Letalis Sonus
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You do know about the situation of x86 SGX linux drivers? <_<
'real' Pandora Clone?
- Thread starter dgame
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Grench
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I don't get it. Cool that they ported Android to it but - huh???
It's a 2ghz single core 64bit X86 CPU with 1GB RAM. I wonder how long it will be until someone hacks it and gets a mainstream Linux desktop distribution rolled into it - as it should be.
I wonder if OpenGL will work on it with 64bit Linux - maybe Mint?
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Actually it isn't 64-bit. It could be, but Intel doesn't like that for some reason so they've fused that functionality off in Medfield. Too bad because Atoms would benefit greatly from running in 64-bit mode on an OS that supports an x32 mode. Those extra registers would help it a lot.
Not a lot of people are putting Linux on phones and Medfield phones aren't hitting critical mass anytime soon. So I wouldn't hold my breath for that. If you don't get why it's running Android instead of Linux in the first place then you're probably a bit out of touch with what people expect in a phone.
Not a lot of people are putting Linux on phones and Medfield phones aren't hitting critical mass anytime soon. So I wouldn't hold my breath for that. If you don't get why it's running Android instead of Linux in the first place then you're probably a bit out of touch with what people expect in a phone.
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Grench
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According to this it is 64bit. /http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Atom/Intel-Atom%20Z2460.html
They could have gotten it wrong.
You're missing the point. The biggest advantage X86 would have on any platform is in executing legacy x86 applications as native.
The phone bits of a phone are the easy part these days. It is the computer part that the phones do that is hard. It would have made more sense to me for them to put Windows XP on it with a phone skin than to go Android. At least with XP they would have been able to easily load and launch X86 applications - which, again, is an X86 computer/phone's biggest advantage.
By re-compiling and patching Android onto an X86 they will need some form of virtual machine to emulate an ARM CPU and ARM-Android phone environment in order to run the applications in the Google Play store - don't they?
So - as I said. I don't get it. Why go through all of the effort to put an X86 CPU in a phone then cripple it's only real advantage by forcing it to do exactly what all of the other Android phones are doing?
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
http://www.realworldtech.com/medfield/2/
"The Saltwell core is a dual-threaded, two issue, in-order, stalling microarchitecture reminiscent of the original Pentium. The instruction set architecture is x86-64 with all the extensions up to and including SSSE3. However, variants optimized for phones will only be available as 32-bit devices, as the memory footprint is limited to 1GB. Versions that are optimized for tablets, low-end notebooks or other form factors that can fit in 2-4GB of memory are likely to have 64-bit support enabled."
David Kanter's comment on phone chips applies to Medfield. The tablet and netbook variants are Clover Trail and Cedar Trail respectively.
I think you're the one missing the point. Intel didn't make Medfield so that phones could run legacy Windows apps. There's very little market demand for this. Windows XP would suck for doing things that a phone needs to be good at. It doesn't matter how much you in particular might want it; if there's no market demand they won't do it. That should be crystal clear to you.
Intel makes Medfield because Intel wants a piece of the mobile market share, not because Intel is trying to make a new market. Medfield is x86 because Intel makes x86 processors; they have more experience optimizing x86 processor designs, they can leverage existing tools (like for instance validation suites), they don't need to pay licensing costs, and they can better lock in vendors with it.
Android apps already run on a virtual machine called Dalvik, which normally JITs bytecode. Only apps using the NDK execute native code. So yes, ARM NDK binaries are translated to x86 binaries and there's a big performance hit. But NDK is a fat binary format, so you can contain for both ARM and x86 binaries, and usually (unless the app uses platform specific stuff without a portable fallback) there isn't a good reason not to do this anymore. And besides that, a lot of what people run on Android isn't store bought apps but stock stuff like the web browser, media player, mail client, etc. Lack of native ARM support is a disadvantage but not nearly at the scale you're presenting it.
elwing
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an x86 in a phone makes no sense at all... an ultraportable device able to run windows or linux nativelly would make sense, but theses x86 phone are just ridiculous yet... if they made a device like the pandora but with a x86 and not bundled with a crippled android that you need to root to do anything that would be quite interesting.
it's just a way for phone maker to put an intel logo on their phone and a way for intel to enter a new market
it's just a way for phone maker to put an intel logo on their phone and a way for intel to enter a new market
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Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
The x86 part isn't an advantage for the end user, but if the SoC (which includes much more than just CPU cores) otherwise provides good features, perf, perf/W, price, etc, compared to its competitors then why wouldn't it be a good choice for a phone? Assuming the ARM NDK disadvantage doesn't hit them too hard, and that disadvantage will only go down in time. It's not a question of if it makes sense to "go x86" for phones but if Intel has what it takes to play in the phone market, because Intel is going to make it x86 no matter what.
I'm not saying Medfield fulfills any of that in particular but you shouldn't underestimate Intel just because it's x86. They still have a lot of experience with processor design and in the future will end up with a much bigger manufacturing advantage for their SoCs. The "x86 tax" (both in area and power consumption) is less significant with more advanced processors; it'll hit something Cortex-A15 class less substantially than it hits something Cortex-A8 class, which hits less substantially than it hits something ARM7 class, etc. And it's not like ARM doesn't have its own idiosyncrasies that translate into hardware costs, hence why they went in a few different directions for AArch64.
My big complaint is that right now Medfield's Saltwell is just not a great CPU core regardless of ISA and a couple benchmarks are greatly skewing that, and (current) Medfield isn't great by only having one CPU core and a fairly lame GPU.
I'm not saying Medfield fulfills any of that in particular but you shouldn't underestimate Intel just because it's x86. They still have a lot of experience with processor design and in the future will end up with a much bigger manufacturing advantage for their SoCs. The "x86 tax" (both in area and power consumption) is less significant with more advanced processors; it'll hit something Cortex-A15 class less substantially than it hits something Cortex-A8 class, which hits less substantially than it hits something ARM7 class, etc. And it's not like ARM doesn't have its own idiosyncrasies that translate into hardware costs, hence why they went in a few different directions for AArch64.
My big complaint is that right now Medfield's Saltwell is just not a great CPU core regardless of ISA and a couple benchmarks are greatly skewing that, and (current) Medfield isn't great by only having one CPU core and a fairly lame GPU.
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