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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

The Asus Zenfone 2, released 5 years ago, ran on x86 (Intel Atom) [1]. I know someone who was still using it this year Eventually switched but the phone still works. So, to the question:

> Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

Well, technically, yes ;-) This does not change anything to your point though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_ZenFone#Second_generation...

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I bought the Zenfone 2 which had an Intel processor, and had a similar experience to the sister comment. The only super annoying thing that happened was when Pokemon Go came out all my friends had it but it didn't support Intel. By the time they made it available for the intel phones (which was a few weeks) the game wasn't cool anymore. :/

I used the ZenFone 2 for about a year ~3.5 years ago; it worked surprisingly well. It was impressive that it really "just worked" like a normal ARM device.

There were some annoying software aspects (the Play Store only allowed me to download x86 apps even though it could run ARM apps), and the device was 100% a battery hog - but cool tech.

Surprised Intel gave up on that effort.

Intel gave up because Atom for smartphones were sold at a negative price after marketing incentives. They couldn’t even get volume from manufacturers when it costed less than zero; because no one wanted to invest upfront R&D costs.

Intel should have made their own phones.

There were a few MIPS Android phones too.

MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets.

Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets.

> Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem:

Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM

Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM

Want more IP coming from a single vendor that just core, interrupt, controller, and DMA? Go for ARM

Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

When MIPS understood that they are losing, they simply gave up on competing, and improving.

And in the end, the lunch went to MediaTek because it was the only SoC vendor that was ready to ship competitive SoCs with 4G baseband without rapacious licensing deals like Qualcomm do.

Actually at that time MIPS suddenly came back to life and had a big push with improved designs and a few deals resulting in pretty decent MIPS socs. Performance was okay, battery life was good, and they were first to market with the latest Android release (I think it was 4.0 or 4.4).

But then everything suddenly stopped and they left the market altogether.

Edit: Regarding this:

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

One of the founders of OpenCores (RIP) told me that ARM lawyers contact him _within hours_ of someone pushing a design they dont like. While MIPS has a bad rep, ARM is probably more aggressive.

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

Interested in this comment: were MIPS/Imagination known for being particularly litigious around licensing?

There are tons of stories about MIPS going after people for trivial designs.

http://probell.com/Lexra/index.html

> Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM

> Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM

But that's also true for MIPS.

I have not seen any activity from MIPS on GCC for years.

Making a Linux port for a given MIPS based SoC is a known pain. They should've worked towards not requiring any hardcoded configuration for each SoC at all, like Linux on ARM does these days.

Do you mean the device tree?

I thought all major kernel archs were on device trees now...

Yes now, but last time I talked with people who dealt with them, people spoke of their new cores coming with "prehistoric kernels" on usb sticks.

So every vendor had to upstream their own soc in its own

Ubiquiti will still sell you a shiny, expensive MIPS box, as will GL.inet.

Interestingly, they've gone ARM in their latest generation of hardware, e.g. the UDM-Pro uses a Quad ARM Cortex-A57 Core at 1.7 GHz: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switc...

So their MIPS stuff might be consigned to the past at this point.

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

Er... not convinced about this one.

ARM has been quite lawyerish sometimes.

For a while, parts of QEMU could not be published, at ARM's request, because they implemented instructions ARM did not permit a software emulator to emulate.

At least one non-commercial design on opencores.org was removed at ARM's request.

By comparison, for a while MIPS ISA was completely open for anyone to implement, software or hardware. That's been retracted now, but it was nice while it lasted. ARM has never done that as far as I know.

Even before, I used devices based around MIPS without a licence a long time ago, so long as they avoided implementing one or two "special sauce" instructions that was fine. The instructions weren't necessary, just a neat, patented optimisation, and I have a GCC patch somewhere for building the target without those instructions.

So I don't know about today, but until recently I would have consistently regarded MIPS as much less lawyerish than ARM.

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