I am honestly curious, why was an Intel Atom processor choosen in favor of an ARM one in the Jolla tablet? X86 processors are generally more energy hungry than comparable arm based ones and the jolla tablet has a pretty small battery. Support for the Intel atom on the linux platform is abysmal to say the least. Plus there is the issue of software compatibility, all the native applications on sailfish os are compiled for arm so you won't be able to use any of the native apps from sailfish os. I guess you could run apps designed for desktop linux, but sailfish os lacks several components from desktop linux necessary for running said applications.
Were Intel Atom chips cheaper? Was there more available reference designs and were reference designs more customizable? Did Intel provide technical or marketing assistance of some sort?
To me it seems the tegra k1 would be a better choice given that it is arm based and has open source drivers with excellent linux support. Plus many tablets already use it.

One particular reason is finding a good proposition that has a high-level display at that pricepoint, enough oomph to drive the display, a hefty GPU.. I think the Intel direction is quite nice.

AFAIK, there is a possibility of running ARM binaries on Intel cpus using the Intel emulator. Which is what used in x86 Android devices to run ARM only binaries.

I don't know if Sailfish can (legally) also use the emulator. If possible, you'd be able to install ARM Sailfish packages (although with less performance).

Because of: Intel Turnkey Program

The program helps with reference designs, development tools and lots of marketing $$$. http://www.computerbase.de/2014-06/t...r-smartphones/

Read it as Intel Turkey Program, which made sense, giving thanks for giving intel a chance in mobile

Qemu can be used legally, though all libraries would have to come in two flavours too, might be not worth the extra load. Jolla has the advantage of being rather new, so not so many stale packages out there yet, wish we had extras devel that would automatically result in both types being available removing that problem altogether (at least for open packages)

Afaik, there won't be a compatibility problem. You just select a different target and compile for Atom and as long as your code is nicely portable, you'll be able to publish for both ARM and Atom with the same code. There are suddenly quite a few Atom Android tablets around too, so they should be well supported.

Yeah, pretty much every app in store will compile, unless author didn't bother checking if his work works in SDK emulator (it uses i486 target iirc, so x86 that should run on atom), only problem is guys who submitted only arm binary and left the scene

They cannot even make proper linux drivers for the Bay Trail stuff,
so they have a bit of a credibility issue when they
shill this sort of thing

Since the Jolla tablet is Atom based will this mean the ability to run Sailfish os on Intel Atom tablet like the myriad of 8 inch Windows 8 tablets?