AMD Joins Intel's MeeGo OS Effort

angry tapir writes "In an effort to expand software compatibility for its upcoming Fusion chips, AMD has joined rival Intel's efforts to develop the open-source MeeGo OS. AMD 'will provide engineering expertise intended to help establish the technical foundations for next-generation mobile platforms and embedded devices,' the company said in a blog post on its website."

Comments

I was completely with you until the end...

[rsborg]

3. In 2 years when the 'tablet computing' fad has largely blown off, Intel and AMD will realize that its just not that important to keep pushing down their marginal revenues until its just not worth the investment to keep with it.

I just don't agree that 'tablet computing' is a fad. Bill Gates was definitely correct that this form factor held lots of promise but Microsoft just could not untether themselves from the Windows gravy-train and thus constantly missed the mark with their tablet OS (not to mention pricing put it well out of the general consumer market). Intel got lucky in an emergency conspiracy with Microsoft to kill the netbook market but the tablet market is out of their control (with upcoming wave: Google/Android, HP/Palm, and RIM/BlackberryOS will put a permanent dent in PC sales). I bet both Intel and AMD are pretty disappointed in Microsoft's lack of real competitive OS here and have no "in" with the tablet players of today.

Are you sh*tting me?

[Qubit]

*puts on anti-Nokia troll hat*

I don't know about hats, but it sure sounds like you're trolling!

What's stopping Google from using code in the MeeGo base?

MeeGo uses a (somewhat) stock kernel, I believe. Android puts in all kinds of special sauce not in mainline like wake-locks.

Drivers written for Android aren't necessarily going to just work in MeeGo, unless you add all that additional stuff (cruft?) to the kernel, etc...

Like most popular distros, MeeGo uses the standard GNU userland; Android uses their own, non-GPL userland.

we'll probably see a lot of cross contamination between Android and MeeGo kernel code.

Sure, anything that's from upstream.

(I suspect that since Android's source is completely open, there would be no...

Android, like MeeGo is largely open. But there are certain things that are not released under a FOSS license (e.g. some drivers, particularly power-related and graphics-related drivers).

On Android, I believe that all of Google's core applications are completely closed-source. What's more, it's non-trivial to set up the phone to sync with non-Google servers.

Nokia would steal Google's UI code and Dalvik

I don't think that Android's UI is particularly better or worse than MeeGo's.

And Dalvik? That's like asking the MeeGo folks to go stick their hand in a beehive filled with thousands of tiny little Larry Ellisons with stingers. Surely, you must be joking!

Google would steal their best threading, i/o, and whatever other code is probably superior in MeeGo that isn't probably going to wind up in the base kernel trunk

Part of the whole point with MeeGo is to try to get as much stuff pushed up into upstream projects as is possible. If there's some good threading or i/o improvements to be made to the kernel, it seems reasonable that the MeeGo kernel devs will work hard to get it into mainline. From my perspective, Android has an "after the fact" attitude towards kernel development, whereas MeeGo has more of a "let's cooperate with upstream" attitude.

I don't know if ARM is working directly on the Linux kernel/Android or not

Sure. One of the projects they sponsor is Linaro. Linaro is a projects tasked with making it easier to deploy Linux-based systems on top of ARM: http://www.linaro.org/