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They are doing this because they want the benefits of great ARM battery life. But they are emulating x86 on ARM. So they believe that emulated x86 on ARM will h
by fnord123 9y ago
They are doing this because they want the benefits of great ARM battery life. But they are emulating x86 on ARM. So they believe that emulated x86 on ARM will have a better battery life than native x86. The only way I think this could be possible is if they measure battery life of an idle device. Maybe someone can disabuse me of this belief.
- martinald 9y agoKeep in mind, if you're just using a web browser, Skype and office, these are likely to all be ARM native. It's only when you boot up an x86 program it even comes into play - for a lot of users that will be very rare.
- pilsetnieks 9y agoBecause they aren't running everyting in the emulator - the kernel, drivers, many of their own apps, and in future possibly 3rd party apps as well are run natively. They're emulating x86 for apps and some system DLLs. (There's a schematic at about 8 minutes.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- angryteabag 9y agoMight be costly to emulate x86 - negating the power-saving benefits of ARM, however as it'll be using an SOC, they would have a lower physical presence. Imagine the motherboard on your phone, but in your laptop. The rest of the space would be used for batteries.
- stirlo 9y agoIf you imagine a hybrid PC/phone device you could very well restrict x86 emulation to when the device is in PC mode and thus has a larger battery/AC power available in which case battery life isn't as big an issue.
- adrianN 9y agoMost computers are idle most of the time.