Intel Rolls Out "Beacon Mountain" Android Dev Platform For Atom 126
MojoKid writes "In an effort to coax developers to begin taking Atom seriously as an Android platform, Intel has just released a complete suite of tools that should help ease them into things — especially since it can be used for ARM development as well. It's called Beacon Mountain, named after the highest peak outside of Beacon, New York. As you'd expect, Beacon Mountain supports Jelly Bean (4.2) development, and with this suite, you're provided with a collection of important Intel tools: Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager, Integrated Performance Primitives, Graphics and System Performance Analyzers, Threaded Building Blocks and Software Manager. In addition, Android SDK and NDK, Eclipse and Cygwin third-party tools are included to complete the package."
Intel CPU's are too expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to break this to you, but the lowest end Intel CPU is powerful enough to emulate the highest end ARM CPU
Its not true ARM chipsets are faster than atom chipsets...and even if they weren't you need a 12x speed in power. The bottom line though is what people need is CPU's cheap, fast enough (for smartphone apps) vs power consumption (at least a day maybe two). The problem till now is Intel didn't have a CPU suitable for mobile...now they do (have for a while), but they are still expensive(because they insist on ludicrous margins...and its helping kill the PC industry), and in comparisons worse than the opposition.
Why is there hatred of Open Platforms? (Score:5, Insightful)
On my supposedly "archaic" x86 desktop, I download any Linux distro I feel like using and can use the exact same installer to setup a 5 year old desktop or next month's Haswell.
On my "futuristic" smartphone I have to wade through outdated information on sketchy forums to find the exact set of model-specific voodoo in order to unlock the device. Oh.. and I'm aware that not every ARM device comes locked, I was in the first-wave of Raspberry Pi purchasers. But guess what? Even with my Raspberry Pi I have to hunt down images that are tailor made just to booth with the Pi and stepping off the Raspberry Pi software reservation gets real ugly real fast.
Why is the thought of an unlocked x86 tablet that could host the exact same Linux distro that I feel comfortable with on various other computers be considered some type of evil? Why is the idea of having the ability to install a stock Android with no garbage without having to sift throught 2,000 forum posts dedicated to a specific flavor of smartphone for a specific vendor considered "anti-freedom"?