Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

Just as an info point for you all...Windows as we now know it is built on Windows NT, which was cross-platform, supporting not only x86, but PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, (and internally, Sparc). ...and that's just the 32-bit architectures. It also supported 64-bit Alpha and Itanium, and Windows 8 will support ARM.

...so it's not as bad in that regard as this thread makes out ;)

Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

This Medfiled thing comprises a complete system in a chip, even the RAM.

Not so many years ago, an Intel cpu had the memory controller outside the cpu, opposite as AMDs, that had it inside it,at least in the package.

What ARM sells it's the core of the cpu. The different manufacturers added different things to that core: memory controllers, GPUs, sound controllers, touchscreen controllers... and packaged them in a single chip. That way, we have had all those different cpus trough the years.

An example of this are the Intel Core series, were in a single chip we had several cores, but not complete cpus. And in the recent Core i3, i5... units, we even had an integrated memory controller (a feature that AMD cpus have had for years) that wasn't there before.

In the PC world we have this Virtualbox virtual machine. It can be installed in OSX, in windows, linux, solaris, and bsd. And it can run many, if not almost all every x86 OS out there.

And why can do that? Because it's a virtual machine, but not a cpu emulator, like qemu. The fact that the OS of the host it's installed on, and the OS of the guest you want to run, is compiled to the same cpu, helps a lot.

So imagine that even if we don't have a bios or a efi, a properly compiled virtualbox from the open source edition, for a device made with this medfield chip, will be able to run windows, dos and other OS that rely on bios to properly run, and a higher speed, because, a last, it's a x86 cpu.

And if you think I'm wrong, take a look at this and this. Those are videos showing a htc hd2 running windows 95 and xp under cpu emulation.

The hd2 sports a qualcomm cpu, which is not a x86 cpu at all.

If a non-x86 cpu can do this, what can we expect from a x86 cpu?

I don't enter, I say, in what each one of us thinks about windows, linux, osx or whatever, but in the possibilities with this.

Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

I found the Ars Technica article on the subject very interesting.
And indeed, PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, so much for hoping for drivers... :(

Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

ARM licenses the blueprint of the CPU, companies manufacture it and add other bits onto one die, i.e SoC.

PSP with a 333MHz MIPS processor runs Win95, 98, so what of it? If you wanna know what to expect, slap 95 and XP on an Atom netbook.

Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

What I meant was that if a non x86 could run Windows under cpu emulation, what could be done under cpu virtualization?

I know that tablets and smartphones are not the ideal hardware for desktop computing.

I know that those windows runnings are just a proof of concept that a real solution.

But it comes to my mind projects like XPlite, 98lite, nlite... Those tools allows to create your very own customized version of Windows, removing bloatware, and keeping things to minimum.

Maybe not everyone, specially in developers/power users/hackers area, wants to run Windows in their native x86 portable hardware, but many users will be more than happy if they have windows live messenger, microsoft office 97, and all those old but still functional apps while on the go - leaving aside what you and me think about them.

Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

Intel ...making an Atom use less energy, and hoping to slap Android on it.
Good luck!

MaeOS + big.LITTLE computing would provide much more power at less energy consumption, but it doesn't matter as long as you market it correctly, right?

Re: Intel enters in smartphone market: Game Over for ARM.
 

An interesting difference between x86 and ARM regarding the platforms that will ship Windows (and there will be some.)