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...
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.
While it's certainly true that android is happy to run on mips, there is currently a Renaissance of arm-based SOCs with interesting silicon coming from freescale, ti, marvell, phillips, qualcom, and samsung to name just a few. Most of these have thier own combination of differentiators like video codecs, signal processing cores, and analog interfaces.
I see mips running mostly in set top boxes that use the discreet codec/drm devices and routers with external 802.11 radios and switches, and some network-centric processors... but there doesn't seem to be nearly the level of diversity present in the arm ecosystem lately.
I hope that android's architecture agnosticism allows more payoff on investments in other interesting architectures like mips, sh, and openrisc.
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.
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)
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.
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.
"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.
Sent from my Dell Streak. Hey young Jimmy! Dell have made a RISC box. It's a bit smaller than that Ultra 1 though...