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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."
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.
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.
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).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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
Well i guess that settles the question of what a chatbot with ADHD might say after reading the entire history of /.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
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.
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
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.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.