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Honeycomb To Require Dual-Core Processor
adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products."
Honeycomb's big, yeah yeah yeah, it's not small, no no no?
Teach your kids: "C++ made baby Jesus cry."
How many cores will Total require? Probably just 1 right?
Well hold on here, isn't Honeycomb supposed to be a tablet OS? And since dual core mobile processors are on their way, is it unreasonable to make them a requirement?
I mean, you can restrict yourself to the capabilities of an ARM11 based processor from six years ago but then all of the performance and technological gains since then would be completely wasted. And if such a processor is your target, don't use an OS made for more capable devices.
Personally, I want an A9 based device running MeeGo. Something even more open than Android, and more familiar underneath.
So Google are going to leave their shiny new baby on gingerbread? Yeah... no.
And wasn't it an equally "reliable" source within an OEM that told us about minimum hardware requirements for Gingerbread? What ever happened with that again?
Oh yeah, it was total bull.
Why REQUIRE [a sufficiently fast CPU]?
So that people don't blame Google for the molasses performance of a bargain-basement Android device.
If an OS can to take advantage of dual processors it's a good thing.
If an OS needs a dual processor to function properly it's a bad thing.
No one (well, almost no one) seems to mind when a mobile OS requires a faster processor, but the number of cores is suddenly an issue. Wake up and smell the 21st century. The not-so-recent improvements in performance come from the number of cores and not the clock speed. And it looks like this is the way it's going to be for a while. Get used to it.
But is there a market for small handheld computers without cell phone capability? Google doesn't seem to think so, or it'd have licensed the Android Market application to Archos.
The source for this is a tablet maker claiming that its competitors' tablets won't be fast enough. So there's an obvious conflict of interest. And anyways, requiring a dual core processor doesn't make any sense; Google isn't stupid, they won't release something that's too slow for the majority of hardware already shipped.
This is already been discussed at length on androidcentral. The consensus is that this stupid rumor is false. It makes absolutely no sense to require any particular number of cores to run Android.
Who is writing this stuff and what is their motive???
Sorry, but you need to update your arguments.
Java is NOT slow and hasn't been for quite some time - that argument is so old it's not worth discussing anymore.
Most benchmarks put it ahead of other languages (with the exception of C and C++ to a lesser extent).
In terms of performance it's well ahead of Objective-C due to the overhead of it's dynamic dispatching (oh, and Objective-C 2 now has GC as well - it's about time).
http://www.javarants.com/2010/05/26/android-dalvik-vm-performance-is-a-threat-to-the-iphone/
The current crop of 1Ghz Android phones are every bit as fast and responsive as the iPhone4 (with it's 1Gz A4 CPU - essentially a custom Cortex-A8) so your fanbois argument just doesn't pass the smell test. Rumors are that the iPad2 and iPhone5 will ship with dual-code A4 cpus (based on the Cortex-A9), so if iOS and Objective-C are so much more efficient why does it need dual-core? It's needs it to compete against the flood of dual-core devices that will be coming in 2011 and it will need the horsepower to stave off the attack from Android which IMHO, has already surpased the iPhone in terms of features as well as usability (and I'm an iPhone user - for now).
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
My point is that the performance requirement progression is pointless, useless, too fast, and stupid.
Why? We want more security, more stability, more responsiveness and more capability...these things don't come free. No-one's forcing you to upgrade so it's moving too fast for you then stick with what you've got.
Gingerbread is leaving behind almost every device already on the market.
That's a lot more forced progression than I'm used to seeing from any OS.
Well firstly it doesn't even have a release date yet and secondly of course at some point the OS will leave most existing devices behind, look at all the problems with the older iPhones running the latest OS, and the original 2G and early iPods don't get it at all. They want to start fresh to provide a consistent user experience and this is the way to accomplish that, seems reasonable since there are already some devices on the market that will support the OS even though the OS doesn't have a release date yet.
Step one: allow a million tablet devices to be released with Android
Step two: Make a new version of Android for Tablets that runs on none of them and only on a new wave of tablets.
Step three: Developer making tablet specific software now required to target two classes of devices.
Step Four: Mu-ha-ha
So what are you to do now if you are an Android developer? Ignore millions of Galaxy Tab units sold?
If I were an Android developer I would be THIS PISSED.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Java might be fast enough for your fancy calendar app, but seriously, we need to access NEON the SIMD ARM extensions directly on the CPU to get some decent speed, because the hardware itself is still slow even the A8 Cortex is far underpowered, and do not want to wait hundreds of cycles for Java binding to even start. Java is a nightmare to code mission critical real-time applications and professional grade games. Java should be optional, nobody serious would even consider it then. GC and "managed code" was Sun's marketing ploy to deceive those exec fools to believe that Java is somewhat better then anything else, it looks like many still drink the Sun stirred Java coolaid here.
Objective-C is in the same slow lane league as Java, it is intended for weekend code warriors and calendar app coders. Our iPhone apps, surprise, do not use ObjC at all (except for some tiny binding code snippets).
I hate Apple... to prove it, I don't even run OS X on my Mac Book, I use Windows 7 instead. I have no idea how, but I was resolved not to own an iPad because tablets with telephone operating systems sound really stupid to me, yet, I was given an iPad against my will. I use it as a coffee cup saucer.
Though, I love my iPhones. My daughter runs iOS 4 on her 3G, my son runs iOS 4 on his 3Gs and my wife and I both have iPhone 4s. They're great devices and the #1 reason I like them is that my daughter's iPhone 3 is still getting Apple love after all this time. I've owned HTC's, Nokia's etc... and the bitch of it is, that when you buy the phone, unless there's a major issue, you are stuck with what you bought. I've worked on Nokia phones (internally with Nokia) and know for a fact that after a phone ships, the least valuable asset on the development team becomes the new support team for that phone.
Apple at least makes a commitment to their phones for a long enough time that you feel that you weren't just abandoned after purchasing.
I also have a stack of Android devices. I don't use them. With the exception of the REALLY high end ones, I find them to be clunky as hell. If anything Google needs to set a specific standard requiring a minimum CPU, a minimum GPU (and a minimum set of functions that MUST be hardware accelerated as part of the GPU), a minimum amount of RAM, a minimum performance speed for RAM and Flash, and a minimum screen refresh time.
By leaving the platform as open as they have, they've made it a joke. It's the "I couldn't afford and iPhone, but this Android thing was affordable, too bad it's not fast enough to run Angry Birds" platform.
What Google did wrong was this. They waited until after Christmas to hit us with this bomb. It's like "Samsung sold X millions of Galaxy Tablets for Christmas 2010" followed right by "Be ready to by the new Galaxy Tablet in February 2011 since Samsung will not be able to provide support for newer OS versions on the model you got for Christmas".
So, now either Samsung needs to fork Android and maintain it for a year or so to keep users from being pissed that their $600 Christmas gift to the family is a brick in January. Or Google needs to specifically support the fork themselves. Just imagine how cool you'd be if you got to work on the development team at Google that has to support that shitty old OS that was superseded by something better.
Let's not forget the thousands of stores around the world that has a stock of these things and they'll sell them and three hours later, the purchaser will come back saying "I just read this thing won't run new software starting in February". What kind of scam are you pulling!
well the VM used in android is a custom one (dalvik), 2.2 introduced JIT (with noticeable speed improvements vs 2.1).
And if one really want speed, Google do provide a NDK so that one can compile parts as ARM code (basically having them sit as ARMv5, v6 and/or v7 libs in the APK).
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/which-programming-languages-are-fastest.php
Java is very very fast, though its main performance problem is memory usage:
6x more memory usage than C
5x more memory usage than Go
2x more memory usage than C#