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

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?

[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.

Emulator?

[mustPushCart]

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

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).

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.

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: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.