Slates, smartphones and 3G ‘smartbooks’ built around Intel’s Atom processor could all running Android in the near future.
IDF Beijing 2010 | Intel has dived deep into Android’s open-source code and enabled the OS to run on its Atom processors, in addition to the ARM chips for which the operating system was first conceived and compiled.
Speaking at the annual Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, the company’s general manager of software and services, Renee James, said that Intel already has Android running on sample Atom-based smartphones.
The Atom architecture already supports Windows and Linux, including the Intel-Nokia collaborative effort known as
Meego. “Intel is enabling all OSes for Atom phones” James said.
Intel isn’t the first to port Android over to an x86 platform – Acer kicked that goal last year with an Android netbook.
But with Intel now in the game, it will be in a much stronger position to offer Android to any of its partners building Atom hardware.
And Intel’s move is less about the netbook market than for smartphones, slates, 3G ‘smartbooks’, in-car systems, set-top boxes, next-gen wireless digital frames and other kit designed around the forthcoming Atom ‘
Moorestown’ platform.
Due for release in the second half of this year, Moorestown adopts a ‘system on a chip’ or SoC design which integrates the processor, graphics, video encode/decode and memory controller onto a single 45nm chip or ‘CPU hub’ codenamed Lincroft.
Moorestown will be up against some solid competition in the ARM stakes, including the 1GHz Snapdragon and Apple’s new A4 processor, so Intel wants to be holding as many cards as it can – and Android is certainly where all the action seems to be, especially with touchscreen devices and doubly so if Google wants to build its own
gPad slate.