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Intel Confronts a Big Mobile Challenge: Native Compatibility

Posted by Soulskill on from the write-once-run-nowhere dept.

smaxp writes: "Intel has solved the problem of ARM-native incompatibility. But will developers bite? App developers now frequently bypass Android's Dalvik VM for some parts of their apps in favor of the faster native C language. According to Intel, two thirds of the top 2,000 apps in the Google Play Store use natively compiled C code, the same language in which Android, the Dalvik VM, and the Android libraries are mostly written.

The natively compiled apps run faster and more efficiently, but at the cost of compatibility. The compiled code is targeted to a particular processor core's instruction set. In the Android universe, this instruction set is almost always the ARM instruction set. This is a compatibility problem for Intel because its Atom mobile processors use its X86 instruction set."

2 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. "newsy" bits by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Informative

    Somehow missing from TFS...

    Intel has released a beta of its native development environment called Intel Integrated Native Developer Experience, (INDE) and written plugins for Eclipse the most Android developers use to build for Android so the apps can be X86 compatible and execute efficiently on Atom processor-based hardware.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  2. Bigger problem than Intel admits by edxwelch · · Score: 5, Informative

    ARM ran a survey of the top 500 Android apps in the market and found that only 20% are pure Java, 30% are native x86, 42% require binary translation and 6% do not work at all on Intel's platform. To make matters worse the level of compatibility is falling. They also found that running an app in binary translation mode takes a huge performance hit."
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...