> I'm puzzled too. The latest wave of mobile appliances is technologically > successful and is able to run on a "clean" architecture (ARM), without > all the legacy encumbered of x86.
Just to be clear, developing for ARM isn't quite that rosy. For every ARM CPU I've ever played with (Android phone, Synology NAS, iGala picture frame etc.) it's quite a tricky process to setup the toolchain and makefiles. Remember the SoC's use a mishmash of instruction sets and extensions, this is both the beauty and the complexity of the architecture. ARM sells/licences designs, Intel sells actual silicon... the latter carries more legacy aspects, but it is still more homogeneous. Btw. Linus Torwalds lately expressed his concerns regarding developing for ARM: http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/175829/arm-and-linux-major-construction-ahead > I'm wondering whether Intel is really interested in mobile and > > tablets, or whether they want, just in case, to be able to migrate > > "real" desktops to Android. > I think it's simply a matter of them spreading their portfolio, mobile computing is after all destined to take over quite a bit of the typical desktop space. And with so much cash in the bank, why not? It was, after all, Intel's small research team in Israel that came up with the Core (Pentium-M micro-architecture) that ended up saving Intel from loosing to AMD, back when Oregon engineers went pipeline crazy with the NetBurst (Pentium 4) micro-architecture. In Intel's defense, they also tried with Itanium but, at least in the past decade, there was little incentive to leave the proven and backwards-compatible x86 platform. Times have changed though. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/mJuGQiIaGBkJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
