Android 4.0 For x86 Is Now Available

[bridgman]

There's a YouTube demo up now, including Android Market :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugG80Zqjgd4

[Ansla]

This works surprisingly good on my AMD Fusion E-350 notebook!

It works not so surprisingly good on my E-450 notebook. It did boot (very slow, about twice as slow as a Fedora live CD) and the GUI showed up on screen, but the screen was flickering every time I moved the mouse cursor. Almost nothing else worked, the keyboard was recognized by the kernel according to dmesg but key presses appeared to do nothing, wifi was again recognized by the kernel but it couldn't be activated from the GUI.
That is all I was able to test before it went to sleep, as it looks like even though the touchpad was moving the cursor on screen it didn't count as "activity" for Android. The only thing counting as activity was key presses, even though it did not react to them in any other way. So pressing a key woke up Android only to see a garbled screen.

And, btw, when they say x86 they really mean 32 bits, I was expecting at least the kernel to be x86_64, but it didn't even have PAE enabled.

[bridgman]

We saw that flickering on one of our systems a couple of months ago. Don't remember what fixed it but will see if it was an actual fix or just went away, ie "the next image didn't flicker".

There is another YouTube demo covering first boot - I also thought it seemed pretty slow but I think it was running some kind of setup wizard as well.

I don't think I've ever seen mention of 64-bit Android -- AFAIK it's pretty much 32-bit only for now. You can run (32-bit) Android emulation on a 64-bit (Windows) system but that's not the same thing

[Ansla]

The reason why I expected it to use a 64bit kernel is that all x86 chips that will be produced from now on are 64bit capable, and by the time Android x86 will be ready for production 2GB or even more will be a usual amount of RAM for a tablet, and a 32bit kernel can not efficiently handle that amount. I didn't follow the development of Android, I only tried it out of curiosity and because of the comment that it works on a E-350.

[DeepDayze]

I don't know about Android Market, but if you are expecting to buy/download applications and run them on x86 there will be some issues. Theoretically if an app is Java only and doesn't use any ARM architecture specific libraries then it will work on x86.

Thanks for that..will look at using java-only apps that don't don't make ARM-specific API calls

[popper]

We saw that flickering on one of our systems a couple of months ago. Don't remember what fixed it but will see if it was an actual fix or just went away, ie "the next image didn't flicker".

There is another YouTube demo covering first boot - I also thought it seemed pretty slow but I think it was running some kind of setup wizard as well.

I don't think I've ever seen mention of 64-bit Android -- AFAIK it's pretty much 32-bit only for now. You can run (32-bit) Android emulation on a 64-bit (Windows) system but that's not the same thing

while that's true ATM. now that Mike Muller (ARM’s CTO) back in 27 October 2011 announced the ARMv8 architecture

http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-discloses-technical-details-of-the-next-version-of-the-arm-architecture.php

"ARM Discloses Technical Details Of The Next Version Of The ARM Architecture...."

that's going to change the 64-bit landscape OS and apps Very quickly in relative terms, after all the MANY ARM OEM's don't mess around like x86, if there's a market for an option, then they will provide the goods and make a profit in both wholesale and retail PDK as proven time and again.

hardware assisted video encode/decode as a standard in just about every ARM NEON SIMD device produced now, and 2K/4K never mind 1080P output capability's to name but a few examples coming soon (as in the real definition of "soon" 12 months or less perhaps)

then OC theres the

http://blogs.arm.com/multimedia/620-techcon-2011-the-arm-mali-gpu-joined-up-story-is-clear/

Mali-T604,with on-board MMU and the Midgard architecture design, that Android and other devices should get a nice general data speed throughput improvement <> between the gfx and cpu

[popper]

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4231083/Intel--Google-not-supportive-of-AMD-s-attempt-to-port-Android-to-PCs

"Intel, Google don't support Android to PC port


Sylvie Barak

12/2/2011 9:45 PM EST

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--A developer in Taiwan has been making internet waves with his new but unauthorized release of a Google Android Ice Cream source code for x86 devices, aimed specifically at PCs.

Chih-Wei Huang runs the Android-x86 group, which is not part of Google?s official Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Instead, Huang?s initiative is being funded and supported by Intel Corp?s chip rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).

Neither company has made any significant inroads into the smartphone or tablet market, but Intel has been making significant efforts on the mobile front, with plans to release Atom based smartphones and more commercially appealing tablets within the first half of 2012.

Intel has also spent a year and a half working directly with Google Inc........
......
"