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Comment by scaladev | Hacker News Reader

The latest version works fine on my x86 phone with Android 5.

> x86 phone

Sorry, what? I think I need to know more...

Possibly something like an Asus ZenFone 2 (ZE551ML) which has an Intel Atom processor, and a binary translator to run ARM code, for compatibility reasons.

That's wild. Why would they make something like that? Does it dual-boot Windows or something?

There was a period (back in 2016 or so?) where Intel was really gunning for the phone space with their Atom SoCs. I imagine they gave very good deals to Asus to put them into their products (undoubtedly large “marketing support” dollars were involved). Alas the lack of progress on Intel’s side combined with the utter domination of ARM basically killed Intel’s hopes at the phone CPU market.

> There was a period (back in 2016 or so?) where Intel was really gunning for the phone space with their Atom SoCs.

The whole Meego project (Nokia + Intel, 2009 from the top of my head) was founded with the goal of getting Intel phones. When Nokia jumped ship in February 2011, Intel still continued and hired Nokia engineers to make phones. How long they tried, I have no idea.

Desktop Windows won't run there directly (but works just fine virtualized under qemu, I should add). It's a pretty typical all-in-one SoC, but with an x86 core:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/75203/i...

But I can copy statically linked binaries from my main Linux machine, and they work. (Dynamically linked typically don't because Android userspace is so different from "proper" Linux.)

It was actually a good beast at the time. And was subsidized so it was cheap for the specs.

Why do you live your life like this?!?

I get this. I have a low spec phone by today's standards, and it has android 10, it is pretty useless practically. It is pretty much stock. And I would gladly go back some versions for speed hikes.

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