http://www.geeksphone.com/
So this has me a little excited. Dual booting Sailfish and Ubuntu sound fun to me. (if possible) I am hoping to see more unlocked x86 phones that we can play with.
Who knows maybe gnome 3 finally put that gui to use and Ubuntu won't have to bother looking for manufacturer, More than anything a downloadable SailfishOs would be groovy as hell. I would like to play with Firefox Os too.
Any thoughts?
I am happy to see x86 getting onto a phone. I am not happy that it doesn't seem like it is coming to Verizon, whom I am stuck with until I am old enough to pay my own bills. I guess I shouldn't say I'm surprised.
T Mobile is paying people out of contracts.
Why x86? WHY?!
I hear it has better performance over ARM, also Intel has very good power draw with their haswell processors, I hope their new CPUs make it into it, I was tempted via a Intel phone last time but opted for a Snapdragon, Id have just sailfish, Android has become quite the virus area lately.
Also just to add Satya, why has apple gone x64? its marketing mostly also, We have a x64bit processor, a lot of apple customers wont know the benefits of x64 over x86, and to be honest if linux applies to apple, x64 takes up more storage space over x86 no?
Even in the home environment there are no massive boosts for x64 really, more chance of breakage, but we still roll x64.
uhm, x86 is i386 and amd64… not sure what you are talking about
I don't understand why you people want x86 instead of ARM or anything else. There is NO logical reason.
I would say the platform standards of x86 is the big draw here. Intrinsically you are correct in saying that newer ARM platforms in phones are "good enough" in terms of general performance for what we would expect out of a phone vs the potential power savings as compared to the x86 systems. The problem however seems to be the lack of standardization across the lines of ARM based systems. This has been a big problem in the spread of "desktop" linux systems into the ARM space. For instance Qualcomm is notoriously bad with regards to the sharing of information about their systems, which makes it extremely difficult to write for those SOCs in all except explicitly supported environments (read android). Across the x86 platforms that has been less of a problem, with the general system specifics being pretty standard at this point, and Intel being a company that has a long history kernel contributions for their newest platforms. Although its not entirely certain that it will remain that way in he future, witnessed by what has been happening with the bay trail platform (although that seems to be a case of OEM lazy implementation of 32 bit UEFI systems which makes things harder when trying to boot alternative OSes) so who knows.
x86 on devices sucks, because almost all devices the Atom SoC is in, have a really tough to crack bootloader lock, that makes it impossible to install a full operating system on them that isn't poisoned with all kinds of spyware.
Cheap Chinese ARM-SoC's FTMFW, they're cheap, they perform really well, they are hugely compatible, and most devices with Chinese ARM SoC's come rooted and unlocked out of the box. There is also a huge development community out there for cheap Chinese SoC's, à la Rockchip or Allwinner etc... that makes them much more interesting.
Intel x86 for devices is a bit of an odd-ball product in my opinion. The higher IPC would be handy if anything that would use that extra power would be allowed to run on it, but in reality, the Intel Atom devices are some of the most locked down, zero flexibility devices out there. What's the use in having more power if users aren't allowed to use it?
This is what I am thinking. Easier to develop for. And smaller companies like geeksphone are making their stuff unlocked and intel plays well with open source. Maybe Microsoft will release Windows Phone Pro or something so people can dual boot linux or Windows on a phone.
The sever side atoms seem easy enough to load Linux, I think it is more of a vendor problem then Intel
Yup, and it's understandable for vendors of consumer devices that they want to lock down the software to avoid support issues, but it's remarkable that there are e.g. no dev-boards with Bay Trail chips. In my opinion, that means that Intel keeps the platform locked. I do understand why, after all, they do have an interest in Tizen, but fact remains that even with their brother-in-arms-for-Tizen Samsung, they are scoring pretty poor, the market definitely seems to prefer the Tab 3 with Exynos over the Tab 3 with Atom for instance. Also other vendors, like Asus, with their newest Atom devices, don't sell that well. I only have experience with the Galaxy Tab 3, and the Exynos ARM-SoC version is a lot smoother and more functional than the Atom-version. The Atom version was introduced in June/July last year I think, and now it's been replaced already by an Exynos version, whereas other Samsung devices have a lifespan of more than a year to several years. Android-x86 is not the greatest thing ever. I tried to run Android-x86 in a container on my PC, but I switched to Android-ARM in a QEMU-container, and guess what... the QEMU-version actually performs better... that's a sign that Android-x86 is not competitive at all.
I use SailfishOS now on my Jolla, and I think it's great. It might work better on x86 than Android, but I can't say that I'm that interested in it, because it works great on ARM as well. The functionality and ease of use is great. It loads Android apps, but isn't as bloated and bogged down as AOSP. It's also quite a bit faster as Samsung Androids on custom kernels, and the GUI is much less confusing and chaotic as Android. I could definitely use an ARM-tablet with SailfishOS, full connectivity (which is the big problem now, most manufacturers of devices provide very limited I/O options) as a laptop replacement, and gain quite a bit of productivity efficiency. I'm actually waiting for a dev-board with a very powerful ARM-SoC, that I could use as a mini-PC.
At FOSDEM two weeks ago, almost all of the innovations that mattered were ARM-focused. The press is full of talk about innovations on x86, but I see very little of those, in fact, the major innovation that is about to be implemented, is based on RISC-processors that are added to the x86-cores as co-processors, and that is then called HSA. The 12 cores of an APU are actually 8 RISC units and 4 CISC units that use a lot of RISC-like technology.
Look at who pays for linux, and you know who has the most functionality. IBM is investing a billion in linux, and has no x86-products, Intel and Samsung are investing in the linux foundation's Tizen, which is mainly focused on ARM, RedHat and Novell are cutting funds for their normal x86 upstream community distros, and focusing on the server market, where there is ever more RISC presence.
Right now, x86 CISC still has a better performance per Watt ratio than RISC processors, but look at how much it costs to accomplish that. Every little step forward in the development of CISC processors is costing a lot more than the previous step. That means that x86 is closing a hard limit. RISC-chips are still very far from hitting any limits: every step forward in ARM-design brings a huge boost in performance, and the chips keep getting cheaper to produce and development times keep getting shorter. Another benefit they have is that the designs are non-US, ARM is based in the UK, and many other designs are European (Scandinavian, French, German, ...), and with the US x86 hardware designs having been spiked by the NSA, there is a definite motivation of the market, especially the enterprise and government market, the big spenders, to find an alternative, and because RISC SoC development is relatively cheap, and the majority thereof is based on open source development, they sponsor a lot of research, and the products advance really rapidly. Not in the consumer devices that run a locked down operating system or are locked down by an ISP or telecom giant, but in dev boards and enterprise products.
Yes, Intel still has a better performance per Watt in comparison to ARM, but not in comparison to RISC, because PPC does better in scaled applications when it comes to performance per Watt, and in dev boards, the performance per Watt of Intel Haswell and Broadwell may still be better, but therefore the linux support is problematic (Intel just can't seem to get Haswell working well in linux, they are still working on Ivy Bridge support, and that seems to be quite good now, and latest gen AMD x86 products do work well in linux, but they don't come near the performance per Watt of Haswell/Broadwell), and the performance per dollar is not so good. For the price of one Haswell i5, you can get 10 powerful ARM-dev-boards that can easily - and without extra hardware - , scale up to a similar performance, while using a bit more power, but also while offering better functionality as a whole.