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Intel's Plans For X86 Android, Smartphones, and Tablets
MrSeb writes "'Last week, Intel announced that it had added x86 optimizations to Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, but the text of the announcement and included quotes were vague and a bit contradictory given the open nature of Android development. After discussing the topic with Intel we've compiled a laundry list of the company's work in Gingerbread and ICS thus far, and offered a few of our own thoughts on what to expect in 2012 as far as x86-powered smartphones and tablets are concerned.' The main points: Intel isn't just a chip maker (it has oodles of software experience); Android's Native Development Kit now includes support for x86 and MMX/SSE instruction sets and can be used to compile dual x86/ARM, 'fat' binaries; and development tools like Vtune and Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer are on their way to Android."
Since most of x86 architecture and related hardware is getting smaller and most smartphone are getting bigger, they are bound to meet somewhere.
hmm, I guess it will be called a tablet or an i(ntel)Pad. ehm ehm
In this field no matter how much you know, You still don't know anything.
have you used intel graphics lately(stuff they're shipping in 2011)? it's like having a discrete mobile gpu from 2004.
but this article is not news of any kind. intel has had these plans out in public for years and years, android ndk has support for multiple targets. if they actually started shipping _that_ would be news.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Just give me a debian build for my phone including dialer, messaging, etc..
Then I can play REAL games on my phone.. Or as real as they get in Linux!
While it is always nice to hear about companies contributing to opensource, I don't see there being a big demand for x86 android. Who would use it? It's not low power enough for most tablets/phones. And while the ability to run existing x86 apps is nice they are mostly tied to Windows which is also not likely to see much traction in the mobile space. So what is the point?
What I would like to see is Intel creating a SoC and softcore suite. Intel has some big advantages that they could use to seriously compete:
1) Lots of experience in chip design. I don't see why they can't create an ARM-Core competitor.
2) They can start from scratch. Unlike ARM there is no need to legacy support or backward compatibility.
3) They have in house designers for everything from graphics, wired, wireless, etc. chips. I don't see why they cannot design from this a whole suite of modules that work on their SoC platform.
4) They have (to my knowledge) the best chip fab plants in the world by a sizable margin. Die shrinks offer a great way to reduce power consumption.
5) They have produced great x86 compilers for years, so producing a new compiler for a new chip shouldn't be too difficult since they are already experienced with x86 and Itanium.
6) They have shown that they already know how to support Android.
7) They have the cash and business partners to make it work.
I'm not saying they are guaranteed to make big bucks. Fighting an intrenched ARM with wide industry support will be hugely difficult. But if any company can do it it's Intel. Of course this means they would have to get over the Itanic debacle and stop trying to shove x86 down the throats of every problem.
Google allowed them to mess with the graphics engine? OMFG, we'll end up with tablet devices that run 1990's era graphics tech.
Wow. I hadn't realized Intel's graphics offerings have improved to even that point.
At least it wasn't ATI/AMD, then it would be fast, but crash a lot...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Add some x86 optimizations to the battery.
Even if they develop their own graphics chip for tablet use, it'll a) probably be enough for what you'd do on a tablet (seriously: on a desktop PC, for anything except gaming, Intel's stuff is good enough), and b) it depends on how well the software's done, anyway (case in point: on many recent Linux distros, and again, unless you're gaming, Intel's chipsets provide a better overall experience than much more capable nVidia or ATI hardware).
--srj/mmv
What's more interesting to me is the Android@Home announcements (from Google IO 2011) that Google is implementing its own networking stack (instead of Zigbee) on 802.15.4. 802.15.4 is a very low power low-level radio network, with cheap embedded microcontrollers that are often ARM. There's probably not enough power in the node's ARM to run Android, but some nodes could have extra power and extra ARM cores that do run Android.
Android's Java means in addition to network RPC, code can be straightforwardly programmed to safely migrate around the network for distributed local execution near the data, whether that's network metadata, sensor data, or just the power of massively parallel distribution. I wonder whether JavaSpaces or something like it (probably a very lite version) will find a fit in making cheap distributed networks represented in computational tuplespace. Distributed around one's home, office/classroom or car, or among one's clothing (daily worn watch/jacket/shoes/belt/keyring), or eventually merging among those personal spaces as they're either near or just related (linked by the Internet).
Intel's x86 architecture still has too much power consumption (and the legacy HW baggage that consumes it) to be a design win for this distributed architecture. By the time x86 is suitably low power, Android will probably have defined the space of these smart spaces, and the smart things in them.
FWIW, there's still few details of A@H, though supposedly there is a reference implementation (network backbone embedded in LED bulbs). Anyone seen any specs, like whether it's really a SNAP/6LOWPAN hybrid, or which specific alternative Google is now pushing? Where to get the devkits (HW and SW)?
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make install -not war
Not very popular on /., but Android being Java based will make life very easy for Intel to crack the mobile market. Most of the apps (sans native ones) will just work. It would have been almost impossible otherwise without some serious virtualization.
It is. The difference between an x86 and ARM core is around an order of magnitude at the moment for the same performance. But the difference between an x86 core and the display is another order of magnitude, so for devices that you mainly use with the screen on there isn't much difference between x86 and ARM in terms of overall power consumption. The difference in battery life between an ARM core at 200mW and an Intel core at 2W is very small when the display is using 10-20W. There are a few display technologies that are supposed to be hitting the market Real Soon Now that ought to make the difference between x86 and ARM a lot more apparent.
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I'd mod up your post, but I want to reply instead. Are you suggesting that the display uses 50-100 times the power of an ARM chip (and therefore 5-10 times an x86)? If that is true, that is very interesting. I did not realize the display was such an outlier in power consumption department...
Hey, don't knock my Diamond Stealth 64! It's got VLB!
Program Intellivision!
Is the display really that much of a hog on a cell phone? Those numbers sound like laptop numbers, but I thought we were talking cell phones.
My phone has a battery that holds around 1300 mAh at 3.7v. That means I can draw 4.8W for 1 hour. If my phone's display really sucked down even 10W, then I wouldn't be able to have the display on for more than about 28 minutes total, which doesn't match my experience at all. I regularly browse the web from my phone for a half hour at a time, without making much of a dent in the battery.
A quick scan through this paper suggests backlight power for the phone they analyzed tops out at 414mW, and the LCD display power ranges from 33.1mW to 74.2mW. If you drop the brightness back just a few notches, the total display power is around a quarter Watt or so, which sounds far more reasonable.
I don't think Intel is standing still on power consumption. Their desktop CPUs are hogs, sure, but they can bring a lot of engineers to bear optimizing Atom-derived products. (We might get an early read from Knight's Corner, actually, although I expect it to still be on the "hot" side. I'm waiting to hear more about it.) Also, ARM's latest high-end offerings (including the recently announced A15) aren't exactly as power-frugal as some of their past devices. In the next couple years, I think the scatter plot of power vs. performance for ARM and x86 variants will show a definite overlap in the mix, with some x86s pulling less power than some ARMs.
Program Intellivision!
I bet everybody think about Android Market and all the cool stuff there. Well, don't do that unless your Android runs ARM.
I've got recently my hands on a Android MIPS phone. Extremely frustrating experience -- two of every three downloads from the Market simply refuse to install, because they have some tiny snippet or library compiled to ARM native code. Unless Intel heavy invests in app developers recompiling their works for Android/x86, it will be barely usable outside of the base system.
On my Samsung Galaxy S2 it's between 40 and 50% so maybe the super amoled display is really a power saver despite the 4.3"diagonal. And I use little wifi and little 3g, only when I explicitly need the net, so the display consumption could be even lower in % on a typical always on scenario.
Despite what many other commenters will say, no, it isn't a power hog compared to ARM. Or at least it doesn't have to be. Intel/AMD/VIA don't yet offer processors that have as low power as ARM (although some are pretty power/performance efficient depending on your workload), but they will within the next year for smartphones and tablets. On modern manufacturing processes the "x86 tax" becomes almost non-existant.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
I have my phone screen on for about 2-3 hours per day due to bus rides. According to my the Android battery tracking thing my display uses up around 60-70% of my battery for the day, and this is on a Nexus S with the AMOLED screen that is supposed to use less battery than an LCD screen due to not having to light up the black pixels.
The screen really is huge when it comes to battery consumption.