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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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.