> x86 didn't dominate in low power because Intel had the resources to care but never did
Remember Atom tablets (and how they sucked)?
Remember Atom tablets (and how they sucked)?
I have a ten-year old Lenovo Yoga Tab 2 8" Windows tablet, which I still use at least once every week. It is still useful. Who can say that they are still using a ten-year old Android tablet?
Care to elaborate. I had the 9" mini laptop kind of device based on Atom and don't remember Atom to be the issue.
However, what I meant is Atom-based Android tablets. At about the same time as the netbook craze (late 2000s to early 2010s) there was a non-negligible number of Android tablets, and a noticeable fraction of them was not ARM- but Atom-based. (The x86 target in the Android SDK wasn’t only there to support emulators, originally.) Yet that stopped pretty quickly, and my impression is that that happened because, while Intel would certainly have liked to hitch itself to the Android train, they just couldn’t get Atoms fast enough at equivalent power levels (either at all or quickly enough). Could have been something else, e.g. perhaps they didn’t have the expertise to build SoCs with radios?
Either way, it’s not that Intel didn’t want to get into consumer mobile devices, it’s that they tried and did not succeed.
IMHO, If Intel had done another year or two of trying, it probably would have worked, but they gave up. They also canceled x86 for phone like the day before the Windows Mobile Continuum demo, which would have been a potentially much more compelling product with x86, especially if Microsoft allowed running win32 apps (which they probably wouldn't, but the potential would be interesting)
Atom wasn't about power efficiency or performance, it was about cost optimization.
(Also probably due to it is a tablet, so it have a reasonable fast storage instead of hdds like notebooks in that era)