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Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they went with an Intel Atom CPU instead of using ARM chips as they do in the Nexus phones. Seems like a strange choice.

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Intel is almost giving away Bay Trail-T CPUs to try and claw marketshare away from ARM-based CPUs/SoCs. As an example, Intel's advertised price for an Atom Z3735F (quad core, 1.33–1.83 GHz, 2.2 W SDP, 2 GB RAM max., Intel's Gen7 graphics) is $17, but I've read that the "real life" price dips under $10 in volume. This is an absolutely mind-boggling price for a quad-core x86-64 CPU with really quite good integrated graphics.

An exciting (to me, at least) development is that OEMs are starting to produce sub-$100 HDMI sticks with Bay Trail-T CPUs and 16 GB–32 GB of eMMC storage inside. Assuming the firmware isn't crippled, those sticks should be able to run unmodified copies of any modern x86 operating system. On Linux and FreeBSD, there is stable, functional, non-proprietary GPU support, which is a huge win over the vast majority of ARM-based systems. (Even the "OPEN hardware and software platform" Matchstick is currently chained to a binary blob because of the Mali GPU. Maybe one day the reverse engineered Mali driver will be awesome, but it's not there yet.)

Intel's earnings report supports the concept that they're not making much money on Atom. Their mobile BU this last quarter managed to turn about $1M of net revenue ... at an operating loss of about $1.04B! [1]

Watching Intel Mobile strategically over the next year or two will be very interesting indeed.

[1] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/INTC/3545134377x0x786...

"An exciting (to me, at least) development is that OEMs are starting to produce sub-$100 HDMI sticks with Bay Trail-T CPUs and 16 GB–32 GB of eMMC storage inside."

I'm very interested in this, but it's the first I've heard of it, please can you share some examples? They sound like a great match for a Motorola Lapdock (I have one, but currently unused).

This article came across my Twitter feed this morning:

MEEGO-T01 HDMI TV Stick Supports Android, Windows 8.1, and Ubuntu/Linux http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/10/15/meego-t01-hdmi-tv-sti...

There are other models by other OEMs out there, but I can't find any URLs for them off-hand.

Thank you, the MEEGO-T01 looks like a great device, will almost certainly pick one up (or something like it).

This is probably not it because it has an Imagination GPU, as opposed to the Intel ones in Bay Trail.

This is probably an old Moorefield-thingy to copy the Apple TV, like the Z3560. (which is sad considering that Bay Trail is available, but it probably wouldn't allow to have the same margins.)

I thought that was strange as well. Any phone or tablet app in the Play Store that uses native code will not be compatible. I'm guessing they did this to make it more attractive to game developers. PlayStation, XBox, and PC are now all x86 platforms. Makes it easier for top game studios to also target Google Player if it runs the same architecture.

actually, 99% of native apps should work flawlessly _on the condition_ that they're downloaded from the Play Store. intel has something called the Houdini for AOT binary translation: http://stackoverflow.com/a/13005569/38749

Interesting! I didn't know that Intel had such a feature. Most vanilla apps will run fine on any Android JVM, but I was wondering how Intel was going to support apps that use the native interface.

Probably so they can use Player as a way of getting Atom ready for phones. The Atom chips use more power, but it doesn't matter because they'll not be running off battery.

To me it makes total sense. Intel's Atom has facilities to do hardware accelerated H.264 video decoding[0]. They're both low power chips (ARM and Atom) so can both be passively cooled, ARM is just more focused on minimalism, whereas the Intel Atom is a little bit more feature rich (which is great if you happen to be utilising one of those features, as in this case).

[0] PDF(!): http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...

Every modern ARM SoC built for thisnpuepose has H.264 hardware video decode (and typically HEVC for that matter).

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