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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.
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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The mistake most people seem to make here is to compare ARM to IA32, when they should be comparing ARM to Intel64/AMD64 (x86_64) since even Atom can run 64-bit code these days.
Going to 64-bit does increase code size a bit, but one of the good things about x86/x86_64 code is that it is VERY dense. This document
http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~vince/papers/iccd09/iccd09_density.pdf
suggests that 64-bit x86 code is actually even denser than ARM-thumb code in most cases (which in turn is denser than "normal" ARM code).
High code density means more cache hits, which means better performance and less power-hungry.
x86_64 has the same amount of integer registers as ARM: 16. Every single x86_64 CPU has support for SSE, which means that floating point operations can (and is) handled by the 16 SSE registers instead of the old x87 fpu-stack.
Fact is that the 64-bit specification for x86 fixed a large number of problems that the 32-bit specification had, making x86_64 a really good architecture without any significant flaws.
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.
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