Slashdot Mirror
Intel Porting Android To x86 For Netbooks and Tablets
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.
1.6 has been ported by the community for some time now.
http://www.android-x86.org/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
"Eeep!" - Microsoft
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
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.
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.
So where would this leave Chrome OS theoretically?
... 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
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
How many USB ports did your old MacBook have?
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...
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.
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.
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.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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.