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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."
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."
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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
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.
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.