

Armdroid - mjfern
http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/16/armdroid/

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liljimmytables
I remember as a student, years ago, writing a little hobby OS for my PC and
thinking of the assembly language "and this is the most popular architecture?
Ye gods." It was just so arcane compared to the MIPS we'd been taught in
class. I don't know if the situation has improved over the (10 or so) years,
but I think that student-me would be pleased at the emergence of a common
platform with a RISC architecture.

Sent from my Dell Streak. Hey young Jimmy! Dell have made a RISC box. It's a
bit smaller than that Ultra 1 though...

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pjscott
Android can also run just fine on MIPS processors, and there are MIPS options
available which are competitive with the offerings from ARM. And of course it
has been ported to Intel's Atom processor.

Windows only really runs on x86 these days, but the Linux-based Android OS is
not so encumbered.

~~~
recoil
Is the MIPS architecture still seeing continuing development the way ARM is?
After Sony stopped using them with the PS3, I stopped paying attention and had
begun to write them off.

~~~
pmarin
The chinese processor Loongson [1] uses the MIPS instruction set and it is
used in some netbooks (Stallman is using one of those netbooks as his main
computer)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson>

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Cushman
_...and Google’s growing suite of cloud services (e.g., Gmail, Maps, YouTube,
Android Market)_

...that run on commodity hardware running Intel chips.

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Aegean
I think the most special achievement of Android is that it created a very
successful mobile application environment on top of the Linux kernel. This was
missing and the state of software on ARM-Linux was a set of crippled versions
of desktop linux software retrofitted for embedded. Now its all different.

As a separate note, anyone interested in kernel-level work on ARM and Android
feel free to contact me. (contact on profile) We do some interesting work on
ARM Linux kernel and need skilled people.

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yason
I would suspect it won't take long until Microsoft simply _has to have_ a
Windows ARM build that is also tuned and/or redesigned to consume as little
electricity as possible.

Considering the _backwarts_ -compatible bloat that Windows is this might even
turn out to be a good thing.

------
megablast
"As of September 2010, the Windows OS controlled 91% of the PC market (Net
Applications, 2010), while Intel microprocessors controlled just over 80%
(IDC, 2010)."

Not sure how Windows can control 91%, but Intel only 80%, since Windows only
runs on Intel. I would think, in the PC market, Intel would have almost 100%
now, since Mac OS and Linux run on Intel. Not sure what other OS he is
thinking about.

Anyway, this is great to see, and why Microsoft is so worried. It is possible
the reason they let Windows Mobile OS stagnate in the first place, fear of
Mobile market becoming to popular.

~~~
tryp
AMD has a decent share of the current 'Wintel' market. In the recent past IDT,
cyrix and transmeta also dabbled in x86 processors.

