Not me who says it, but Sebastian Anthony from Extremetech.

And I think he is right, but not because Motorola goes in.

A SoC x86 compatible system means smartphones, tablets, handhelds, netbooks... than can run whatever x86 thing you want to, with no emulation at all.

You can have a Windows or Linux machine running in the size of a N900.

They can say "wait, you already can do that", but this time is different because this is native. Linux does get coded with x86 in mind and then ported to other platforms. Linux gets updates first, and then the other platforms. Also, when you have the kernel as much as optimized as possible to the SoC core, you then can focus to the rest of the hardware.

So when they start to release tablets with this SoC and opensource-driven hardware, developing for *any* other platform will be the same that today is to develop for exotic systems: a challenge.

Intel can try and market what ever they want, but manufacturers and customers have always found that Intel's claims of battery efficient parity with ARM chips were WAAAAAY overblown in all past attempts.

Am I the only one to remember the Moorestown marketing crap that mostly seems to be repeated verbatim in this article you are referencing?

At this point, any talk of Intel producing X86 chips for "mobile" devices to try and displace ARM's dominance sounds like nothing more then crying wolf.

and when you get a x86 pocket device with windows or some other os and a locked bootloader how do you think that you will install anything else on it

btw. mobile phones with embeded x86 processors exist since the 90's and the arm is still here somehow...

Linux gets coded with C in mind; yes, it gets compiled into x86 binaries first, because there just are a lot of x86 cpus out there, but the days of Linux being tied to any one specific architecture are long past. I can't think of any significant Linux product these days actually using any assembler code; you can get pretty good speed with properly written C, and being platform-independent is just too valuable to throw away.

There's a reason why you find Linux on everything from embedded devices to supercomputers...

...site knowingly biased towards American companies. "ultra-low-power Atom chips", yeah sure. There's just money pushing it in, probably.

Game over? I doubt it. Many new smartphones have ARM Cortex processors which are as fast as my Atom-powered netbook. But the Atom runs at about 8 watts. The ARM processor? 2 watts max. Also, look at price...there's a reason most new manufacturers are going into phones: the profit margin for an ARM-powered device is much higher. Unless Intel is able to bring down the cost and power usage, this is not going to go very far.

Intel/Nokia

Now Intel/Motorola...

I don´t know, seems to me that all Intel movements are for preventing ARM to enter the servers market and other strategic areas for them.

The new Intel CPU is awesome.
It is more powerful than a Tegra 2 and consumes less battery.

Opensource-driven hardware? Excuse me, I have to laugh. Ha ha. He he.

Now what were you saying? ah, Intel. Yeah, I'm sure ARM are scared now.

In case you don't know, almost every low-power smart device in this world runs on Linux or a variant thereof. That means ARM is supported out-of-the-box.

The only relevance of x86 low-power hardware would be to run those lame operating systems that only support (and badly at that) x86. I think that would be Windows.

Now, who would want Windows on a low-power device? Heck, who would want Windows on a high-power device?

List of architectures supported by linux.

List of architectures supported by windos, ugh...1.


Linux is already the most important operating system in use today, you just do not realise it yet.