screen devices and the likes of Meego being used on +9" touch screen devices purely because the applications dynamics are visually different. It is a shame though that the Android and Meego application market space cant be done through a single service so you can load the same app on both devices (you can with android but not with a mixed android-meego setup).

    15. Re:Response to meego by fractalrock · · Score: 1

      You don't need the Market to install applications. An APK from any location can be installed.

    16. Re:Response to meego by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      Why would you say that?

      Because mobile phones are no longer just phones, or even just smartphones. They're becoming full-blown operating systems, which require long-term investment and long lifespans to be fully realised. As a result, people expect to see belief and commitment on the part of the companies pushing those operating systems. You can do that for one OS, but you can't hedge your bets and promote two completely different systems, like they're both the future you believe in and plan to create.

    17. Re:Response to meego by Deosyne · · Score: 1

      Damn straight. Intel is a company that has always served multiple niches. Just as some people prefer Symbian, iPhoneOS, and Windows Mobiles, others will choose from Android and Meego. Smart move on their part to leave the all-in on a single platform strategy to other companies.

    18. Re:Response to meego by Deosyne · · Score: 1

      Apple seems to be doing alright splitting their attention between Mac OS X and iPhone OS, although I did see gripes from some of their customers after their last developer conference regarding Mac OS X being treated as an afterthought. Yet the next Mac or i will likely still presell hundred of thousands of units sight-unseen.

    19. Re:Response to meego by sznupi · · Score: 1

      Sony hardware meant for music playback is pretty much as open as they get (nvm Ogg/etc. stuff, that's a niche). One other part of Sony would only like to change that, it seems.

      Generally they are one of the best examples of how such companies are far from monolithic. Some divisions and their products are great; some...meh.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
    20. Re:Response to meego by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      That's because OS X and iPhone have different markets. Note, however, that they're fundamentally the same OS underneath, allowing Apple to push similar development skills, and to combine the two as soon as devices fully converge.

  4. Meego? by Spykk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I personally prefer the direction Intel was going with Moblin/Meego to Android. I wonder if this means Intel is going to leave Meego development up to Nokia?

    1. Re:Meego? by Urkki · · Score: 1

      I personally prefer the direction Intel was going with Moblin/Meego to Android. I wonder if this means Intel is going to leave Meego development up to Nokia?

      Unlikely.

      However, I wonder when there'll be first Android VM for Meego... Obviously with Android App Store support, or wouldn't be all that useful. Shouldn't be too hard, now should it?

    2. Re:Meego? by BRSloth · · Score: 1

      I was wondering the same thing ("MeeGo is now on Nokia's hands")

      Well, one thing, this could be Intel cheating Nokia after Nokia cheated Intel porting MeeGo to ARM processors (or so it seems, from what I read somewhere.)

    3. Re:Meego? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Well, one thing, this could be Intel cheating Nokia after Nokia cheated Intel porting MeeGo to ARM processors (or so it seems, from what I read somewhere.)

      Cheated? Somebody expected them to abandon their nxx0 users and hardware on Maemo?

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    4. Re:Meego? by sznupi · · Score: 1

      "Cheated"? MeeGo/Maemo is available on ARM since inception, Intel knew perfectly well what they're getting into.

      And anyway, Symbian is the powerhouse on which Nokia will ride for a long time; MeeGo is a quite periphery project / expect experimentation and some shifts in direction.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
    5. Re:Meego? by wick3t · · Score: 1

      I personally prefer the direction Intel was going with Moblin/Meego to Android. I wonder if this means Intel is going to leave Meego development up to Nokia?

      I suspect both MeeGo and Android x86 are just part of Intel's plan to drive the Atom market. At the end of the day, they probably don't really care what OS is running on it.

  5. Cant wait... by morphotomy · · Score: 1

    Till we have x86 pocket computers on par with the droid or the iphone, hopefully they wont be as locked down however...

    1. Re:Cant wait... by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you're going to switch to a new OS, which doesn't run any of your existing apps anyway, why care about what processor its using?

      ARM is far more power for the battery usage, using x86 without some paradigm shift would be taking a step backwards.

      Just go buy a Droid or an iPhone rather than wait for some bad version of the existing technology to come around.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    2. Re:Cant wait... by jedidiah · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      ...except the beauty of source code and an easily adaptable tool chain means that your existing apps won't stay away for long.

      A platform where the end users and developers are free to do what they want with it is very handy this way.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    3. Re:Cant wait... by sznupi · · Score: 1

      If it will be only "on par", what difference does the x86 make? (well, besides waiting for huge improvements in battery technology and process shrinkage to have the same level of experience, of course)

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
    4. Re:Cant wait... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ARM is far more power for the battery usage,

      This is simply untrue. At low power, Moorestown is at least competitive in terms of power/performance, probably still somewhat behind. But Moorestown offers _far_ more performance at the high end than current production ARM chips, meaning it can do things ARM can't. Things get very interesting with Medfield.

    5. Re:Cant wait... by pslam · · Score: 1

      No, it is true. At idle it's in the same ballpark as ARM SoCs. At peak performance, it's faster, but it's (not exaggerating) an order of magnitude worse performance/power. That means at every point on the graph above idle, Moorestown is worse performance/power than ARM - the only thing in its favor is its graph carries on to the right a bit further. The problem is nobody needs that section to the right of where ARM stops.

    6. Re:Cant wait... by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      Jepp I do not know where Intel wants to go with this, ARM is in the Embedded world where Intel is in the Desktop world and so far their only argument, it runs windows (the other one is we have the worst processor instruction set ever designed in human history) does not hold a candle in the embedded world.
      The issue I see is, unless Intel drops their instruction set entirely and they cannot beat Arm in the Performance/Watt game.

  6. Great news by thoughtsatthemoment · · Score: 0

    ... and I hope the goal is not just netbooks or tablets. It has the potential to replace XP on the desktop as well.

    1. Re:Great news by InsaneProcessor · · Score: 1

      The mention of arm tablets in the same arena makes me want to puke!. Arm cannot do enough to be a real computer, only a pocket toy. I want to see more X86 tablets and Atom isn't good enough either. AMD or Via has a good enough x86 for this though. I actually would prefer the Via Nano if they ever get a bit more horsepower in it.

      --

      Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
    2. Re:Great news by RocketRabbit · · Score: 1

      Actually I think you have is ass backwards.

      The tablet computer is designed to be carried around, and have long battery life. It is not designed for serious computational work. The proper way of doing stuff these days, is to have a big ass computer at home which can do your real work, and the tablet as a sort of mobile interface to its power when that kind of owe is necessary.

      Most of the time it won't be because you don't need that kind of power just to browse the web.

    3. Re:Great news by ducomputergeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Really? Because I'm using an iPad right now in the form of a computer because it replaced my MacBook Pro. It seems to have plenty of horsepower to run browsers, iWork, and Skype. Which is pretty much what I ran on my old laptop and that is what most people using desktops are doing. Seems to be powerful enough to do what I, and most people not on Slashdot, need.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    4. Re:Great news by PBoyUK · · Score: 1

      The absurd part is the 'seems to be powerful enough', and 'browsers, iWork and Skype'. You're defending the iPad on the basis of it being "good enough" when for half the price it costs, you could get a low end laptop/high end netbook with no need for qualifiers like that. And rather crucially, this would be a platform that could expand easily to meet future unseen needs you may have, unlike the iPad, from which you must get a permission slip from Hallmonitor Jobs.

    5. Re:Great news by BobMcD · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How many USB ports did your old MacBook have?

    6. Re:Great news by InsaneProcessor · · Score: 1

      How many usb ports does your Ipad have and, for that matter, how much SD memory can you plug in. For much less money, I have a netbook that does so much more. No permission needed to install what I want. I really want a tablet in the same (or a little higher) price range that do the same thing.

      --

      Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
    7. Re:Great news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Arm cannot do enough to be a real computer, only a pocket toy.

      1980s IBM called, they want their FUD back.

      Since ARM got started in real computers which kicked your beloved x86es arses (at launch they were only matched by the 386-16, which cost over twice as much, and only got faster from there), you can STFU and GTFO my lawn.

      x86 won not on its own merits, but because the IBM PC-compatible platform won -- and that happened (against technical merits) because PCs became commoditized while all the competition were more-or-less single-vendor. The success of x86, in fact, stands in direct contradiction to your underlying assumptions -- if that hack on a kludge on a mother-loving pile of cruft is good enough, in practice, for real computing, then anything is!

    8. Re:Great news by cerberusss · · Score: 1

      I think not many people realize that an iPad is tethered to some sort of PC/laptop which runs iTunes. It looks like it will replace the desktop/laptop for a lot of things. But since you have to sync it for music, movies and updates, it becomes an additional expense -- BESIDES the desktop/laptop. Not only an expense, but it's an additional desktop/laptop to maintain as well. Maintenance costs time.

      Apple wants to have your money. And you're going to pay it.

      --
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  7. "Sweet eye candy" by qoncept · · Score: 0, Troll

    sweet eye candy of Android to x86

    Really? Some of the themes for rooted Android phones are a step up and the UI is effective, but Android's default look is hardly "sweet eye candy." I submit that new even Blackberries have a "prettier" UI than Android.

    --
    Whale
    1. Re:"Sweet eye candy" by c0d3g33k · · Score: 1

      No kidding. OP needs to dial down the fanboi-ism a bit. I like android quite a bit, but it's not due to "sweet eye candy" of which there is precious little present by default. Android is notable foremost because it works nicely for certain use cases (small form factor touch screens, small focused micro applications) not because it looks pretty.

    2. Re:"Sweet eye candy" by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 1

      Seriously. The whole reason I bought an incredible was because I felt the default UI of android devices was so ugly. It's worth a big delay in updates just to move a bit beyond that.

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
    3. Re:"Sweet eye candy" by H0p313ss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      sweet eye candy of Android to x86

      Really?

      Pointing out to delusional people that they are delusional is rarely productive.

      --
      XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
    4. Re:"Sweet eye candy" by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all but as an owner of a Motorola Droid that switches back and forth from Eris to Froyo, I have to say I think the interface looks very nice. I love the Droid Sans fonts, they're very easy to read from a distance. I like the style of the widgets. The buttons, toggles, radio buttons, menus, etc. are all attractive. The gradients are dialed in very well. They aren't too much like you see in some themes and they aren't too overly subtle either. The default colors look good. Not over saturated like you get elsewhere. I'm really curious. I mean, what is it exactly that you are wanting here?

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  8. What power advantage? by dgatwood · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In terms of performance per Watt, the Core i7 family beats ARM significantly, last I checked. In terms of idle performance, the ARM tears it up, of course, coming in at a quarter watt versus about ten times that for the Core 2 Duo. The Atom, in turn, slaughters comparable ARM CPUs in idle power, with comparable performance-per-watt, but has lower total performance-per-clock, IIRC.

    What does this tell us? Maximizing battery performance of a device depends on expected load. For a device that's idle most of the time (e.g. a phone), go with Atom if you don't need faster total performance, otherwise go with ARM. For a device that's expected to be doing work much of the time (e.g. a laptop), go with a C2D or something. Not only do you get better performance per watt, you also get better total performance, better compatibility (e.g. Wine instead of a full emulator stack) with existing computer-based applications, etc. I can't imagine an i7 in my phone. I similarly can't imagine an ARM in my laptop any time in the near future.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    1. Re:What power advantage? by ducomputergeek · · Score: 1

      I can image an ARM in a "laptop". Because I'm using one right now in my iPad, which replaced the laptop I used to carry around. I looked at the number of times I actually need a full computer and it's not often anymore. I've gone from being a Geek to a more "typical" user. So far I have great battery life and plenty of power for email, skype, iWork, and websurfing. And with docking stations at home and the office I have a full keyboard when I have to write longer email messages or type up a proposal in iWork.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    2. Re:What power advantage? by woolpert · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What does this tell us? It tells us you need to compare apples to oranges.
      Compare a ARM SoC to a x86 processor and all its support chips.

    3. Re:What power advantage? by dfghjk · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Just because you don't need a "full computer" often doesn't mean the lame excuse for one you've substituted is a "laptop". I have an ARM processor in my phone but that doesn't mean ARM is suitable for a laptop either.

      I expect my laptop to run my laptop software. ARM doesn't do any of that.

    4. Re:What power advantage? by Rising+Ape · · Score: 3, Informative

      You are aware that ARM *started* as a computer CPU, and a desktop one at that (Acorn Archimedes)? People were doing very serious work on machines with much less power than an ARM mobile processor not so long ago.

    5. Re:What power advantage? by rolfwind · · Score: 1

      ARM has been in laptops previously:
      http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm (btw, this came out last year)

      Seems to work fine:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snlp1yTmeyM&feature=related

    6. Re:What power advantage? by jareth-0205 · · Score: 1

      For a device that's idle most of the time (e.g. a phone), go with Atom

      Utter rubbish. ARM idle power consumption is measured in microwatts, and has always been leagues more efficient of anything that an x86 core can do. If Atom is so good, why aren't there any phones based on Atom?

    7. Re:What power advantage? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Depends on which ARM chip you're talking about. The Cortex A8, if my numbers are right, idles at about a quarter watt. The Atom idle consumption is about 0.01W, more than an order of magnitude lower. Maybe my numbers are wrong---the manufacturers really try their hardest to avoid giving numbers that are in any way comparable across product lines....

      As for why there aren't any phones based on Atom, I'm guessing that's more inertia than anything else. Why bother to port your OS and apps to a different CPU family?

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    8. Re:What power advantage? by Locutus · · Score: 1

      are you saying that ARM chips can't run an office suit or a full web browser? If so, you might want to try a Beagleboard or one of those Nvidia dual core Tegra boards to see something pretty amazing. But, if you saying that the vendor of those applications you are using does not or can not provide those running on an ARM chip then you are suck with the hardware that vendor supports. Some products provide choice, others not so much and you must accept the limitations of your choices.

      LoB

      --
      "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
    9. Re:What power advantage? by pslam · · Score: 1

      I'm afraid your numbers are off by orders of magnitude. A raw Cortex A8 core idles in microwatts, not even in milliwatts. The SoC itself will be idling - with keepalive of radios etc - somewhere more realistically on average 10-50mW depending on the device. The figures Intel give are drawn up by weasels: the power consumption of 25mW they state for a system playing MP3s is with the Intel core basically switched off and the IO processor doing all the work (which is, and I'm sure this is too ironic to be true, rumored to be an ARM).

      I'm sure you can get an Atom based handset idling at roughly the same power cost as an ARM based one. That just means they've got their silicon process finally optimized for power, not performance, and Intel has a huge advantage in general when it comes to this stuff. But that's not where all the interesting stuff is. It's the realm somewhere-between-idle-and-peak where all the efficiency counts: browsing a web page, flipping through contacts, playing a game, watching a video. That's where efficiency really counts, and Atom will struggle. Again, Intel has very carefully provided "number of hours of playback" for some figures and "watts" for others, but never "battery size". So they've made very sure you can't connect the dots and get a power figure for any of those tasks.

      Guess we'll have to wait and see, but I'm not holding my breath. Even the most optimistic interpretation says they're competitive with handsets... from about 5 years ago.

    10. Re:What power advantage? by jareth-0205 · · Score: 1

      The Cortex A8, if my numbers are right, idles at about a quarter watt

      I don't think that can be right, the numbers don't add up.

      My HTC Desire has a 1400mAh 3.7v battery in it, which means there's 5.18Wh in a perfect battery. Even if we assumed that the only power consumption is the battery (ignoring the radio or other electronics), the maximum possible battery life wouldn't even get you though a day.

      5.18 / 0.25 = 20.72 hours

      Admittedly the phone has a Snapdragon which is only 'similar' to a Cortex, but the maths is suggesting that 0.25W must be out by an order of magnitude.

    11. Re:What power advantage? by CAIMLAS · · Score: 1

      But what about an Atom SoC with integrated controllers (ie no support chips - at least none you'd not find on an ARM device) like the newest Atom offerings? You know, the Mooreland that doesn't have a PCI bus and competes favorably (middle of the field) against all the current smartphones with comparable specs (Apple's iPad and iPhone; Snapdragon, etc.)

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    12. Re:What power advantage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The quarter watt figure probably comes from the Moorestown Intel material. That is, however, idle consumption of a smartphone WITH radio modules enabled, NOT just CPU (aka apples vs oranges). A cortex A8 when idling is in the range of nanowatts (adds up to a few mW when you count in the whole SoC but or ARMs that includes RAM, etc - again, something conveniently forgotten in Intel docs).

    13. Re:What power advantage? by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      5.18 / 0.25 = 20.72 hours

      You're on the right track there but it isn't quite that cut and dry. A 5 Whr battery, yes, will run a 5 watt load for an hour. Thing is, it will actually run a 2.5 watt load for a bit more than 2 hours and so on. As the wattage gets lower and lower, it will run for more and more than you would expect just from the Whr rating itself. It gets pretty significant the lower and lower the draw is and .25 watt is pretty low. Unfortunately, I don't have exact numbers but a few years ago, I was doing a lot of studying into it when I was running an inverter in my motor home and trying to figure out which marine battery to get.

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      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    14. Re:What power advantage? by Vintermann · · Score: 1

      The Acorn Archimedes? The fricking Acorn Archimedes? No, I did not know that. That is awesome, now I have a reason for rooting for them!

      --
      xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
    15. Re:What power advantage? by woolpert · · Score: 1

      The fact that amp-hour ratings are only valid for the specific amperage specified is true - but be careful extrapolating your experience with lead-acid deep-cycle batteries to LiPoly ones.

      There is a (relatively) huge difference in amp-hour capacity of a lead-acid battery at 1/2 amp and the same battery at 4 amps of draw. This is due to the internal resistance of the battery, though, and as such affects the much lower internal resistance lithium chemistry batteries less than lead-acid ones.

    16. Re:What power advantage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The real advantage of ARM is that it does not run Windows.

    17. Re:What power advantage? by Jorophose · · Score: 1

      What the hell?

      Are you only looking at the 4W Atom core? Should I remind you that you have to drag along an 8W+ chipset along with that, whose sole ability is to draw 2D graphics and maybe do light 3D if you don't look at it funny?

      Compare that to ARM cores like the Cortex-A9... Dual-core, 600MHz to 2GHz, 45nm, comes with a GPU core (they're usually meh to me, but apparently they're very good at cellphone resolutions), and a DSP that's worth a shit (1080p encode/decode at the same time, and sometimes they're reprogrammable).

      Yeah, I believe you when you say the i7 has great performance per watt... but that's to be expected. Atom and the Core 2s just suck on battery life compared to ARM. If they didn't, how do you explain the fact that we were talking like 2-3 hours of battery life for the HP Slate, and yet Notion Ink's Adam should get at least 10 hours (they claim 16, I'm not sure how exactly, if it's 1080p on the internal screen or via an output) and they're similar profiles. And the Adam can still do more!

  9. I must agree. by Rantastic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have been running Android 1.6 on an old eeepc 701 for quite a while now, thanks to the good folks over at android-x86.org. Android is quite well suited to a low power, small screen machine like the 701.

    Also, consider this: When running the android bowser, more and more sites default to a mobile version. I've found that the mobile versions of many sites are preferable to the full versions. I suspect this is at least partly to do with the mobile interface being streamlined.

    --
    Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
  10. MS Will Not Be Amused by MrTripps · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Eeep!" - Microsoft

    --
    "I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
    1. Re:MS Will Not Be Amused by BLToday · · Score: 1

      It's OK. MS has been seeing AMD on the side since the early 2000s. When Intel gained too much IA-64 weight, MS made Intel go on the x86-64 diet to fit into the dress made by AMD. Seems to me that both Intel and MS want the Wintel to be an open relationship. Somewhere in Redmond exist a build of the NT kernel with ARM support just like Apple kept the MacOS X on x86 for years before revealing it. My guess is that going forward, MS is going to really support AMD's vision of the GPU/CPU relationship. Admittedly, the Intel vision is pretty close to AMD's vision (CPU+GPU) vs the nvidia (GPU main, CPU support).

  11. Re:Best option for OLPC by RocketRabbit · · Score: 1

    Can I feed this troll mommy?

  12. I see as android as the toe in the door for.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    actual games on linux. I'd like to see plain jane linux distros with the ability to run android 'apps', from the android marketplace, for this reason.

    1. Re:I see as android as the toe in the door for.. by icebraining · · Score: 1

      Canonical demonstrated a prototype version of an execution environment for Ubuntu that lets it run Android apps, says an industry report. The environment acts like a simulator, and is based on the Xorg X Window environment, says the story.

      Ubuntu sponsor Canonical demonstrated the Android emulator at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, Spain, according to a Ryan Paul story in ArsTechnica. Based on the Xorg open source implementation of X Window, the execution environment functions like a simulator, enabling Android apps to run alongside conventional Linux applications, writes Paul.

      The simulator is said to be compiled against Ubuntu's libc instead of Android's custom libc, and runs on a standard Ubuntu kernel. Canonical plans to excise Android-specific components that are unnecessary in order to make the software run on Ubuntu, says the story.

      The developers are said to have fashioned a temporary workaround to bypass Android's "Binder" interprocess communication system, but the final version will instead depend upon a Binder-compatible patch to the Linux kernel that will be added to the next Ubuntu release. In addition, an interoperability "shim" is said to be under development "that will expose native platform services and hardware to the Android execution environment," says ArsTechnica. Open source code is expected to be released for the Android execution environment soon.

      http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7172257171.html

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
  13. Re:Best option for OLPC by jedidiah · · Score: 0, Troll

    The truth hurts. Doesn't it?

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  14. OLPC OS Swings? by PaintyThePirate · · Score: 1

    What OLPC OS swings? The ones being shipped today, like million plus that have been distributed over the last few years, still use Sugar on top of customized Fedora.

    --
    eclecti.cc
  15. Re:Best option for OLPC by RocketRabbit · · Score: 0, Troll

    In this context it is impossible to say, because Apple actually makes their own Free and open source OS, and gives it away to anybody who wants it.

    It'll be fun to see how ugly, slow, and choppy Android is on a bigger screen though. I was actually shocked to discover how awful it really is.

  16. OLPC/Android is coming by mswhippingboy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Given all the OS swings that the OLPC project has gone through, maybe they should be thinking of Android, too.

    Funny you should mention that. According to Negroponte, XO-3 will most likely use Adroid. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/one-laptop-per-child-android-meet-dr-negroponte/3976

    --
    Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  17. Give it a rest, please! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can we please stop the OLPC bashing? OLPC has never distributed anything other than Fedora Linux based laptops with the Sugar shell.

    Oh, and see this thread for a discussion about android on the XO: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-December/027049.html

  18. Chrome OS? by Grizzley9 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So where would this leave Chrome OS theoretically?

    1. Re:Chrome OS? by icebraining · · Score: 2, Informative

      Android for x86 -> x86 based tablets
      ChromeOS -> netbooks

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      Dilbert RSS feed
    2. Re:Chrome OS? by sznupi · · Score: 1

      Well... http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-factors/tablet

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
  19. And where.... by bmo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... Is Microsoft's tablet/small device OS?

    Yes, there are "tablet" versions of Windows ever since XP, but where is the small, lightweight, finger friendly OS for tablets?

    I brought this very fact up earlier in another post with regards to Microsoft's ability for growth here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1695766&cid=32667752

    Fine, we've got a computer on every desktop as Bill Gates dreamed, and Microsoft has 90 percent of the market, since the late 1990s. When this happened, the question to have been asked was "Now What?" Apparently nobody asked, not in 10 years, at least. They got soft. Complacent.

    Vaporware and demo products don't count. I had someone honestly tell me that KIN was not meant to be profitable, or even good. What? Is this what softies actually believe?

    Microsoft: Google is eating your lunch. Apple is eating your lunch. Every mobile device maker is eating your lunch.

    Oh well. That's like telling the same thing to IBM in 1980s when the clone makers started making "IBM Compatible" PCs. IBM didn't listen then, and Microsoft won't listen now. The King never listens when he's been told he's naked.

    --
    BMO

    1. Re:And where.... by Pollardito · · Score: 1

      I think MS is killing their ability to make a strong tablet platform by choosing to add tablet functionality as just an extension to the existing OS that already has a huge installed base of non-tablet devices. There's something to be said for making a new platform whose apps only run on tablets to prevent developers from seeing tablet users as just a niche of the existing market rather than its own market. If they see it as just a niche they are more likely to ignore it or to make apps that hit more squarely on the non-tablet part of the market "but are also not-completely-crappy on the tablet." If they see it as its own market they hopefully build apps from the groundup with a tablet interface in mind, and they're much better apps because of it.

      Of course there is a chicken-and-egg problem there where few developers will target a new platform unless the hardware is selling, and people won't want to buy the hardware until there is a good set of applications. That's a hump that the iPhone got over with non-stop hype, and the Palm Pre seemingly never got over.

    2. Re:And where.... by sznupi · · Score: 1

      MS put self-imposed limits on what they want to view as their market anyway. 90%, sure; but that means a little over 1 billion PCs. A far cry from what mobile market is accomplishing.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
  20. You missed it by symbolset · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Cloud-based touch-centric resource efficient virtual desktops running on x86 virtual machines, from any client running any architecture.

    What this means, literally, is that Intel has decided not to go down with the ship.

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  21. Android would be great.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As a firmware based OS for "instant on" functionalities..

    1. Re:Android would be great.. by c0d3g33k · · Score: 1

      I'd love to have that functionality in my android phone.

  22. But do apps work with x86? by rolfwind · · Score: 1

    But will current android apps with this port? In other words, are apps interpreted or binary?

    If they are binary, then google has to make sure developers make a universal binary, like apple did with their PPC->intel transistion.... or this effort will be DOA.

    1. Re:But do apps work with x86? by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

      But will current android apps with this port? In other words, are apps interpreted or binary?

      If they are binary, then google has to make sure developers make a universal binary, like apple did with their PPC->intel transistion.... or this effort will be DOA.

      Most apps should work. It's just Java, after all!

      The ones that need porting are things that have native code in them. In which case they need to be recompiled. Not sure if there exists a universal binary format for Android to support this though, but I'm assuming it's regular ELF at the lowlevel so there's a chance.

      There's also MIPS android as well - MIPS wants to get back into the phone game. Would be interesting to see a triple architecture binary...

    2. Re:But do apps work with x86? by Night64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you are talking about the type of App that you find in Android Market, those aren't neither binary nor interpreted per se. They run in Dalvik, a Java virtual machine made for hardware with constraints in terms of memory and processor speed (wikipedia). In plain english: yes, they will. No, there are no applications with native code in the Market. If you port kernel, middleware and key applications, every single app in Android Market that runs in Android 2.2 will run in x86.

      --
      Grey's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
    3. Re:But do apps work with x86? by mjwx · · Score: 1

      Most apps should work. It's just Java, after all!

      More accurately, its a Java Virtual Machine. So long as the hardware runs the VM, most applications should not have a problem.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    4. Re:But do apps work with x86? by Vintermann · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's not exactly that either. You enter Java - or at least, a language that has the Java syntax, not sure they can call it Java since it isn't J2ME or J2SE. What you get out to actually run on your phone isn't Java bytecode, but Dalvik bytecode.

      Dalvik bytecode is portable, too, so it shouldn't be a problem for most apps. But there is also the Native Development Kit, which almost no one talks about... I guess stuff written in that won't be portable.

      --
      xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
    5. Re:But do apps work with x86? by badkarmadayaccount · · Score: 1

      Unless they port android to LLVM, and the Open Group designates a ELF machine type for .llbc. There exists a LLVA port of Linux.

      --
      I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
  23. What planet are your figures from? by pslam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In terms of performance per Watt, the Core i7 family beats ARM significantly, last I checked. In terms of idle performance, the ARM tears it up, of course, coming in at a quarter watt versus about ten times that for the Core 2 Duo. The Atom, in turn, slaughters comparable ARM CPUs in idle power, with comparable performance-per-watt, but has lower total performance-per-clock, IIRC.

    Bizarro world, apparently. I just searched for the DMIPS/mW figures for a Core i7 and an ARM Cortex A8. Guess what, the first clue is that the Core i7 is listed in DMIPS/Watt. A Core i7 is about 1DMIPS/mW, while a Cortex A8 is about 16DMIPS/mW. The ARMs are an order of magnitude more efficient. I didn't really have to search - it's common knowledge in the industry and it's always funny seeing Slashdot articles and posts which haven't got this yet.

    The Atom is still nowhere near: about 2DMIPS/mW. Even that sucks for idle consumption compared to pretty much anything ARM even from 5 years ago. Most ARM SoCs made for a portable device idle - and we're talking total system with background processing here - somewhere between 5-50mW depending on whether you're talking about an MP3 player or a big tablet. The clue, as always, is that Intel stuff is talked about in Watts, not milliwatts.

    Basically the only thing Intel CPUs are better at is peak performance, and by a large margin. Not performance/watt. Not idling. Atom, when we're talking complete system, doesn't even have a peak performance advantage compared to Cortex-A9 based SoCs. And all that peak in an Core i7 goes to waste because you just don't need it for the target devices.

    1. Re:What planet are your figures from? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I was looking at performance-per-clock and thinking performance-per-watt. I retract that part of my comment. Idle performance, though, is better on Atom (if my numbers are right), assuming you ignore the rest of the chipset. (As you're no doubt aware, the Atom chipset power consumption is still embarrassingly high, but at least it has gone down from a couple of years ago by a large margin.)

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    2. Re:What planet are your figures from? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Partial BS. Moorestown has idle power numbers competitive with ARM.

    3. Re:What planet are your figures from? by pslam · · Score: 1

      Partial BS. Moorestown has idle power numbers competitive with ARM.

      It's partial BS from Intel too. They haven't released enough information to make anything from their figures. (See one of my other posts) They've very carefully not drawn enough dots to connect anything together - notably they omit the size of the battery they're talking about when they say how many hours they can do things. Easily missed by a journalist, but an obvious half truth in the eyes of an engineer.

      But even if they do (optimistically) end up with the same idle power consumption as ARM SoCs, that just means their baseline is the same. At every fraction of CPU usage above idle, they'll be worse than ARM. These devices spend an increasingly large fraction of their time actually doing stuff. That's where the DMIPS/mW comes in, and Intel just isn't there yet, by a very wide margin.

  24. How about no? by paxcoder · · Score: 1

    Android is (almost!) free and that's cool and all. But see, I don't really want to run such OS on a PC.
    Give me my standard library, and C. Then I can build whatever I need.

  25. ARM the Atom by fm6 · · Score: 1

    I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life...

    This advantage seems to have gone away, more or less. ARM chips use less power because they're RISC, which means fewer transistors. And guess what? Intel's low-power Atom is also RISC (the complex x86 instruction set is emulated using "micro-ops") and seems to do OK with power consumption. My own Atom-based Netbook can make a battery last all day.

    1. Re:ARM the Atom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It all depends on how short your days and how big your pockets are.

    2. Re:ARM the Atom by emt377 · · Score: 1

      Intel's low-power Atom is also RISC (the complex x86 instruction set is emulated using "micro-ops") and seems to do OK with power consumption.

      Dynamic translation of a CISC instruction flow onto a pipeline adds complexity. The other big difference is that x86 has a fully coherent N-way associative cache which neither ARM or MIPS provide - at quite a bit of complexity. Heck, ARM prior to Cortex didn't even support unaligned memory access, and I'm not sure if MIPS does in any of their recent designs. Complexity requires die real estate. A bigger die is more expensive, and with more gates involved in just about every instruction fetch, decode, pipeline step, and memory bus cycle power consumption is going to be higher. Without the need to execute legacy code there's no way Intel can make it work with an inferior product at lower margin. They're going to shovel a few hundred million into the furnace to test the waters, then decide they can't make it work and exit. Undoubtedly they expect to lose money on every unit sold, to spend their way to a dominant market position where they can manage costs and eke out a margin through sheer volume, similar to their desktop and server processor business. I doubt management will have the guts to take the hemorrhaging and stick it out; it's a company used to seeing more or less instant returns from its other business.

    3. Re:ARM the Atom by oakgrove · · Score: 2, Informative

      This advantage seems to have gone away, more or less.

      My own Atom-based Netbook can make a battery last all day.

      Check this out. Standby time 180 hours. And by standby time, they mean the screen is off. Not "standby" as it is normally meant on regular desktops and laptops whereas the whole thing is off. The advantage there is instant on, not 1 second on, not 2. Instant. And while the screen is off, it can still be doing something. Checking your email, updating your rss feeds, whatever it would normally be doing. Basically, it's a continuous run device like a cell phone. And it's silent. And it generates little to no heat without a cpu fan. It also weighs less than 2 pounds. Your netbook doesn't even remotely compare to this. What's the difference? ARM vs Atom. Atoms aren't even on the same planet when it comes to power efficiency as ARM. Give it 5 years and maybe you can make that claim.

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    4. Re:ARM the Atom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Utter bullshit. Each generation of atom has _markedly_ improved on the last. Moorestown is competitive with ARM, if still somewhat behind in practical implementations for smartphones. Medfield will be another integration leap forward as well as a shift to 32nm.

      Something I think your average plebe forgets is Intel's manufacturing power. Intel does not _ever_ lose money on a CPU or chipset they sell. Instead, people just don't understand how good Intel is at manufacturing silicon.

    5. Re:ARM the Atom by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 1

      Atoms aren't even on the same planet when it comes to power efficiency as ARM.

      Nonsense. This is no longer true. Don't get me wrong - ARM still has a sizable lead, but to claim they're "not even on the same planet" is simply untrue. You would see at least same neighborhood batter life out of a well made Moorestown Atom based netbook with the same capabilities running the same OS.

    6. Re:ARM the Atom by fm6 · · Score: 1

      I think you misunderstand what "standby time" means. It definitely does not mean the screen is off but the rest of the system is active — you don't save that much power just by switching off the backlight! It appears to be equivalent to Windows Hybrid Sleep, which also supports 1-second resumes. I don't use it myself, because Windows 7 can resume from plain hibernate mode (which uses no power at all) in 5 seconds, and draining the battery, even by such small amounts, is not worth saving 4 seconds.

      The comparison that really matters is, of course, how long you can use the thing without recharging. My netbook goes for 6 hours, this one claims 8. Possibly a 25% difference, though that doesn't allow for the usual manufacturer hype.

      Incidentally, my netbook is also a Toshiba, and it looks like this ARM netbook uses the same double-sized battery pack.

    7. Re:ARM the Atom by oakgrove · · Score: 1

      A BP oilspill sized barrel of e-ink has been spilled about how Moorestown will be an efficient alternative to ARM on mobile devices. Talk to me when I can buy a Moorestown smartbook that competes with the device I linked to in my previous post. Note the 180 hours of standby (screen off) time. I'm not hating on Intel here. On the contrary, I think Intel is great. They've supported Linux through thick and thin and that's important to me. But, I'm going to have to see some product to believe the Moorestown and Oaktrail claims.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    8. Re:ARM the Atom by oakgrove · · Score: 1
      I don't have the particular smartbook under discussion at my disposal to be absolutely 100 percent certain. However, I do have a Motorola Droid sitting right here. When it goes on "standby" that means I just clicked the button to switch the screen off and the CPU clocks itself down to 250 MHz from the 1.2 GHz I have it overclocked at. It is still running just clocked down. That is not the case when referring to an x86 system going into standby. In the latter case, the device may as well be off as it can't do anything at all. It's just keeping the memory contents hot, that's it. Using the word standby to refer to two completely different concepts is, admittedly, unfortunate. But, I've never seen the word standby on ARM mean the device actually goes into "standby" as it is meant in the Wintel world.

      My netbook goes for 6 hours, this one claims 8. Possibly a 25% difference, though that doesn't allow for the usual manufacturer hype.

      I really wish I had the real specs of this smartbook here but I'm going to go out on a limb and say, judging by it's weight that it, at most, has a 3 cell li-ion battery in it. You're netbook almost certainly has a 6 cell for that kind of life. I'd bet that if this smartbook had your 6 cell, it would get 18-20 hours of continuous running since although you'd be doubling the battery size, you'll get more than double the run time. I won't bother explaining why, I'll just take it on faith that you know.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
    9. Re:ARM the Atom by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      ATOM still sucks big time in performance/watt compared to a Cortex A8 or Cortex A9, heck the Cortex A9 is overall faster than any Atom offering.
      It will be interesting that we see by the end of the year beginning of next year phones that are faster than the Atom based Netbooks, both in graphics performance and processor performance.
      (Most of not all phones currently sold are Cortex A8 based)

    10. Re:ARM the Atom by sznupi · · Score: 1

      "Most of not all phones currently sold are Cortex A8 based"

      Far from it. Large part of smartphones, yes, but even there certainly not "most" - Symbian has close to half of sales, and they are all ARM11 (I guess this might change in a year at the earliest - Symbian^4 basically breaks binary compatibility anyway, and with Cortex A5 available...). I don't think Blackberries are very different; and that's already much more than half.

      But yeah, ARM has still a bright future. Heck, if one takes a closer look at the new "Atom for smartphones" - a) Intel shows only power usage numbers when the x86 is idling, and omits them from performance graphs b) if you look at diagram of the chipset (actually chipset, 5 chips IIRC), there are probably at least two ARM cores integrated there; doing boring stuff (signalling interface and some "southbridge" controller) and allowing at least some passable power usage.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
    11. Re:ARM the Atom by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Nowadays almost all chips perform way better (or way way better) than they need to for the application at hand. If an Atom chip and an ARM chip consume the same amount of power and are both performing well enough, it doesn't matter if the ARM chip gives you more cycles per watt — it just means that the ARM chip has more cycles to waste.

      ARM chips dominate cell phones for the same reason x86 chips dominate PCs: they grabbed a dominant market share early on. It says nothing about the superiority of one versus the other.

    12. Re:ARM the Atom by badkarmadayaccount · · Score: 1

      Does anybody know of a FOSS Tegra driver?

      --
      I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
    13. Re:ARM the Atom by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      It does not say anything about the superiority that ARM dominates but if you look at the raw numbers and general performance numbers also performance per watt numbers than you can see why no one really switches over from ARM to Intel in the non netbook space where Windows compatibility is a non issue.

      Arm simply has the better overall architecture. Atoms and generally also is cheaper.
      As soon as you count out the we need windows factor from any archtecture, Intel has lost the game with X86 everywhere. The architecture is garbage and the Risc core + interpreter on top of it just wastes cycles compared to a lean and clear instruction set ARM provides.
      Intel tries to cover that ground with shrinking die sizes, but now that ARM has got such a strong foothold, others with good fabs are interested to produce ARM with low die sizes as well, globalfoundries wants to produce ARM in 22nm so Intel has lost the game again.

    14. Re:ARM the Atom by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      Except that ARM is about 4 times as fast on CortexA9 than Moorestown is, also Moorestown numbers always are given in idle, go figure why. The platform simply is not competitive compared to the latest Cortex processor designs.

    15. Re:ARM the Atom by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      Moorestown is about 25% of the performance of CortexA9 (which is about twice as fast as a current Atom gen) and only competitive powerwise in idle mode. Hence Intel always just shows the idle numbers not the non idle ones.

    16. Re:ARM the Atom by fm6 · · Score: 1

      if you look at the raw numbers and general performance numbers also performance per watt numbers than you can see why no one really switches over from ARM to Intel in the non netbook space where Windows compatibility is a non issue.

      I think the absence of an x86 operating system suitable for phones (even Windows Mobile is RISC-only) might also be a factor. Obviously Intel thinks so.

      The architecture is garbage and the Risc core + interpreter on top of it just wastes cycles compared to a lean and clear instruction set ARM provides.

      Ooh, Deja Vu. I used to work at Sun, and one big reason that company no longer exists: too many people there couldn't get past their loathing for the x86 architecture.

      Hey, I hate it too. Probably more than most people, since back in the 80s, I tried to learn Windows programming and was partially stymied by all the weirdness of the segmented architecture back before it was hidden by 386 memory management. But I long ago learned to live with it. As they say in the military, quantity has a quality all its own, and you can't compete with the x86 architecture solely on the basis of technical superiority.

      And it's not just about Windows compatibility. The x86 systems I worked on at Sun (and that the SPARCophile salespeople refused to push) mostly ran Linux. You think Steve Jobs cares about Windows compatibility? No, he cares about keeping costs down, and using Intel-based chipsets allows him to do that.

      I used to assume that ARM would dominate the netbook market, for all the technical reasons you mention. When I decided to buy a netbook, I actually looked for an ARM one first. Couldn't find one worth the cost. Ended up with the aforementioned Atom netbook, and its battery life is everything promised for the ARM netbook. ARM may be theoretically better suited for low-power systems, but so far theory and practice are not the same.

    17. Re:ARM the Atom by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      The reason why Intel swept Suns floor was that x86 got competitive speedwise and then became faster and cheaper. Add to that the general Windows craze and Sun had a problem.
      The biggest problem Sun had in the recent years was that x86 servers were cheaper and faster than Suns offerings at the same price and with Linux, unix became a commodity. Sun recognized that too late. Low end Sparc was competitive until 2000 or so and guess what, what the critical turning point in Suns hardware business was...

      The current situation is quit different, x86 compatibility is more a hindrance than a must and currently ARM is sweeping Intels floor and will be for the forseeable future unless Intel drops its x86 instruction set. Windows compatibility is a non argument there.

      Entirely different situation. Sun simply was in a reality disortion field and never came out of it.
      ARM knows its job and definitely is not in one.

      Besides that dont forget ARM just licenses the core, it is the entire chipset which counts with multitudes of manufacturers. The processor core is not as important as the rest, the radio chipset for the phone communications and the gpu etc... and that from a load of vendors all. Intel has a serious problem to gain a serious ground there because for every Intel design there are probably 5 faster arm designs which are also cheaper.

    18. Re:ARM the Atom by fm6 · · Score: 1

      The reason why Intel swept Suns floor was that x86 got competitive speedwise and then became faster and cheaper.

      I absolutely agree. And so did top management at Sun, which why they spent billions trying to move into the x86 sphere. A move which failed, for reasons already covered in my previous post.

      And guess what? Atom is fast and cheap too. Technically inferior to ARM, but then it's technically inferior to SPARC too.

    19. Re:ARM the Atom by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      Yes but the question is is it good enough and cheaper, an arm core can be licensed for a few pennies, and then the third party vendors jump in and trim it to any area you like. Atom is just a measly processor subpar to ARM with more power consumption and Intel only adds an even lousier graphics core to the mix. Intel might be one day good enough, but for now they are not, but as I sad Suns approach to x86 was too late, and to half assed. They first brought out first x86 servers and then it seemed like they dropped them again after one model, they got relatively late seriously into the game, but too late for them, they had somewhat of a success but it did not help them out anymore. I remember there was one server line between 2000 and 2005 and in between the relatively successful Cobalt line was killed.
      And 2006 or so they became serious about x86 at a time when Dell and Co already swept the floor with x86 based servers. Nevertheless Suns x86 servers sold well, but did not save them anymore, the grave already was to deep and on the high end the constant delays of the next gen Sparc killed them in the end.

  26. Just swell... by rickb928 · · Score: 1

    More fragmentation. Just what we needed.

    Oh, wait. Fragmentation. The connotations are disturbing...

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  27. Re:Best option for OLPC by JohnBailey · · Score: 1

    In this context it is impossible to say, because Apple actually makes their own Free and open source OS, and gives it away to anybody who wants it.

    They do? Which one?

    It'll be fun to see how ugly, slow, and choppy Android is on a bigger screen though. I was actually shocked to discover how awful it really is.

    Ahh..So the SCREEN is what defines the speed of the device..

    Silly me.. All these years I've been upgrading processors and video cards.. I could have just got a smaller screen and had a faster computer..

    --
    It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
  28. Re:Best option for OLPC by RocketRabbit · · Score: 1

    "They do? Which one?"

    Its called Darwin and it has existed for years and years. It is a blend of FreeBSD and Mach, with quite a bit of other innovative stuff thrown in for good measure. I am surprised that you never heard about it.

    "Ahh..So the SCREEN is what defines the speed of the device..

    Silly me.. All these years I've been upgrading processors and video cards.. I could have just got a smaller screen and had a faster computer.."

    Not at all. I just think it will be funny to see people attempting to use Android as a replacement for a netbook.

  29. Re:Best option for OLPC by JohnBailey · · Score: 1

    Its called Darwin and it has existed for years and years. It is a blend of FreeBSD and Mach, with quite a bit of other innovative stuff thrown in for good measure. I am surprised that you never heard about it.

    In all honesty.. Never heard of it. I stand enlightened.

    Not at all. I just think it will be funny to see people attempting to use Android as a replacement for a netbook.

    Why? Is it really any stranger a concept than putting another phone OS on a netbook with no keyboard?

    There is not only no reason why a netbook can't have a touch screen, but it has already been done. So not limited to a tiny track pad or optical sensor of some kind for any physical reason.

    A phone OS if anything is a better fit for a small screen netbook than an OS more normally associated with and designed for a full sized computer. Windows on a small screen yuck. To be honest, anything under 1024X768.. Forget it. And chunky UI 7.. even worse. Same with a non modified Linux install, and then we have the problem of each manufacturer making their own half assed variation on a distro that may never be updated properly. Android on the other hand is designed for lower resolution screens and low powered processors, has a nice selection of applications, a good community going, and some pretty impressive capabilities.

    As an example.. There are some really nice Japanese models that would fit the bill quite nicely. Already in existence, so not some vapour ware thing that may never see the light of day.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCkVhuCC6tU

    Beats the iPad in pretty much every specification. More easily portable, more powerful, more connectivity out of the box, lighter, longer battery life.. Ticks all the boxes. About the only thing against it is the price. Make it about £200-250 and you have a sale.

    Add a light weight OS with a large number of low power applications, and you have a nice useful little gadget. If it uses an X86 processor, no ties to just Android for those of us who like to tinker.

    Personally.. If I could justify one of these, I'd buy it. Anything that gets much bigger than a DVD case however, becomes less casually portable, which is really the only sane reason for such a device.

    We will see what we will see, The whole thing may end up being a disaster. But I wouldn't bet against Android being quite successful on small form factor netbooks/enbiggened PDAs.

    --
    It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
  30. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is anybody still listening to him?

    He burned his reputation with all the people that could have made a success of the idea, now it is all frankly irrelevant, if any entity wants to have cheap internet enabled devices they don't need to look at the OLPC project at all, they can use from cheap netbook set up with a myriad of OSes (mostly Linux based) and it is not unlikely that having cheap mobile phones would be enough to give children a taste of how useful the Internet can be.

    Talk about oportunities missed.