Ice Cream Sandwich Ported To X86

angry tapir writes "Google's open-source Android 4.0 operating system for smartphones and tablets has been ported to work with x86 processors. The port means that tablets with Android 4.0 based on x86 chips could be on the horizon. Intel is the top x86 chipmaker, and the company has already said it is working with Google to bring Android 4.0 to smartphones and tablets."

Comments

Singularity

[cyachallenge]

It seems our technology continues to expand in all directions and then collapse into a single device. TVs, PCs, and phones are becoming part of the same thing.

Re:Singularity

[Ethanol-fueled]

It's like Ubuntu's Unity, except that it'll get good reviews!

Re:Singularity

[akirchhoff]

This sound like Microsoft's strategy all over again. Anyway you cut it a single platform ecosystem is ugly, as it just lets another monopoly.

New boss same as the old boss

Re:Singularity

[renegadesx]

We are the borg, lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

Re:Singularity

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Microsoft's strategy in an alternate universe where large swaths of the Windows core are gpl2 or apache, every x86 whiteboxer has their own "Windows Distribution" and their primary leverage consists of the licensing requirements to ship Office out-of-box..

Re:Singularity

[shellbeach]

This sound like Microsoft's strategy all over again. Anyway you cut it a single platform ecosystem is ugly, as it just lets another monopoly.

Sure, Microsoft's strategy, only with an open source OS being built in this case by hobbyists and enthusiasts. Definitely sounds like monopoly building at work to me ...

Re:Singularity

[Ihmhi]

And the only time the screen will be filled with brown is if we play a modern FPS game!

Re:Singularity

[mjwx]

Microsoft's strategy in an alternate universe where large swaths of the Windows core are gpl2 or apache, every x86 whiteboxer has their own "Windows Distribution" and their primary leverage consists of the licensing requirements to ship Office out-of-box..

RMS went back in time to stop Microsoft before they could begin, but it went horribly horribly wrong, Microsoft sent their best man back in time to stop him...

Balmer still wasn't good enough.

Re:Singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is nice but don't kid yourself: it is not built by hobbyists and enthusiasts. It's very tightly controlled by Google -- I really appreciate them making source releases when it suits them, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still controlled by them.

In case you were referring to the kernel: linux is partly built by hobbyists but it just isn't a major part of the Android strategy so I don't see how that applies here... Google will keep their linux fork and could even swap the kernel if kernel developers really started being difficult -- it wouldn't be painless but it would definitely be possible.

The point is: Android is tightly controlled by a single entity. Letting them become a monopoly (or even close to one) would be bad. It would be different from Microsoft but still bad.

Re:Singularity

[afc_wimbledon]

It seems our technology continues to expand in all directions and then collapse into a single device. TVs, PCs, and phones are becoming part of the same thing.

You missed out the next step. The lawyers & marketing bods get involved, realise they are losing money, and split the hardware and software up into discrete items again, that they can sell to you individually. Rinse, and repeat.

Re:Singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

John Trudell New boss same as the old boss

Re:Singularity

[binarylarry]

Why is this post modded Insightful and not +5 Retarded.

Re:Singularity

[CrzyP]

My problem with Windows was never that it wasn't open source. My problem with Windows is that it is shit. That's also my problem with Android.

Please tell us why Windows is "shit".

Re:Singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

The proper term for what you described is monoculture.

Re:Singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the security issues, Android.

The larger and dumber the user base gets, the more hideous and pervasive the exploits and malware will become. Smells just like what happened to Windows XP/IE5 after the RIAA and MPAA contaminated the file sharing community with viruses and rootkits, and started buying hackers to target the people they couldn't sue to death.

I can see it now: the Android Market will bloat to capacity with anti-virus and scareware spam, because no profiteer will ever endorse open source.

I wonder if Android will get awesome UAC features like Windows Vista when that happens.

Re:Singularity

[atlasdropperofworlds]

But it's still Linux. It's the linux Kernel, and many linux utilities. It has a few propreitary bits, but at least is a chance for a successful desktop linux for once. It's actually easier to use than Windows, and has a large quantity of quality applications being made for it.

Microsoft isn't going away, nor is Apple. We'll have a competitive marketplace, I can guarantee it.

Re:Singularity

[Drinking Bleach]

You mean when Android will sandbox applications and have users explicitly allow permissions that could break out of that sandbox? Like how it is already?

Re:Singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, how is the permissions control business in Android anything like UAC in Vista?

Let's compare/contrast, hmmm?

Android:
1. You seek out the setting to allow untrusted installs once, and then have to come back to it and actively return the setting to it's previous state.
2. The installation process in Android is standardized. At every installation you are informed of every permission you must grant. You may choose to allow or deny the installation.
3. Android might be open source, but all these oh-so-trendy "apps" aren't. Hence the necessity of sandboxing. Since you can't pry open the code, and look at it, you'll never know what an app is trying to do unless it's sandboxed and forced to play by a VM's rules. It may be a false since of security, since most people are as likely to audit source code as they are to read a EULA, but it's a more desirable form of CYA than "this might be dangerous, we won't tell you exactly what's happening why, but you have to say you want it anyway to proceed"

Windows Vista UAC:
1. UAC is a also single setting. This setting is either on or off, sure. But when it's on... Oh boy will you know it's on! You see, installing a windows program is already it's own little process, but it's always just been theatre for consumers so that they feel special about buying things. It has never had anything to do with permissions. UAC is another animal, and it cuts across all behavior on the machine. Not just new application installations. Once turned on, it will incessantly harass you at every potentially dangerous step taken. And there are SOOOOOOOO many of these fucking things, that 50% of your mouse clicks will be to acknowledge that someone is possibly trying to look at your boobies, grab your boobies, or maybe even bend you over to take what's theirs.
2. With the setting off, it's ineffective, but hey, if you wanna be raw-dogged YOU asked for it. With the setting on, it's well... ineffective! ...because users are lulled into complacency by the noisiness of UAC, and become casual with granting actions. Either way, Microsoft has covered its ass and deferred blame.
3. On a Windows machine there is no real way to audit any individual program. Essentially because all programs are allowed to perform potentially dangerous actions at all times in Windows. They aren't sandboxed, so no one every really knows what the fuck a Windows program is going to do to you, but such is life in a world of pay-to-play black-boxed proprietary bullshit. ...and hey, in Capitalist America, if you don't flash your pussy, sweetie, there's no incentive for the heroic Captains of Industry to take a break from reading Ayn Rand novels and descend from the clouds of Mount Olympus and collect their just rewards for being so fucking awesome! amirite?

Re:Singularity

[BasilBrush]

I could spend days writing about why windows is shit. And I probably have done over the years. It comes into two categories:

1) The designers of the Windows UI have no taste.
2) The architecture behind Windows is flawed.

Now I'm not going to bore myself repeating things I've complained of before, so here's a new one. I haven't touched Windows for a couple of years, but I had to use someone else's PC yesterday and had to copy a directory. A dialog comes up and the most prominent, eye catching thing is an animation of a page in space, doing some rotations and then resting back in the same place in space. Repeated over and over. An animation that serves no purpose whatsoever, is not representative of the action that is happening, and is so busy it distracts the eye from the things that are giving information. It certainly does not have the purpose of showing that something is happening. There's already a real progress bar already that has a built in pulse animation to reassure that the task is progressing.

Why is it there? Because Windows has always had an animation there, since Windows 95. But back then, it was less in your face, and actually gave a clue and some reassurance as to the operation taking place. A page used to go from somewhere to somewhere else. Over the years that animation has grown bigger and more distracting, and less meaningful.

That animation is nothing more than distracting bling. It breaks fundamental rules of UI design. And it shows bad taste.

Now that my be just one small thing, albeit in a central OS interaction. But when using Windows I find these annoying things during every single task. The UI is awful.

And just a quick one on the architecture side: The Registry is a fundamentally misguided idea. This huge data structure that no one piece of software is responsible for. It grows and grows until the computer starts to slow to a crawl. At that stage it either needs expert and time consuming surgery. Or more commonly, someone needs to waste a day reinstalling the OS and all the important apps. The registry is probably the worse architectural decision I've ever seen in any OS.

Re:Singularity

[lsatenstein]

I believe that the MS strategy is to cause their architecture for security to be included in hardware along with their software. They already are recommending dedicted bios's, encrypted signals to the monitor, etc. etc.

Lock-in for life is the new slogan.

Power?

[Daniel_is_Legnd]

What is the power consumption like on an x86 tablet vs. an ARM tablet? Seems like running Android, x86 would still be much less efficient than an ARM core.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but on the other hand, even an Intel Atom is significantly faster than even the fastest ARM... pity Intel insists on supplying their own GPU with Atoms, because the NVidia Ion + Intel Atom.combo was actually pretty sweet.

Re:Power?

[vivek7006]

Why? x86 or ARM, both obey the same laws of physics. There is nothing inherent in ARM which makes it better at running Android. The x86 benchmarks are looking very good http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/11/30/intc113011aa_610x466.jpg

Re:Power?

[dbc]

Yes, interesting question, but difficult to ask correctly. x86 power consumption is all over the map, varying with features, and the same can be said for ARM. More interesting numbers are MIPS/Watt, FLOPS/Watt, and MACS/Watt. Then of course, MIPS don't translate directly into whether or not the platform "feels snappy". Some of those Watts might be better spent on fast display updates than on MIPS when you look at the total platform experience.

Re:Power?

[afidel]

Intel has a major process advantage over everyone else in the industry and with the introduction of the 3D trigate they'll be able to bring leakage current down significantly. I imagine they'll be able to get similar battery life to ARM based solutions with significantly better burst performance. However I'm not sure how much that matters since quad core A9's are already pretty powerful for most users, especially with GPU cores available for the heavy lifting in games and video.

Re:Power?

[Max Littlemore]

But isn't the x86 instruction set inherently silly? I thought modern processors run RISC cores with shenanigans wrapped around to implement the x86 legacy. Surely that means that they are inherently less efficient even if it's only marginal.

Looking at the 4+1 thing that NVidia has done with Tegra3 I think it may be too late for x86 and it may finally die a death. We can only hope.

Re:Power?

[the linux geek]

All major processors except Itanium use microcode, including most ARM implementations. It's not an x86-specific thing.

Re:Power?

[ArhcAngel]

The better question is why the submission focuses on Intel when the port currently only works on AMD?

"The release isn’t fully stable — missing sound, camera, ethernet, and hardware acceleration for Intel chipsets. What will work however is Wi-Fi, sound, and hardware acceleration for AMD chipsets."

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

The X86 instruction set was silly, then it stopped being silly as instruction bandwidth became a limiting factor for RISC processors. Ideally you want a kind of huffman coding for instruction sizes, so that the most frequent instructions are the smallest. Traditional RISC makes all the instruction the same big size, so you get the worst bandwidth through a limited instruction bus.

In today's world, where on chip busses are so much faster than off chip busses and instruction bandwidths are limiting, having compact instructions over the pins, being converted on chip to regularized RISCy instructions makes complete sense. So X86 stopped being silly a while back.

If you wanted to design a new instruction set today, you'd optimize for things like instruction bandwidth minimization, security, parallelizability and important application loads (e.g. more DSP). In that light, X86 might be a bit messy, but it is far from silly, especially after the 64 bit cleanup.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the Cortex A9 found in Tegra 2 and Ti's OMAP 4 series are at the same clockspeed marginally faster than even the top end Atom cpus, IONised or not, even at their standard speeds the differences in performance are not that huge.

http://parisbocek.typepad.com/blog/2010/11/arm-outmuscles-atom-on-benchmark.html

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure things like the tegra 3 would blow away any atom.

But, even things like the omap4 and tegra 2 might be pretty close. Memory bandwidth sucks on the omap, so for some things like large transfers of data atom may excel over omap but not really cpu speed issue. Tegra doesn't share this flaw with the omap.

I never did / read any benchmarks, but I have a dev board with an omap4 on it, and it "feels" just as fast as my netbook. The dev board is currently doing duty as the guest web browsing machine, wifi access point (two radios), radius server, ldap server, firewall, squid proxy, webserver, dhcp server, dns cache, network USB server (serves up a dvd writer to my netbook over wifi this way), and fileserver (laptop hard drive) for the house. It is running Debian wheezy armel (need a few more things to work on armhf before pulling that trigger, but armhf will make it even faster).

As for power, even with all the peripherals (radios, spinning hard drive, USB hub, doing a native build), it is pretty rare to see system power hit 5 watts. Atom is left in the dust here too.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

and the laws of physics say that given two pieces of the same conductive material, one being twice as long as the other, all other things being equal, it will take twice as long for a signal to reach the end of one over the other.

basically, I'm saying the first part of your statement is gibberish, considering they are two different designs with different pathways. One may very well outperform the other due to physics in the designs of the architecture.

{anonymous coward}

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

*longer (replacing twice as long)

{anonymous coward}

Re:Power?

[catmistake]

As others have pointed out, Atom is pretty weak. It has a rep for being powerful, idky. The Atom is on par with the PowerPC G4... an old chip that uses a lot more energy. I'd be very surprised if ARM couldn't easily match it. If you want more proc power in a low power chip, AMD E-350 blows Atom away. I really don't undertand everyone's crush on Atom.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because Atom has pretty much dominated until only recently?

Re:Power?

[Guy Harris]

All major processors except Itanium use microcode, including most ARM implementations. It's not an x86-specific thing.

The second sentence is true. The first one, well, do you consider SPARC and Power Architecture processors to be "major processors"? If so, where's a citation to indicate that they use microcode? Even if not, where's a citation to indicate that most ARM processors use microcode?

Also, what "run RISC cores with shenanigans wrapped around to implement the x86 legacy" means is that, on at least some modern x86 processors (dunno about Atom, but Intel's other processors since Pentium Pro, as well as, I think, all AMD processors since the K5), the x86 instructions are decoded into one or more presumably-RISCy "microoperations" which are what are scheduled and executed by the execution units. Some of them might be implemented with "microcode" in the sense of microoperations fetched from a ROM rather than generated on the fly by the decoder.

Re:Power?

[pjr.cc]

While slightly off topic - if you like ion, try amd fusion (e350m series)... very much like atom, but actually worth having (faster, and generally better hardware).

I liked the idea of atom, until i got one and compared to a (at the time) 8 year old epia (N10k)... the atom was about 1.5 times the speed and sucked down more juice... I was really disappointed with the atom processor... ION made it worth while, but in reality the atom is a POS bang per W is very low on the platform and the atom has had several functions torn out of it (compared to a i3/i5/i7 or core/core2) which i personally found kind of annoying..

But, back on topic. This should run on the embedded cpu AMD fusion boards (such as the e350 mentioned above) and if i get the chance i do plan on giving it a shot.

Re:Power?

[gman003]

Clock speed != performance. Especially not between such divergent systems as x86 and ARM. Even comparing clocks between Atoms and Cores is an unreliable indicator of relative performance, let alone comparing different fundamental architectures.

Re:Power?

[Kjella]

More like that relative to ARM, everything has a rep for being powerful.... The Atom was good a few years ago, but right now the E-350 is a better deal in pretty much every way. Intel's Cedar Trail should have been out in September, then November and right now it looks like January. AMD isn't the only one with delays.

Re:Power?

[jones_supa]

That was my thought too, but according to this chart the E-350 is pretty much on par with D525. The AMD designs feature a nice Radeon chip though. By the way there's an E-350 based Eee Box already available...I would actually like to own one.

Re:Power?

[symbolset]

Intel's not the only foundry on 22nm. Obviously not, since they buy their lithography equipment from third parties that must have more than one customer. They're investing heavily in this area it's true. Trigate is slick, but there are a lot of up-and-coming technologies Intel can't prevent. Apparently Intel forgot to patent the 90 degree rotation of trigate.

Intel's problem isn't their hardware, it's the software that runs on their hardware. In the executive suite they've got a Windows habit that's hard to kick. That worked for a while, but that day is coming to an end. People are starting to look from their WinTel PC to their iPad, iPhone, Android tablet or phone and ask: WTF? Why is this all-day battery-powered thing more capable and responsive than the half-kilowatt new desktop before me? For a lot of years the proclivity of Windows to consume all of Intel's Moore's law progress in hardware with slower software was a good thing. It moved a lot of units - encouraging people to upgrade both hardware and software, but Apple and now Google have spoiled that game. It was a trick and now the trick is told, all bets are off. It's a new game now.

Truth be told I was always amazed that people with a 3GHz dual-core processor just accepted that to get a desktop they should fire it up and go get coffee because they knew it took five minutes. That's performance we wouldn't have stood for in 1984 when processors were less than 0.01GHz and storage was slower still. A 3GHz single core Intel processor from 2005 retiring 4 instructions per clock retires 3.6 trillion instructions in five minutes. A modern SATA hard drive can deliver something like 4.8GB in five minutes. A modern gigabit network connection passes 6GB in five minutes. A reasonable desktop environment takes about 3MB and a few million instructions to present. Do you get what I'm saying? The hardware isn't the problem and it hasn't been since about 1993. Just abandoning crap software isn't going to get Intel out of the woods though now. That might have worked in 2003.

Intel's software partner Microsoft got the clue first, and now the word is that Windows 8 will be expressive and performant even on Windows XP machines, and run on ARM too. That's not going to move a lot of Intel CPUs any more. By all reports the WinTel marriage is on the rocks and could be over soon.

In the executive suite Intel's focused on exactly the wrong things: improving what they're doing, not cannibalizing their current markets. That was a good strategy for a while, but it's not going to weather the current changes - as I tried to tell them seven years ago. Now they need something... different.

So now Android runs on X86. That's a good thing. It can run in a VM on your modern Windows desktop in W7 with Microsoft Virtual PC, and give you the Android apps from your phone in a window on your PC. They can share accounts and data in the cloud. HP should have (and I believe planned to) done this with WebOS, but I believe caved when MS explained the consequences. But Intel's focus is still on the widget, not solving the real problem. Android on x86 is just going to move people to ARM faster if Intel doesn't get their software religion under control. This should be dead simple. Intel doesn't sell Windows and they should not care whether Windows lives or dies. They sell platforms, and help software vendors implement those platforms. They need to shift from that to delivering experiences, and controlling those experiences to a limited extent.

There are others without Intel's history and established markets who are ready to solve the real problem. Intel can join them or get out of the way. This is going to happen very fast, so Intel doesn't have forever to dither about figuring out where the road ahead might be.

Re:Power?

[gl4ss]

because intel releases press infos every 12 months about moving to handhelds.

do they ship intel slabs to these guys for porting? not really.

Re:Power?

[PaladinAlpha]

Processors are not atomic physical units -- or, put another way, the "laws of physics" don't get your software running as anything besides first principles.

Processors are one of the most complicated engineering feats of the human race, and performance characteristics of same are very, very complicated. Even such detailed factors as the relative size of an instruction word in the chosen instruction set have tremendous implications for power consumption and processing speed. In addition, even between processors that most would agree are comparably powerful, a program of given execution characteristics could easily differ wildly in execution time on both.

ARM was designed for efficiency, and so it's reasonable to think that it won't be easily beaten in that field -- but Intel has been designing very good processors for (in IT years) a very long time, and knows the issues and tradeoffs. Nonetheless, marketing materials from Intel based on a reference design do not an answer make, and only deployed, running handsets can answer this question.

Re:Power?

[mark_reh]

I loaded Android 2.2.2 from the site in a virtual machine in my Asus AMD laptop and found networking (wifi) not working. I'll look around for ICS and see if it's working in there. Didn't test sound. No idea about hardware acceleration.

I am far from an expert on this stuff- just someone who tinkers with OSes, virtual machines, etc., so go easy with the flame thrower.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until Intel spins a 22nm finfet Atom. It'll be faster and lower power then anything Arm will have for a couple of years. Now only if Intel could get a decent low power GPU...

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But did you read what the post you were replying to, which said that ARM Cortex A9 is *faster per clock* than Atom. The Atom is an in-order, dual issue processor with no speculative execution. The Cortex is a reordering dual issue with speculative execution. And the lack of register renaming on the Atom means its 6 general-purpose registers compare particularly badly with the Cortex's 15. Of course it's faster.

Now, OK, the faster A9's I've seen clock at 1.3GHz, compared to the Atom's 1.8GHz, but that means the two are in similar ballparks, and the A9 is *much* cheaper and *much* lower power. And a quad-core A9 typically draws less power (about 1.3W with all 4 cores running flat out) than a single-core Atom (about 2.5W). And there are no quad-core Atoms as of yet, so the A9-based systems (eg Tegra 3/iMX6) are clear winners in total peak performance in a mobile chip.

Re:Power?

[Rennt]

Informative.

Re:Power?

[serviscope_minor]

That was my thought too, but according to this chart the E-350 is pretty much on par with D525.

Benchmarks, eh?

This benchmark seems to be very favourable to the atom. Not to say that the benchmark is bad, but YMMV, especially depending on the task. It is possible to squeeze quite a bit of performance out of th atom since it clocks quite fast and can issue two instructions per clock. But lacking out of order execution makes it very hard to keep the ALUs busy, which is why hyperthreading helps relatively more on an atom than fatter intel CPUs.

Nevertheless, OoO can help a huge amount on many tasks.

If you look at the benchmark, the atom 1.8GHz is only a hair below the Core 2 Duo at 1.4 GHz. I have fairly extensive experience with a single core Pentium 3 M (eee 900) and 1GHz atom single core (Toughbook CF-U1). For most things, I found the atom much slower.

Re:Power?

[serviscope_minor]

I hear this thing about instruction compression quite a lot.

On high end CPUs like the core iWhatever, basically the decoder makes little difference. The power budget goes into the massive array of parallel execution units and a honking great out of order register renaming unit to keep the execution units busy. The transistor and power budget for the decoder is minimal.

On lower end CPUs, especially the Atom, ARM and so on, you still need the same size decoder, but now the overall transistor budget is much smaller, so it takes up a much larger fraction of the transistor and power budget.

It certainly does offer some compression, though it is wildly ad-hoc. However, one could essentially replace the decoder with an equivalent number of transistors in the instruction cache. That would probably help a lot. Expecially as the small instructions that do complex things are not favoured by compilers (hard to use) and so little effort has gone into making them fast.

Also, the ARM chips have the thumb instruction set which is purposfully designed to be compressed. It is much less ad-hoc and I would suspect it gives better compression than x86. Also, because it's been designed with compression and simplicity in mind, it doesn't have all of the variable length with evil dependencies nastyness that x86 has.

On the very low end in today's world, you have something like the PIC 12F675 which heroically squeezes a RISCy instruction set into a 14 bit wide bus. Quite entertaining to program as you have to work around the hoops they jumped through for extreme cheapness and low power.

Re:Power?

[serviscope_minor]

Why is this all-day battery-powered thing more capable and responsive than the half-kilowatt new desktop before me?

Really depends on what one is doing. Generally the all-day battery powered things can't do all that much, otherwise they start to loose the all-day thing. I wouldn't dream of replacing one with the other though. The idea of a locked-down single tasking workstation is terrible.

Truth be told I was always amazed that people with a 3GHz dual-core processor just accepted that to get a desktop they should fire it up and go get coffee because they knew it took five minutes.

It's a mix of things. The bootup is slow for three main reasons. The first is that PCs do a lot of stuff before even getting to the hard disk. Things like self-testing, running weird ROMs of random PCI cards probing hardware, firing up USB so you can change BIOS settings, checking RAM, probing disks and so on. I've had workstations before than between the SCSI and network cards could take about 10 minutes to boot. Of course that is all great because it means that they CAN support all the weird and wonderful crap that PCs support.

The second is that the OSs have to do rather careful hardware probing. You can dumo a random linux kernel on a random PC and it will probably boot whatever the hardware. PCs provide a rich mechanism for discoverable hardware that allows for wonderful possibilities for expansion. There is also a lot of cheap hardware thancan do very silly things if you are not very nice to it, so the probing has to be rather conservative.

The final stage is between kexec("/sbin/init") and the desktop (or equivalent). That's generally inexcusably slow. A lightweight system (like my eee) can do that lot in about 3 seconds. People seem to be working on solving the speed problems for fatter systems.

But the first two problems are a blessing and a curse. Devices like phones etc have fixed hardware, and so don't need to do the first two stages in any meaningful manner, massively speeding boot. It also means that a lot of per-system hand hackery has to go into the kernel (and there are some good rants on that topic).

So PCs are slow to boot but you get a lot of benefit for that slowness. But I really don't care much. My laptop comes out of sleep in under half a second. My workstation stays on 24/7. Boot time has pretty much ceased to be a problem.

And your memories of yore are (as is often the case) rather rose coloured. Take, for example my faithful BBC, running at a glorious 0.002 GHz. So you switch it on and...

ZWOOWWW BOOP!

>

booted in about .5 seconds! Great now what? Well, you either have to start typing BASIC, crank out the ole' tape drive or floppy drive and wait a very long time or a bit of time for the software to load.

If you were posh and had a master, then it came with things like an editor in ROM, so you could do ome fairly limited stuff instantly. Well, ASUS motherboards seem to be able to boot to some cut-down desktop Linux before doing most of the biosy stuff, just like that.

But I never use it since I never reboot.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, with >4 byte/instruction instructions that account for about half of any x86 program's size, and 2-3 byte instructions being most prevalent by count, it's only ~40-50% bandwidth saved in exchange for a lot more complicated fetch/decode parts of CPU.

Also consider that it doesn't even matter much as long as your caches are big enough for most critical tight loops.

Re:Power?

[hairyfeet]

Totally agreed on the AMD E-350 as that is the reason i finally bought a netbook. After dealing with customers constantly saying "can you make this....I don't know...faster somehow?" and having to tell them that without ION Atom was pretty much a lame duck I avoided the hell out of them until I got to work on a customers E-350 and thought "Hell yeah, this is actually usable!"

As for TFA....why? if you want a killer low resource Linux on X86/64 frankly all you have to do is go buy the AMD E-350 based EEE (don't know if they have it on the Atom) and enjoy expressgate. Instant on, adds a couple of hours to the battery, at least for me, nice GUI, its all easy peasy. If the community would just get behind expressgate/splashtop and be writing apps for it frankly i could easily see the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" meme becoming reality.

If you want to beat MSFT the trick is NOT to try to get rid of Windows, its to go around it. With EG/ST they still have windows if they need it but as they play in EG/ST and if the community backs it I could easily see them not really needing to go back to Windows much. It already plays most media, has a nice book store and piles of radio stations, all it needs is more apps and games and you could slowly but surely wean users off constantly needing Windows.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

x86 is much more compressed than Thumb2, there was a Paper about it somewhere.

Re:Power?

[rwiggers]

Having compiled the same code for ARM, x86 and x86-64, with the same compiler, I dare saying that the ARM code is much smaller.
Compiles using -Os and GCC for all cores.
Embedded has code size as a limiting factor for quite some time now...

P.S. before saying that a sample size of one isn't evidence, I develop firmware for ARM and some other arch e frequently compile it on the PC for testing purposes.

Re:Power?

[Narishma]

The E-350 blows Atom away only in terms of graphics, it has about the same CPU performance with Atom better at some things and E-350 at others. If you pair the Atom with an Ion GPU they become about equal.

Re:Power?

[blackest_k]

Interesting post are you using a wifi connection to connect the dvd writer, are the transfer speeds reasonable? I've got an iomega Iconnect which could be running debian rather than the stock firmware.
I ran into a bit of a brick wall with that as it needed faster ethernet to configure it and there was no default wifi address set up in the installation which left me needing to buy a ethernet card or fast router.

Having a writer and a more complete os could be very handy and economical.

Re:Power?

[serviscope_minor]

they start to loose the

oops. I hate when people do that. Now i have. :(

Re:Power?

[Hast]

One alternative use for this is to use it as a "simulator" for developing Android applications.

The emulator that is included in Android SDK really emulates ARM code (it's actually running QEMU with ARM v5 code). The problem with this is that it's rather slow, even on high end computers. Anything that runs opengl is extremely slow and not usable.

The Android X86 project makes it possible to run Android in eg VirtualBox. You can then test applications in a much better environment. (Well, currently OpenGL still doesn't work, but it's a work in progress.) Since this is actually running the full Android environment, but compiled for X86, it's possible to get pretty close to real Android behavior on the system.

So that's one nice benefit of the system. Otherwise I imagine that it could be useful to run Android on an old netbook which has problems running a full OS. (And to be frank, many netbooks with Atom seems to have this problem. At least mine does.)

Re:Power?

[Zebedeu]

I loaded Android 2.2.2 from the site in a virtual machine in my Asus AMD laptop and found networking (wifi) not working.

(Almost) same here.
I loaded a previous version on my Intel/nVidia netbook and it was working very well.
Unfortunately, like in your case, wifi wasn't working, so it wasn't much use.

I'm really looking forward to trying ICS, since it's the first Android version which natively supports input devices, including mice.
I'd like to try using it as a permanent netbook OS. I think it might make sense there.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

> HP should have (and I believe planned to) done this with WebOS, but I believe caved when MS explained the consequences
If I'm reading you right, you're suggesting MS leaned on HP to kill WebOS, otherwise they'd be paying a lot more for
their Windows licences?

If that's the case (and it sounds pretty likely to me), then all I can say is damn you scaredy cat HP! They could have
used Linux as a leverage and told MS to go screw themsleves. HP is currently one of the biggest non business retailers, and
with a concerted effort they could have promoted Linux to the common public, and gotten themselves out of that abusive relationship, or at least gained a better bargaining position.

Better the devil you know I guess...?

Re:Power?

[Asic Eng]

An ATOM-based tablet might not be ideal now, but maybe Intel has already plans to offer something more competitive to ARM. It makes sense to have an already ported OS available once that comes out.

Apart from that, I think an x86 version of Android might be interesting for a TV settopbox. Together with a WIImote instead of a touch screen it would provide a nice user interface, and you could use standard processors for that, not just Atoms.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real drawback there is that it's X86 and any NDK code won't be assured to work right.

Re:Power?

[ChunderDownunder]

nothing more than a recompile Android doesn't automatically download associated native binaries based on cpu type? If NDK is anything like JNI, it's a question of loading the right shared lib.

Re:Power?

[TheRaven64]

For compiling, which is integer and branch heavy, my Cortex A8 seems to be about as fast per clock as my Core 2 Duo. It takes about 6 times as long to compile (doing make -j2 on the C2D, just make on the ARM), but is about 1/3 the clock speed and only has one core. For anything that uses double-precision floating point the ARM core is very weak, although most of those things can be run on the DSP or GPU (and use even less power).

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that a significant amount of chip real estate is taken up by the L1, L2, and (in some) L3 caches just so those hungry cores can be fed without suffering stalls. The caches take up a significant amount of energy themselves. In some of the research our groups is doing, we find out that the energy cost of arithmetic is far out weighed by the cost of moving the data. In other words, we can predict, with about a 95% accuracy, the energy consumption of a large (scientific) calculation by ignoring the arithmetic and only counting the cost of moving data between memory, cache and registers.

-anon

Re:Power?

[hairyfeet]

Just remember folks the benchmarks are often rigged because they are compiled with the Intel compiler that to this very day ties a boat anchor to ANY chip that gives an "Authentic AMD" CPUID. So unless they tell you before running that they compiled with a neutral compiler like Open64 or GCC I wouldn't trust the benches anymore than the old Quack.exe trick. Here is an article to back me up.

As for TFA frankly except for as another pointed out using it as an Android emulator i just don't get it. The Linux community has a REAL winner on their hands with expressgate/splashtop and if they'd get behind it and start writing apps for it I bet it would be trivial to get all the OEMs on board. As I've said the key to beating MSFT at their own game is NOT to try to force them into a showdown but to simply route around them. with tons of apps having a real instant on Linux OS built into every new desktop and laptop could give people REAL choice and I have a feeling once they've tried EG/ST as long as the community backs them up with plenty of apps I could see their installed Windows not getting much use. I have expressgate in my netbook and when i'm out that is practically all I use anymore, its just too nice and easy while giving me more battery life.

Re:Power?

[TheRaven64]

Thumb-2 is very dense. All of the ARM instructions that common compilers generate are there. There are several other things about ARM that make it better for low-power systems:

16 registers and no register-limited instructions mean that you have far fewer register-register moves than in x86 (the x86 register-memory instructions offset this somewhat). This is one of the big improvements that x86-64 brings to the table.

Predicated instructions mean that you can avoid a lot of short branches. This is great on a pipelined superscalar chip - you execute all instructions and just don't retire the results on the ones that shouldn't have been executed. This means that ARM chips need a less complex branch predictor to get similar performance to x86. Less complexity means lower power. ARM didn't even bother with branch prediction until a few years ago.

A single instruction format. Both ARM and Thumb2 have very simple layouts. Decoding an ARM or Thumb instruction is really easy. The Thumb-2 decoder is about as complex as the micro-op decoder in an x86 chip.

ARM and thumb instructions are fixed length. This means that you never get an instruction spanning multiple cache lines. On x86, you'll often see compilers insert no-ops to ensure that you won't see this problem.

There are also some very dense instructions. The load / store multiple instructions, for example, let you push and pop an arbitrary subset of the registers. Saving all of the caller-save (or all of the callee-save) registers is a single ARM instruction. This means that you can have very small function prologs and epilogs in ARM code. In fact, you can implement setjmp() and longjmp() with a single ARM instruction too.

Load and store instructions that make address computation easy and support addressing relative to any register. This makes library code (which needs to be position independent) a lot denser on ARM than x86. On x86 you need to call and then pop to get the current instruction pointer, and then you can use this value (in another register, costing you one of your four approximately general-purpose registers) as a base for address computation. With ARM, you just do a ip-relative load (and ARM loads let you do things like r1 + r2 << 4 in a single instruction, so you can store an array start in r1, an index in r2, and access array elements in a single instruction).

In terms of compression, I implemented the same function recently for ARM, x86-64 and x86. The sizes of the text section from the assembled versions were:

• ARM: 360 bytes
• x86-32: 471 bytes
• x86-64: 651 bytes

The 64-bit version is slightly more complicated, but only very slightly (the extra complexity is about 4 instructions, the rest is the same).

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) http://www.coreboot.org/ ? It was originally designed to boot a supercomputer node with SCSI *and* USB *and* a high-speed cluster interconnect (HIPPI) to fully available Linux in about 3 seconds. (OK, I don't believe that was 3 seconds to the GUI with all the desktop daemons running. It was only to the console prompt with all the non-GUI daemons running.) From this existence proof I surmise that the BIOS is a significant contributor to slow booting. (One may infer that the GUI may also be a contributor.)

So how did they do it? First, they sacrificed DOS compatibility. (Hmmm, do you still run DOS? I don't.) They don't try to initialize and configure all the infinitely varied devices that have been created for the PC architecture in the "BIOS". That gets rid of a bunch of legacy stuff that gets checked for whether you have it or not. Second, a minimal OS [1] is burned into the "BIOS" itself. Why? Because all modern OS's configure most of the devices themselves. Yup, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. all configure SCSI, USB, etc. themselves whether the BIOS configures them too or not. If they are going to do it anyway, why should the BIOS bother? As I understand it, coreboot configures the minimum devices necessary to boot the mini OS on the "BIOS." If that mini OS is sufficient, you are done. Otherwise, the mini OS reads the chained boot loader from the storage device (that it initialized) to run the full OS. I could have gotten some of the details wrong but that is a reasonable summary of the process.

[1] Or some other payload. It doesn't have to be a mini OS.

So why do we still have the BIOS rather than coreboot? Mostly because the code needed to initialize the minimum devices necessary to boot a modern OS is very tricky to write, especially since most chip set vendors and OEM manufacturers do not provide the information necessary to allow the code to be written. Won't UEFI make it better? No, if anything, it is more bloat on top of the old bloat. (Gee, my BIOS is too slow. Why don't I add a GUI. Yes, that's the ticket! And before you say "they wouldn't do that", every UEFI I have seen *also* has a BIOS so you can still boot DOS.) Oh, and we need UEFI so that vendors can create trusted systems that prevent users from tinkering with anything. (Can you say "vendor lock in?" I thought you could.)

What can we do about it? Well for a start, you can try to educate everyone that alternatives to the slow and terribly antiquated BIOS exist. (And help them understand that we don't need the chains of UEFI either.) Second, you can ask vendors to support an open source alternative such as coreboot. How? The best would be for the vendors to adopt something like coreboot. However, providing the necessary information for the opensource crowd to do themselves would be a good start. Third, you can roll up your sleeves and pitch in. If contemporary culture has shown us anything, it is that much good can be accomplished by a few who are determined to make the world a better place. After all, this is /. that was supposed to be a hang out for geeks and technologists.

TL;DR Summary: there are alternatives to the BIOS/UEFI that make booting faster. We just need to start using them.

Re:Power?

[Kjella]

In the executive suite Intel's focused on exactly the wrong things: improving what they're doing, not cannibalizing their current markets. That was a good strategy for a while, but it's not going to weather the current changes - as I tried to tell them seven years ago.

If this was supposed to be a "I told you so", it's pretty damn weak. Intel keeps growing and posting record profits, they've kicked AMD to the curb on the performance market and their processing tech is lowering power consumption considerably. For all the hype on tablets there'll be plenty of laptops, desktops and servers that will continue being most of the market and they'll run x86 processors to run their x86 software. Just because Win8 will work on ARM doesn't mean all the other software you have will or that the ports will be good even if they exist.

As for the tablet and mobile market, Intel is not stupid about what's happening nor are they poor at making processors. Granted, the iPad and the resulting tablet market has probably been a much bigger success than Intel could anticipate closing the gap between netbooks and cell phones much faster than expected. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Intel from firing a solid volley back, they have top notch processing tech and a huge staff when they want something badly. It's easy to say "other companies will have 22nm too" when both TSMC and GloFo have had huge process problems in the past.

For example compare with the graphics market, which is still on 40nm because both AMD and nVidia is waiting for TSMC to get their act together. If you're going head to head with Intel with a handicap like that, well it's not going to be pretty. That Intel got 22nm working is actually a pretty damn big thing. Having a lead on process technology is what's made them able to brush off the PIV, the Itanium and several other expensive fiascoes. I'd be suprised if the ARM producers don't soon feel the same pounding.

Re:Power?

[robthebloke]

For anything that uses double-precision floating point the ARM core is very weak, although most of those things can be run on the DSP or GPU (and use even less power).

The ATOM core is extremely weak for double precision (a couple of orders of magnitude slower than single precision). I'm also quite surprised to hear that you've managed to get the GPU to support double precision? Which GPU are you using? The GL_DOUBLE is not a valid argument for glVertexAttribPointer in GLES, so I'd be interested in hearing how you subverted this? I've not tried windows 8 for tablets, so is this something microsoft have added to their D3D equivalent for tablets?

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a mix of things. The bootup is slow for three main reasons. The first is that PCs do a lot of stuff before even getting to the hard disk. Things like self-testing, running weird ROMs of random PCI cards probing hardware, firing up USB so you can change BIOS settings, checking RAM, probing disks and so on. I've had workstations before than between the SCSI and network cards could take about 10 minutes to boot. Of course that is all great because it means that they CAN support all the weird and wonderful crap that PCs support.

The second is that the OSs have to do rather careful hardware probing. You can dumo a random linux kernel on a random PC and it will probably boot whatever the hardware. PCs provide a rich mechanism for discoverable hardware that allows for wonderful possibilities for expansion. There is also a lot of cheap hardware thancan do very silly things if you are not very nice to it, so the probing has to be rather conservative.

While hardware probing is time consuming, I totaly disagree that it should be done each and every time.

The software is badly broken.
But this is also true for the hardware (I'm talking for the x86 one). What we have is layers of layers of backward compatability bullshit.
And these all add latency. Not to mention the slow ram, small caches etc...

Re:Power?

[robthebloke]

One of the biggest myths in the industry, and one that is not exactly true. If you specifically select "Optimise for Intel i7", then guess what, it only runs on an i7. If however you specify the option to optimise for all platforms (/QxO) you'll have no such problems with AMD chips. The Intel compiler can be instructed to insert two codepaths into an exe. So you can have one specified as /QxO, and a separate codepath for i7. At startup, the app will indeed check for the intel vendor string, and will check to see if it's an i7. If it doesn't find it, it will run the codepath optimised for all processors, rather than the one specifically for the i7. In this regard there is absolutely no difference to running the exe on a Core2, or an AMD chip. In both cases the exe will run the second codepath. The problem only arises if the developer has simply chosen one codepath (or failed to select an optimised codepath for the second one, which could indeed look like a deliberate retardation of performance to a layman).

So the complaint about the CPU dispatcher basically boils down to this: Why does specifying "Optimise for Intel i7" mean exactly that, rather than "Optimise for any CPU supporting the same features as an i7". I can't answer that, and I'd certainly prefer the latter, however it is information that is clearly documented.

To be fair, you have a valid point about rigged benchmarks, but your reasoning is entirely incorrect. The simple fact is that the ATOM is significantly different enough from other x86 processors as to make any comparative benchmarking entirely redundant. You either compile a binary explicitly for ATOM (and it runs quite well), or you choose a general x86 compiler option (and it runs like a dog). Most benchmarking software will not have been compiled with the ATOM in mind, so chances are it will run like a dog, making the processor look worse than it actually is....

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the Atom CPUs are pretty power efficient:

Intel® Atom Processor Z600
(512K Cache, 1.20 GHz) 1.3w TDP

up to

Intel® Atom processor D525 (dual core)
(1M Cache, 1.80 GHz) 13w TDP

Intel® Atom Processor D2700
(1M Cache, 2.13 GHz) 10w TDP (never released to public)

Complete Atom list:
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/29035/Intel-Atom-Processor

A Celeron example:
Merom-L mobile cpu
Core 2 Solo U2200 1.2GHz 533 M/Ts FSB 64-bit 5w TDP

You want power efficient, Intel has power efficient.

Re:Power?

[symbolset]

OK fine. Keep telling yourself it's no big deal, everything's going fine. You're entitled to do that. lalala.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up you stupid fat piece of shit. Which cpu do you use for your host file, fucker?

Re:Power?

[Btarlinian]

Trust me, Intel is so far ahead of everyone else in process technology, it's not even close. Yeah, someone else will eventually make FinFETs in production but by then I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel with transistors that have III-V and Ge channels. And lithography limitations are already resulting in very restricted design rules for design engineers. As they are pretty much the only vertically integrated company semiconductor company left, they'll have a rather large advantage in knowing exactly how to tune their designs to fit the limitations of their mask sets, etc.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Samsung is releasing the A15 cortex dual core 1.8-2.0GHz chip soon...

Re:Power?

[the_humeister]

Atom has 16 general purpose registers as well as 16 xmm registers since it's a n x86_64 CPU.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you mean like Thumb2 that exists on ARM?

Most common instructions are 16 bit some where encoding to 16 doesn't make that much sense are 32.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Atom has 16 general purpose registers as well as 16 xmm registers since it's a n x86_64 CPU.

You probably don't want to be running 64-bit code, which typically uses about 40% more memory than equivalent 32-bit code, on mobile devices that are typically rather short of RAM.

Re:Power?

[hairyfeet]

Dude, do you want me to back it up with links? hell you can even test it on your own machine, there are apps that will change your CPUID. run your little /QxO on an Intel CPU, bench it, then change the CPUID to AMD and watch the numbers fall by at LEAST 30%, probably closer to 50%.

But if you want more than MY word and your own lying eyes then you can read this blog by a guy that actually writes book on the subject of optimization and programming where he documents where INTEL TOLD HIM THAT IS WHAT THEY DID after he confronts them with the evidence! He has emails, he logged every conversation, I have NO doubt he is a good chunk of why Intel paid AMD 1.35 BILLION to not go to court, or do you believe Intel gave its rival one of the biggest paydays in CPU history because it was a nice thing to do?

Re:Power?

[hairyfeet]

Hi Oaktrail! Got modded down so bad you are afraid to post in your own account? That's kinda sad. i don't know which is worse, the fact that you are so badly in need of medication you actually think I'm old APK who has been here frankly longer than I have and was a lurker at CNet before that, or that you think I'm sitting in some MSFT war-room plotting your every move across the net like Die Hard 4.

Seriously Oaktrail, get some help. You are showing signs or persecution complex and think people are secretly plotting against you, those are two sure signs of the start of a breakdown. Go put away your CLI, go into the sun, and go to the nearest shrink. Get help dude because if you don't someone may find you swinging behind the Xmas tree and that ain't no way to go out friend.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the power consumption like on an x86 tablet vs. an ARM tablet? Seems like running Android, x86 would still be much less efficient than an ARM core.

would is your key word. Why do you think that's the case? It's like saying that Linux should be more or less efficient in any other platform. If it's properly optimized to run, that shouldn't be an issue. The thing is if you want a performance android system or a power saver one, and I'm guessing Intel/AMD are trying to bring power efficient processors to battle ARM in the mobile field.

Re:Power?

[Idbar]

Truth be told I was always amazed that people with a 3GHz dual-core processor just accepted that to get a desktop they should fire it up and go get coffee because they knew it took five minutes

Do you realize how long it takes for a phone to boot up, right? It takes a long time. The thing is that you never power it off, because it's in a constant low consumption mode, which is similar to some "sleep" modes. If you don't power your system off, but you sleep it, you'll find out those 5 minutes you're talking about are considerably reduced. The problem with desktops to me are the power supplies, that for mobile have been turned into batteries and USB-voltage regulators.

Re:Power?

[mark_reh]

My mouse worked in 2.2. After messing with 2.2 a little I went to see how I missed ICS. Then I discovered that the site does things sort of upside down- newer releases are near the bottom of the page, not the top. I DL'd and tried to install ICS and it puked and wouldn't install. I'm too much of a dweeb to figure out how to fix it. I'll just wait a week or so and try again with a newer release.

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe SPARC uses microcode (though I’m not sure in all cases, and I have seen the term 'microcode' used for some of the low-level instructions added for supporting hypervisors), but POWER certainly does. See e.g. "IBM POWER6 microarchitecture", IBM J. Res. & Dev. vol. 51 no. 6, November 2007.

Re:Power?

[Guy Harris]

I don't believe SPARC uses microcode (though I’m not sure in all cases, and I have seen the term 'microcode' used for some of the low-level instructions added for supporting hypervisors), but POWER certainly does. See e.g. "IBM POWER6 microarchitecture", IBM J. Res. & Dev. vol. 51 no. 6, November 2007.

Well, having spent USD 30 for the article (I miss the days when IBM JRD and IBM Systems Journal were available for free...) and saved it to disk (no way am I going to spend another USD 30 if I want to read it again!), and having scanned the stuff from "POWER6 chip physical overview" (just in case it mentions microcode storage) through "Error recovery", I didn't see any place where it implies that microcode is used (the only explicit use of the word "microcode", at least as far as Preview can find it, is in an author bio). What did I miss there?

Re:Power?

[Anonymous Coward]

it has about the same CPU performance with Atom better at some things and E-350 at others.

Rubbish. Just consider an equal budget beowulf cluster of each. Not only will you have considerably more processors in the AMD cluster, each processor does way more than each Atom at the tasks for which beowulf clusters are used. The Atom *barely* seems good enough for what its used for, anemic but light nettops. Where Atom spanks AMD is in low power. I think some of them use about a quarter the energy of an E-350... but that suspiciously ends up being the trade off for processor intensive tasks... those Atoms are close to a quarter of the speed of E-350s.

Re:Power?

[triffid_98]

There's no reason for Intel to 'dither', just like Microsoft they are large enough that they don't have to pick a growth strategy. They can go in multiple directions at once to see which ones pan out

...as for ARM support, it makes sense for Microsoft to go this way but there's still a fundamental disconnect between UI design in a mobile device and a conventional PC.

Since there's no way to (without developer intervention) reformat the massive library of existing windows applications to fit a mobile device the interface mismatch is going to be completely awful unless they are only running applications that are designed with that environment in mind.(scalable UI based on 4" touchscreen vs 24" monitor+mouse)...at which point what's the big allure?

Samsung Slates

[exomondo]

Presumably this would work on existing tablets like Samsung's series 7? The ones similar to (or maybe the same) as those that were given away at BUILD.

Emulator?

[mustPushCart]

Does this mean i can run the apps natively without using an emulator on a windows box?

Re:Emulator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of, you just need a VM now.

Re:Emulator?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It would make a difference for apps that use ndk(not that they'll magically become compatible, but if Intel scores some market share people will suck it up and update...) As for the rest, it's a mixture of mostly-normal linux supporting a Definitely-Not-A-JVM-and-Don't-You-Call-It-One...NDK makes it possible, but the applications are supposed to run in-vm unless necessary either way.

Re:Emulator?

[Hadlock]

Can someone walk me through this? I've tried getting ICS 4.0 to run on virtual box with no luck so far.

Re:Emulator?

[Hast]

There is a guide for Android X86 on VirtualBox on their wiki (http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto).

I've tried Gingerbread and Honeycomb before and they work reasonably well. (OpenGL isn't well implemented yet, so Honeycomb and likely ICS will have some performance problems.) I haven't tried to use them as emulator replacements though, not sure how much work it is to actually make it possible to get ADB working with Android X86 in VirtualBox.

Just make sure you disable "Enable absolute pointing device" in the VirtualBox motherboard settings to get the mouse to work.

Previously I've used the Eee PC build of Android to get it to work, I haven't tried getting the ICS port to work in VB yet (there isn't a Eee PC build of it yet).

Re:Emulator?

[Hadlock]

Ah, ok - the lack of an Eee PC build is probably what I am missing. I get to some sort of clock comparison check and it sort of stalls during load on 4.0; 3.2 loads flawlessly. I guess I'll just have to wait!
 
It's a shame that there's no Virtual Box fix to pass off a wired connection as a wifi connection so you can try some of the internet functionality of Android(!).

Re:Emulator?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried to use them as emulator replacements though, not sure how much work it is to actually make it possible to get ADB working with Android X86 in VirtualBox.

I've been using the x86 froyo port on VMWare Player for development for a while now, as the emulator is just too damned slow on my machine to be usable. ADB works just fine... boot up the VM, turn on debugging in the developer settings, and on the dev box run adb connect [whatever its ip address is]:5555, and you're ready to go.

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Step one, have android work on most desktop hardware
Step two, make mouse and keyboard and touch work seamlessly together.
Step three, push heavily to implement office software or google docs + all other must have software

Could this be the start of another big fight between google and microsoft?

Re:Interesting

[SQLGuru]

So, is this the death of ChromeOS?

Re:Interesting

[TheReaperD]

Google stated that they intend the two codebases to merge at some point in the future. They wanted to start at the two ends and meet in the middle. So, it's not so much a death as an assimilation.

Re:Interesting

[gl4ss]

you could run chromeos on android, eventually you would like androids browser to do the native-code thing of chrome anyways. or you'd like to have android widgets and android apps on your chromeos.

chromeos is pointless as an os of it's own. everyone knows that, even the guys working on it.

pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

its all linux anyway. isnt it native x86 code all the way down with platform independent java on top ?

Re:pointless

[kvvbassboy]

Hmm, well. They would have to port the necessary drivers, Native C Libraries and Dalvik. The Linux itself is probably the easy part.

So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[muon-catalyzed]

And Intel is pushing this? Microsoft, the former "Wintel" conspirator must really be shaken by this move.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[afidel]

This was a direct response to Windows 8 on ARM.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[the linux geek]

Every build of Android since, as I recall, 1.5, has been ported to x86. It's part of Intel's (silly) strategy to put Atoms in cell phones and tablets.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[Tr3vin]

This was a direct response to Windows 8 on ARM.

Not quite. There have been projects adding x86 support to Android since 2009. There have even been devices that used x86 chips, such as the Cisco Cius. This move is more along the lines of Google supporting as many chips as possible to open up the opportunities for manufacturers and developers. So far, the focus has been on ARM chips since they are low power and well suited for mobile phones.

If anything, Windows 8 is on ARM as a direct response to Android and iOS.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Intel retaliated by making it work on AMD processors first? Or are you speculating and didn't RTFA

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[0123456]

Every build of Android since, as I recall, 1.5, has been ported to x86. It's part of Intel's (silly) strategy to put Atoms in cell phones and tablets.

I'd like an Atom in my cellphone. Then I could use it as a hand-warmer in the winter.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[pjr.cc]

This move is more along the lines of Google supporting as many chips as possible to open up the opportunities for manufacturers and developers.

I dont think this project has any real (or official) input from google. Intel's port might, but thats not this.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[shutdown -p now]

I'd like an Atom in my cellphone. Then I could use it as a hand-warmer in the winter.

You can do it with any ARM Android phone - just open any web page with Flash on it. You can bookmark it on the home screen for your convenience.

Re:So 2012 is the year of Linux/Android desktop?

[gl4ss]

not really just intels.

this is community driven thing. that's why they manage to get releases _out_.

anyways - ndk as x86 support as well so that's the real proof.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

What legacy closed or missing source x86 binary would need to be run on a phone?

If it is a new binary, the source is at hand, and it will be complied for the best whatever Instruction set architectures.

If it is legacy, emulate x86 as the speed will likely be good enough.

If it is a x86 program that must be run as fast as possible thus precluding emulation, you won't be running it on x86 on a phone.

Comment.

Re:Why?

[mug funky]

it's about being able to play angry birds on a laptop, not about being able to play commander keen on a phone.

Re:Why?

[ArhcAngel]

But you can do that now just by installing Chrome.

Re:Why?

[gman003]

It's about not keeping all your eggs in one basket. What happens if ARM suddenly dies? Or say Intel finally comes out with a 1W, quad-core, 2gHz x86 processor that kicks absolutely every ass ever known. Being able to immediately use that gives them an edge over Apple and the rest.

Besides, Android is Linux-based. The effort to make it run on x86 is probably not too significant, certainly not as hard as porting from scratch. It's a case of "why not?".

Re:Why?

[unixisc]

That was going to be my question. What does ICS gain by going to x86 - it's not that it will run Windows programs. What does x86 gain by ICS running on it - it's still not going to displace ARM.

Misleading title

[Dyinobal]

What a terrible title, Ice Cream Sandwich ported to x86, I thought we had finally added a processor to my frozen treats.

Re:Misleading title

[cyachallenge]

Intel! Make me a sammich!

Re:Misleading title

[BluBrick]

Intel! Make me a sammich!

Ah-ah-aah! You didn't say sudo.

windowsCE chinese GPSs

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a couple old x86 tables... er... chinese GPSs running windows CE... that i'd love to use for android.

Desktop Distro?

[datavirtue]

I vote for a desktop distro. I take back everything I've said about LibreOffice, I shouldn't have judged it by its stupid name. I discovered that it can use .docx the other day, I was somewhat shocked since that was the only reason I was hanging onto MS Orifice, which, as pretty as it is, is getting quite annoying these days. I would definitely try an Android desktop distro! I've been using Mint 12 for a couple of days and I'm still experiencing quirky behavior. It was pretty bad with Gnome 3, and MATE is not much better, oh well, back to Gnome Classic (No Effects). Installing an Android desktop would be like Christmas morn. It would be oh so sweet to see laptops available "like your phone" for consumers....with free Microsoft compatible office software!!

Re:Desktop Distro?

[jamesh]

I vote for a desktop distro. I take back everything I've said about LibreOffice, I shouldn't have judged it by its stupid name. I discovered that it can use .docx the other day, I was somewhat shocked since that was the only reason I was hanging onto MS Orifice, which, as pretty as it is, is getting quite annoying these days. I would definitely try an Android desktop distro! I've been using Mint 12 for a couple of days and I'm still experiencing quirky behavior. It was pretty bad with Gnome 3, and MATE is not much better, oh well, back to Gnome Classic (No Effects). Installing an Android desktop would be like Christmas morn. It would be oh so sweet to see laptops available "like your phone" for consumers....with free Microsoft compatible office software!!

I wonder if one day we'll see MS Office sold with "Compatible with Google Apps" on the box...

Re:Desktop Distro?

[clarkn0va]

Well i guess that settles the question of what a chatbot with ADHD might say after reading the entire history of /.

Re:Desktop Distro?

[Tr3vin]

Somehow it missed all of the racist rants.

Re:Desktop Distro?

[Guy Harris]

Somehow it missed all of the racist rants.

And I saw none of "naked", "petrified", "hot", or "grits" in there.

Re:Desktop Distro?

[andrewbaldwin]

Or the I for one welcome that in Soviet Russia all of us belong your bases ...??...profit

It is an interesting point though - has Slashdot groupthink got to the point where a reasonable chatbot could work -- I'm not thinking of a full Turing test - just be enough to fools a reasonable percentage of skim readers?

Some years ago I wrote a "Canonical Daily Mail Letters Page" generator which used phrases and a few key topics -- it worked (sort of) but I got bored and never quite got it polished enough to try out for real -- perhaps others are doing / already have done this for Slashdot??

Re:Desktop Distro?

[Zocalo]

Well, clearly the chatbot is browsing Slashdot with a comment threshold of at least +2. What a shame; it's missed out on all of the really entertaining stuff like reading posts falling hook line and sinker for a troll. Then again, it hasn't been traumatised by goats.cx, Tubgirl, et al so I suppose it balances out in the end.

Re:Desktop Distro?

[thejynxed]

The closest thing I know of is the Chromebook. Might be along the lines of what you're looking for. Costs $299 for the Acer model (11.6"), with another Acer model available for $399 and two Samsung models (12.1") coming soon. It has some nice features, like 16 GB SSD drive, 2 GB DDR3 RAM, multi-card reader for expanded storage, etc. Uses an Intel Atom N570 @ 1.66GHz and Intel GMA 3150 GPU @ 1366 x 768. Has 2 USB and one HDMI port. 802.11 a/b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth for connectivity.

Looks like a nifty little machine.

Re:Desktop Distro?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia hot grits are petrified naked

BlueStacks

[Namarrgon]

You could already do that.

Well, more or less. It's a port of the Android libraries to a Windows JVM, which is sufficient to run many/most Android apps (much like what RIM are doing). It's not a port of Android itself. But it does run Android apps in windows on your desktop (or fullscreen).

Not this shit again.

[mirix]

x86

smartphones

barring any major improvements in batteries, that just isn't going to be feasible.

The fast ARM phones are brutal enough on batteries, as it is.

This is not what the singularity is

[symbolset]

It's called a singularity because like the singularity of a black hole it's impossible to see what's beyond it. We can see what's beyond this: more progress and more competition. More diversity, more sales, more fitness of technology to our human needs. More connectivity between people.

We've gone beyond moving the buttons around on the word processor to sell it again to the same people who bought it before. But we can still see the future from here and it looks grand.

The Singularity is an even bigger deal, and further out.

Re:This is not what the singularity is

[Raenex]

The Singularity is an even bigger deal, and further out.

The Singularity is a bunch of hype. For one, exponential curves are not guaranteed to keep on going (see the brick wall with respect to processor speeds post 2002). Two, the technological future is always somewhat unpredictable. And three, we've been living in an age where "smarter humans" already have been created -- it's the Internet, where humanity has been working together as a super-intelligent organism.

Re:This is not what the singularity is

[Maritz]

The Internet merely demonstrates that complexity alone is not sufficient to create consciousness/self-awareness. It's more complex in structure than a brain now (the brain is complex, though more highly interated/fractal); but it isn't conscious. Skynet isn't here. Creating self-improving technology (which is basically what the 'singularity' is) is a non-trivial problem but there's no specific fatal objection that I'm aware of. I do however think it's foolhardy to attempt to make timelines on the matter, it's not amenable to being simply projected from current trends.

Anyone try it in VirtualBox yet?

[rsilvergun]

I wonder if you could download / install apps that way. There are some cool Android games out there, but I don't have an Android.

Re:Anyone try it in VirtualBox yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tried a couple of minutes ago and couldn't get it to boot. If anyone figures out how please share the details.

Re:Anyone try it in VirtualBox yet?

[steevven1]

I tried it in a VirtualBox, and it hangs on both live boot and install. FroYo works fine in a VirtualBox for me.

Re:Anyone try it in VirtualBox yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do have an android phone, but I did give the 2.3 port a try on my netbook a while back. The big problem comes from flash not really working. As much as people tend to laugh at flash on android, what they often don't realize is that a LOT of apps are actually written in flash with air. It did suck pretty bad on the first release, but as time went by the performance become pretty close to native. Enough for people to often not even realize when they're using it. This is especially true when it comes to games.

The question is...

[FlyingGuy]

Why?

The CISC vs RISC issue is dead

[symbolset]

Don't mix your memes.

Long ago CISC vendors implemented RISC as a sublayer, and the two merged. This flamewar is officially over.

The 4+1 thing is a different flamewar: SMP vs AMP (Asymmetric vs Symmetric MultiProcessing). This one is still hot because AMP is fairly new. I'm a big fan of AMP, but the SMP camp is rightly concerned about complexity of compilers and tools, race conditions and what not. Too soon to tell, but here's a thing: we dealt with the transition to 486 pretty well, and that was a merging of heterogeneous cores - a processor and a math coprocessor. We integrated GPUs and physics coprocessors pretty well, and I/O offloading too. I think we'll weather this change and come out the other side for the better. But the outcome remains uncertain. The problems involved are certainly challenging.

Re:The CISC vs RISC issue is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you've been but I've been doing asymmetric multi-processing for over 15 years, it's quite common in video game consoles.

The Atari Jaguar had a wacky 128 bit cpu and a 68K, most of the programmers did the brunt of the work on the 68K.
The Sega Saturn had a pair of Hitachi SH2 cores and a 68K. The 68K was mainly used for audio but you sometimes ran game code on it.
The PS2 has a Mips 4000 series and two VU processors, each of the VUs are a little different. VU1 is tightly coupled to the CPU, it can either be used independently or run as COP2 and has 4K of ram, VU2 is tightly coupled to the GPU and has 16K of ram. They both have the same instruction set when run independently.
The PS3 has a single multi-threaded Power PC core and 6 SPU cores.

This shit ain't new.

The only interesting thing with the new Tegra architecture is the weak asymmetric core is binary compatible and the OS decides to use it based on power and load. Big deal.

Re:The CISC vs RISC issue is dead

[serviscope_minor]

Perhaps I'm being naive, but the AMP thing in the style of Tegra (5 compatible cores with one much slower than the others) is the OSs problem, not the compiler or anything else. The main problem for race conditions is that IIRC, it is not cache coherent with the other cores, but it seems that is the problem of the OS to never schedule threads/processes sharing memory onto different units.

Even in a regular cache coherent SMP setup, one cannot rely on the cores all running at the same speed, since process will inevitibly get interrupted at random times in an unpredictable way.

Re:The CISC vs RISC issue is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 15 years? The Amiga had an entire selection of independent co-processors alongside the CPU. The Commodore C1540/1541 disc drives had a programmable 6502 in them that could be loaded from the host computer and left to it's own devices. There are probably plenty of examples in arcade cabinets from before that. Hell, the IBM S/360 architecture introduced I/O channel controllers back in the 60's!

I guess the difference between all of those and AMP is that the nVidia marketing department weren't around then...

Re:The CISC vs RISC issue is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not "only 15 years", "over 15 years". That can mean "during the course of 15 years" but clearly in this context means "for more than 15 years".

Re:Feature complete

[mattventura]

Except Apple's can be disabled by flipping one switch in the settings, no rooting required.

When will the Linux layer be replaced another OS?

[G3ckoG33k]

When will the Linux layer in Android be replaced another OS?

I don't trust Google in this matter since they don't use the standard kernel.

don't even need to install chrome

[Chirs]

It runs fine in firefox on linux

If I run this on VB...

[tombeard]

Can I spoof Carrier IQ?
What is it when you feed fake data to someone stealing/selling your personal business; we need a new word?
In any event, here's to poisoning the cache.

Re:If I run this on VB...

[Anonymous Coward]

we need a spoof app to spoof that CIQ thingy..

Re:When will the Linux layer be replaced another O

[brian.swetland]

By Google? Highly unlikely that we'd ever do that. We're pretty heavily invested in the Linux kernel and it's been working well for us in Android.

By some other entity? Could happen, but the mid and lower layers of the Android stack depend pretty heavily on running on a Linux kernel. It'd be a bunch of work for questionable gain.

hmm...

[justforgetme]

x86 never was a champ in power efficiency. It excels in instructions (performance) though, that's why it has come to dominate the "productive computing" market. The architectures Android was tailored towards both in backend and in api were designed and utilized with instruction frugality and hardware limitations in mind.

Making Android available on the much more powerful x86 ecosystem and its hardware net is counterproductive at best. Why imped a device with the limitations of a toy OS when you can utilize a complete desktop environment?

Re:hmm...

[Rennt]

Who said anything about desktops? Intel's idea is to get x86 into the Android mobile device market. Not Android into the traditional x86 market.

Re:hmm...

[justforgetme]

ohh!

Now who would have guessed that?

Re:hmm...

[shutdown -p now]

Consider this. Tablets are getting quite battery efficient, and then you've got combined devices like Asus Transformer that can last up to 16-18 hours on a single charge. That's already way more than most people practically need. Suppose, now, that there is an x86 version with only 10-12 hours of battery life, but runs all existing apps. I bet there would be a market for that.

Re:hmm...

[somersault]

Anybody who read the summary?

Re:hmm...

[JasterBobaMereel]

x86 is a huge power drain, very inefficient ... so you can now get a tablet that runs hot and has rubbish battery life ...

Re:hmm...

[justforgetme]

You missed my sarcasm...

Re:hmm...

[somersault]

It's strange to be being sarcastic to someone rebuffing your original post, as that implies that your whole first post was stupid..

Re:hmm...

[Joce640k]

The architectures Android was tailored towards both in backend and in api were designed and utilized with instruction frugality and hardware limitations in mind.

Is that why they used Java?

Re:hmm...

[ChunderDownunder]

Is your desktop OS touchscreen savvy?

A potential use case for this is to run Android on mains power from your couch using 'desktop' components. e.g. Remove the stand from your Win7 multitouch monitor and 'couchsurf' using Android in full 23" glory!

Re:hmm...

[TheRaven64]

They use Java, but not for anything performance critical. The rendering GUI are all C/C++ and they use an LLVM-based DSL compiler for things like animations. Most of the time the Java code is either sleeping waiting for user action or calling into non-Java code.

Re:hmm...

[SenseiLeNoir]

Android as a "fast" boot option to use on occasion instead of waiting to boot Ubuntu/Windows/OS-X (via bootcamp) would be an interesting prospect for me.

Re:hmm...

[brentrad]

Runs all existing x86 Android apps? Didn't think there were any.

Re:hmm...

[fast turtle]

HP already has such a system. The latest DM1z with the AMD Fusion APU chip. Gets between 8-10 hours and the best thing is, it runs Windows. Why in hell would I want a toy OS when I can already get a useful Work OS that allows me to do actual work with actual company docs and such?

Re:hmm...

[IANAAC]

Don't know what hardware you're using, but bootcamp suggests a Mac.

Anyway, on my fairly low-end AO D257 (atom-based), I get 20 second boot times to a usable desktop for both Ubuntu and Win 7.

I don't really get the obsession with sub-10 second boot times (or whatever you deem is "fast").

Re:hmm...

[UnknowingFool]

While there are not a lot of x86 tablets sold these days, there are some. For example the HP Slate. They all run Windows because that is the only OS choice that exists. Now, manufacturers (and consumers) of x86 tablets will have a choice for OS.

Re:hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Any Android App that is not a native app should work just fine.

Re:hmm...

[AvitarX]

Android boots significantly slower than my laptop. Even on my dual core tablet without a cellular part.

Re:hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

HP already has such a system. The latest DM1z with the AMD Fusion APU chip. Gets between 8-10 hours and the best thing is, it runs Windows. Why in hell would I want a toy OS when I can already get a useful Work OS that allows me to do actual work with actual company docs and such?

I had to read that many times to be sure you considered Windows to be a work OS because it runs the word processor you prefer.

Re:hmm...

[shutdown -p now]

Oh, for Android it's completely pointless. For Windows and Linux distros like Maemo/MeeGo, though, it would be awesome.

Re:hmm...

[shutdown -p now]

Android on x86 is pointless, I agree. My thought was mainly about Windows.

And a laptop is nice and all, but a laptop that can transform to a usable tablet when you want it is so much better.

Re:hmm...

[ChatHuant]

Totally off-topic, but, for your signature I think you should use "Puteulanus fenestra mortis", (blue window of death) not "mortalis" (blue window of mortal).

Re:hmm...

[justforgetme]

Is your desktop OS touchscreen savvy?

umm.. Yes. It is.

using Android in full 23" glory!

ouch! pretty much any orientation you put it in...
No mobile device/touchscreen gestures/paradigms I have witnessed scale well. It hurts to say this but apple almost did it right with the trackpad. the only thing it needed was a couple more inches of surface (and resolution).

Re:hmm...

[justforgetme]

No, they used Java because they are idiots

but as stated in the previous reply they at least managed to offload a lot of important stuff to other layers.

Re:hmm...

[Gazzonyx]

When you saying "calling into non-Java code", you're talking about the JNI, right?

Re:hmm...

[TheRaven64]

Eventually, but usually indirectly. For example, you write some Java code for compositing an image or drawing a line on Android - most of the time that's executing it will be in the Skia library, not in the Java code.

Re:hmm...

[brentrad]

So then you're really just talking about an x86 Windows/Linux netbook with long battery life, aren't you? Not any kind of new thing. Seems we already have those, although I don't know of any that get 10-12 hours battery life.

To address what you said in your original post above though, about 16-18 hours of battery time being more than most people practically need. As an owner of an Asus Transformer and the keyboard dock, which together get 14-16 hours on a charge in my experience, I find that that extra battery capacity is really freeing. It changes your behavior. I was recently at a conference, and with the super long battery life I was able to just concentrate on taking notes and the information being presented, and I didn't have to even think about finding a plug in. And I didn't have to carry a cord with me, since I was confident that I could use my tablet for over 12 hours straight, and just plug it in at the end of the day before bed. Having massive battery life is huge for a tablet/netbook, in my opinion.

I really think we're getting into an era of specialization of devices. The push in the past seems to have been towards general computing devices (x86 computers) that do everything you ask of them, from light web browsing, to heavy image editing and content creation. But since I got my tablet, I've come to realize that there is a lot of value in having different devices with different capabilities. I can't do the heavy content creation things on my tablet, but then how often do I really need to do those things, relative to the amount of time I spend doing email and web browsing? The way I've been finding myself using my tablet and desktop is this:
- I use the tablet 80-90% of the time for web browsing, email, playing games, etc.
- 10-20% of the time when I need to do something with more computing power (or something that needs a mouse), I go to my desktop.

Unlike others who say that a tablet should be able to do everything a desktop does, I think they're missing the point, or maybe they just haven't ever used a tablet for an extended amount of time. Creating a tablet with the same power as a desktop, I believe, would be futile. It would require so much battery power, that it would be very heavy - which negates the advantages of a light mobile device.

Obligatory car metaphor:
It's like having a truck and a small commuting car. A lot of people would think "well I have the need sometimes to haul stuff, so I'll just buy a truck that can do everything." And then they use that truck for daily commuting, and they burn tons of gas. The most efficient thing to do would be to get a second small car that gets great mileage, and drive that one every day to work and back. Of course, many people can't afford two cars, which is why we have so many trucks being used for commuting in the US. Similarly, many people can't afford to buy both a traditional computer, and a tablet.

Re:hmm...

[shutdown -p now]

To address what you said in your original post above though, about 16-18 hours of battery time being more than most people practically need. As an owner of an Asus Transformer and the keyboard dock, which together get 14-16 hours on a charge in my experience, I find that that extra battery capacity is really freeing. It changes your behavior. I was recently at a conference, and with the super long battery life I was able to just concentrate on taking notes and the information being presented, and I didn't have to even think about finding a plug in. And I didn't have to carry a cord with me, since I was confident that I could use my tablet for over 12 hours straight, and just plug it in at the end of the day before bed. Having massive battery life is huge for a tablet/netbook, in my opinion.

I actually wrote as another Transformer owner, and I share your feelings - but what I had in mind was Prime. Asus claims 18hr battery life when docked with that one. If an x86 version would have it reduced to 12-14, or even 10-12 hours, it's still more than any laptop, and is still close enough to what original Transformer offers to be immensely useful.

I really think we're getting into an era of specialization of devices. The push in the past seems to have been towards general computing devices (x86 computers) that do everything you ask of them, from light web browsing, to heavy image editing and content creation

I disagree. I think that devices like Asus Transformer, Motorola Atrix, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet etc are all part of the early strain of de-specialization of devices. However, it's more subtle. The point is to have a single device that can easily be modified for whatever factor is to be convenient for the task at hand. When I surf the web or read a book, I want a tablet. When I write Slashdot comments, I want a laptop (for the keyboard). When I work on a text document or spreadsheet, I want not only keyboard, but also trackpad with a mouse cursor. But there is no reason why it all can't be the same device that is simply adjusted to whatever shape is desired.

The important thing is that the device should adjust its UI to the form factor. Desktop UI doesn't work for a tablet - that much we found out since the failure of Tablet PC. But it works just fine on a netbook with keyboard and mouse. So, when my Transformer is in "netbook mode", why shouldn't it support legacy apps written for the desktop metaphor?

Short term, I don't see tablets catching up with desktops with respect to sheer power. But they have already caught up with netbooks, and netbooks take care of 90% of the remaining 30% of tasks that you can't do on your tablet, and need a desktop for. So why not make the solution complete? Asus has already hit the nail right on the head with Transformer - it's exactly how the device should look like. The problem with Transformer is the OS, or rather its ecosystem - while Android itself does support hardware keyboard with shortcuts and mouse cursor for trackpad, the apps are not written for it - and it doesn't run non-Android apps which do. So the hardware has potential that is not fully unlocked by software. I'm eagerly waiting for either Win8 (which seems to be designed with this kind of use very much in mind), or someone implementing it for Android, enabling running desktop apps like OpenOffice on top of it.

Re:hmm...

[brentrad]

Interesting. You might be right, re-configurable devices might be the future, but I think they're still in their infancy so who knows. It really all comes down to execution. After all, tablets are not at all new - but it took Apple to finally make them usable and popular. I'm no fan of Apple's policies and lack of power user options on the iPad, but you have to admit they know how to make a device useable and that sells.

The only re-configurable device I've seen that pretty much works as advertised is the Transformer. The Atrix I haven't heard much good about - the "netbook" interface when you dock the phone isn't even Android, it's a completely different Linux-based interface, so it runs completely different apps. For another take on a phone/tablet convergence, check out the Asus PadFone. It consists of an Android smartphone and a tablet with a pocket in the back to dock your smartphone. I have no idea how well that will work, we'll see when (if) it gets released.

I think the real spoiler will come from ARM-based Windows 8. The big question is app support. If Microsoft comes out with ARM versions of all its big apps (Office in particular), they could have a big winner: tablet form-factor, long battery life, plus runs the apps you're used to. But you still won't be able to run all the other ecosystem of non-Microsoft Windows x86 apps, unless the vendor writes a new version. And seeing how glacial most software vendors have been in even coming up with non-Windows XP versions of their apps...

You said "The important thing is that the device should adjust its UI to the form factor." Which is what I think Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 (but so far we've only seen the Developer's Preview, and Microsoft is being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their plans.) You can use the Metro interface when your tablet is undocked, then drop to desktop UI (explorer) when you have a keyboard and mouse attached. The big question though is still apps. Can an app be written to work just as well with a mouse and keyboard, as it works with a touch interface? Do you need to write two completely different UI's? I don't think we know the answers to those questions yet.

IMO x86 tablets will never catch up to ARM based tablets - x86 just has too high of power needs. Although I wouldn't put it past Intel to pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with something both low-powered and powerful - but if they were anywhere near beating ARM in this area, you'd think they'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops. So I'm skeptical.

Re:hmm...

[shutdown -p now]

I think the real spoiler will come from ARM-based Windows 8. The big question is app support. If Microsoft comes out with ARM versions of all its big apps (Office in particular), they could have a big winner: tablet form-factor, long battery life, plus runs the apps you're used to. But you still won't be able to run all the other ecosystem of non-Microsoft Windows x86 apps, unless the vendor writes a new version. And seeing how glacial most software vendors have been in even coming up with non-Windows XP versions of their apps...

That is true. Speaking of ARM, keep in mind that desktop apps are only a recompile away, and porting x86->ARM is actually easier than x86->x64. The only thing that really breaks is any handwritten asm code, but that wasn't common in ages.

You said "The important thing is that the device should adjust its UI to the form factor." Which is what I think Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 (but so far we've only seen the Developer's Preview, and Microsoft is being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their plans.) You can use the Metro interface when your tablet is undocked, then drop to desktop UI (explorer) when you have a keyboard and mouse attached.

Yes. From my perspective, Transformer and Win8 are a perfect match. Then again, if that combo succeeds, I see Google hopping on to the bandwagon. They've already done considerable work in Honeycomb and ICS to support notebook-like devices (e.g. mouse cursor in Transformer actually comes from stock Android - you can also observe it on a recent Android phone is you connect a USB or Bluetooth mouse to it; so do shortcuts like Alt+Tab). They've also added some new APIs, like onMouseHover, in 3.2. I hope for more of that coming in.

But what they really need is to goad the developers into supporting it all properly. Right now, about the only apps that fully use Transformer keyboard & touchpad are a couple of RDP and VNC clients. Even stock apps that come on Transformer - say, Polaris Office doesn't support Shift+arrows to select text! That's a crying shame. Win8 doesn't have that problem, since it retains the legacy desktop culture, and there's no shortage of developers able and willing to provide such apps for it - if anything, the problem is the other way around, convincing developers to make touch Metro apps.

The big question though is still apps. Can an app be written to work just as well with a mouse and keyboard, as it works with a touch interface? Do you need to write two completely different UI's?

I think that "two completely different UIs" is the only viable option. I'm not aware of any desktop apps that were successfully ported to touch devices without a complete UI rewrite. That said, you can still keep most of the app logic intact between two versions.

But yes, it'll take some actual experience with this kind of thing to really figure out the best approach. We have a lot of experience with pure touch now, since iPad, but little with hybrid devices.

IMO x86 tablets will never catch up to ARM based tablets - x86 just has too high of power needs. Although I wouldn't put it past Intel to pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with something both low-powered and powerful - but if they were anywhere near beating ARM in this area, you'd think they'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops. So I'm skeptical.

I don't expect them to catch up. I'm just saying that they might be able to come close enough that it's workable as a tablet (in terms of size & battery life) for practical needs - basically somewhere about where iPad is today. Sure, ARM devices will advance further by that point, but x86 might be "good enough", and give practical benefits of being able to run existing apps for those people who care. Of course, it all depends on how many actually care. Personally, I'd want it to run old games like AoW and Majesty. Some might want them for business use where they already have x86 apps that were written in VB6 a decade ago and cannot be easily ported. It's not a big niche, but it's there.

Re:hmm...

[JasterBobaMereel]

Ta Muchly ...

Like Shakespeare I have "little Latin, and less Greek" ...

86 comments

[Anonymous Coward]

There were 86 comments when I read this..

Disambiguation of x86

[Rhodri Mawr]

Having read the article, I'm still unclear as to whether in this case x86 means only x86-32 or whether it means x86-32 and x86-64. These days x86 is usually used to refer specifically to x86-32 and x64 is used to refer to x86-64.

I'm assuming that common sense would suggest that the article means both x86-32 and x86-64, but the ambiguity in the use of x86 reduces clarity and does no-one any favours.

Re:Disambiguation of x86

[Anonymous Coward]

"x64" is nonsensical bullshit that Microsoft invented and all the retards copied.

why x86 tablets/phones?

[sl4shd0rk]

I don't understand the point of trying to run the x86 architecture on a device where you want efficiency and low power use.

Thanks for the answer!

[G3ckoG33k]

Brian, thanks for the answer and the important perspective - questionable gain!

It would also be nice to hear some perspectives on future Android compatibility with GTK/Qt/etc. :)

Run on VM for Adroid development?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was my first thought. If you wanted to develop for Android, it might be useful to run ICS in a VM.

Re:Feature complete

[TheRaven64]

Actually, Google doesn't include CarrierIQ code in the OS they ship

Of course they don't. They don't want any competition when it comes to spying on their users...

Android native on every computer ASAP

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Listen, Google: I know you and Intel want Android running on x86 in order to diversify the ecosystem, and that's all well and good, but there's something you need to do as quickly as possible.

You need to get Android apps running on every desktop computer, at the same snappy speed they run on cell phones.

Microsoft is looking to sneak this in the back door by forcing Windows 8 users to become Windows Phone users. You can counter this by putting a full Android runtime into Chrome, and perhaps even making it dockable in Linux/Mac/Windows as well. With the full catalog of Android apps available on every desktop, Android will become the de facto new standard operating system for everything, everywhere.

Do this now. Before Microsoft does.

Wait - on an ice cream sandwich?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was amazing that Linux ran on a toaster, but on an ice cream sandwich?!!!

Just don't overclock it - it will melt.

Yum Yum!

[Anonymous Coward]

Woot!

I can't wait to modify this to run on my Acer Tablet PC!

Google not the same as M$

[FriendofTwitter]

This sound like Microsoft's strategy all over again. Anyway you cut it a single platform ecosystem is ugly, as it just lets another monopoly.

New boss same as the old boss

This sounds like an M$ astroturfer is trying to confuse people into thinking Google is the same as M$. M$ is a convicted monopoly for a reason. How much has M$ paid you to troll $lashdot using multiple names?

Re:Google not the same as M$

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilariously paranoid. I doubt if MS instruct their astroturfers to refer to them in monopolistic, obviously negative terms. "Keep making references to how we're convicted of anti-competitive prices; that'll sort our image out."

Oh good

[Anonymous Coward]

Just want I always wanted; a portable device with worse battery life!

second reply

[symbolset]

I know the way forward. You don't. You can buy this secret from me. You won't. And that's the end of that story.