Gadgetory

in our recent videos we've talked about processors we focus mainly on arm-based processors and processors that use the arm is a their advantages disadvantages and basically how they work well what about Intel don't they make processors as well that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode of the android guy weekly today's question comes to us from pratik i assume he's in India I hope he is because if so he's got kind of an advantage over us in America and other countries but I'll get to that in just a minute he wants to know specifically about Intel and why we haven't seen many intel architecture based androids well the answer to that is relatively simple you see Intel is a sisk based architecture all of their chips and I know saying all is going to get me in trouble but for the most part their chips are all complex instruction set computing or sisk now there are several different kinds of sisk processors that complicates things a little bit more everything that we've been talking about up to now has been risk based processors reduced instruction set computing now just a little recap you can run things through a processor faster if you've got a simpler instruction set so if you reduce that instruction set you get better speeds unfortunately that means you've got to do some reducing of the instructions that you're sending through the processor up front that's either done on the fly or that's done by pre compiling well if it's pretty compiling that's not going to take the end-user any more time but if it's done on the fly obviously that's going to take up some time as well and it really becomes kind of a catch-22 intel sticking with the sisk it's what they do best now can we run android on a cyst based system yeah we can unfortunately it does have to be a some compilation to run on the different architecture in fact if we want to take a page from history Microsoft was doing this with Windows Mobile back before it was called windows mobile there were several different types of processors that you can run on now they weren't sisk versus risk they were risk versus risk but they were different processors they had different instruction sets because of that all of your apps had to be custom compiled to run on the different architecture including the operating system android has an advantage over that yes you do have to have a different compliation compilation I think that last one was it of the operating system that's not a problem because you know it comes pre-installed on your hardware so if you're going to have Intel hardware you're going to have a custom-built Android operating system that runs on that but then we get back to the question of apps will these apps need to be recompiled to run on a cyst architecture luckily with Android the answer is no you don't have to do that why because Android apps all run in virtual machines now that means the vm that they're running in has to be recompiled to run in a different architecture but once that virtual machine is recompiled all of the old apps will run in it just fine that's one of the beauties of Java so we learned about Java now I know we're not talking java java oracle java sun java we're talking google java and if you don't know what I'm talking about just look up the Oracle versus Google java lawsuit it's a pain in the neck but that's one of the advantages of that metaphor shall we say so we don't get into any trouble with some patent lawyers or a cool what you do is you write once and you can run anywhere but not quite anywhere we run into another problem you see that vm really kept up with all the hardware advantages that role are coming down the line you see these systems on the chip come with a built-in GPU and some other bells and whistles those GPUs have a lot of power they can really accelerate your graphics but you have to be able to take advantage of that in the traditional desktop laptop code writing if you will you write to a specific graphics driver and since there are only two or three out there in the desktop world you have these people that are writing a game let's say and they write it for AMD or they write it for nvidia or they write it for whom whomever right but they're plugging in to specific ap is in the graphics driver itself we don't want to do that with mobile we don't want to do that in this write once run anywhere metaphor but people are doing that you can and that kind of runs into problems there's usually a fallback to say hey if you're running one of these super high-end GPUs great do this and its accelerated and it's buttery smooth and it looks nice the graphics are amazing but if not fall back and you get basic stuff which is a shame because some of these processors have high-end GPUs married with them they just don't have custom written code in all those apps to talk to them which is then further complicated by switching over from a risk to a sisk based architecture with me so far okay so where are we at with Intel well there are some districts of Android that you can get that will run on your desktop based android OS your desktop OS you can run android right there now I've got an x86 processor which runs x64 instructions what does that mean you can run 32-bit or 64-bit apps or programs on my desktop computer it's great well the whole I 86 platform is kind of interesting and with mobile processors particularly the intel atom processor Intel didn't go that route there's a different instruction set it's called I 32 guys correct me here with this one okay it's essentially a mobile based instruction set it's simpler it's 32 bit it's not going to run your 64-bit stuff unfortunately that means it's going to be a little bit slower than if you had that full band with a 64-bit pipe the arm stuff to the best of my knowledge is all 32-bit so we're still staying with the can I say apples to apples really you guys get mad at me for that anyway it's still the same architecture just different thoroughly confused okay are there any phones or tablets out there that can run this stuff that's what pratik might be lucky if he's in India and I think he probably is there is a phone that you can get that is available in India costs about four hundred and twenty bucks us but it is an intel atom based phone supposed to be really really nice battery life is supposed to be amazing it's called the Zillow x0 and essentially it proves it can be done and it can be done well we just haven't quite seen an intel-based smartphone over here in the states yet and I suspect we'll probably start out with an intel based tablet before we see an intel-based smartphone that answer everybody's questions I 86 I 6432 Intel Atom Wow lots and lots of stuff now we specifically didn't go into the atom based architecture because there are many of them different platforms you can even run some Adam stuff inside a desktop PC but special motherboard special sockets special all that fun stuff that's why it's best when it's a system-on-a-chip which the later atom based processors are there not just a processor they're an entire SOC again not going too much into that but know that they've kind of crossed the bridge from desktop laptop computing into mobile computing by adding the whole SOC architecture which they really didn't have before if you've got some comments that you want to add to the discussion of the topic on this make sure you leave some comments for us over at pocketnow.com for pocket now and the android guy weekly i'm joe levi