There is nothing wrong with Intel. The discussion was comparing x86 compatible with ARM, two different animals that serve two different purposes. The x86 architecture is CISC and has more instructions and generally many more transistors and higher clock speed, more RAM, more peripherals, and requires a lot of power relative to ARM which uses RISC, less instructions, simpler bus architectures, lower clock speed, usually much less transitors and therefor much lower power and less heat generated. The x86 architecture is actually preferrable if you can deal with the power and heat requirements, especially for the application compatibility reasons. Linux on ARM works great but you can't expect drivers, and therefore many applications to just work. At minimal they need to be compiled, and in many cases they will not work without re-writing drivers. There is no ISA or PCI bus on ARM, you have ABI or EABI or some proprietary bus depending on manufacturer. Most phones use ARM processor in fact ARM owns that whole space. ARM is desireable for small portable devices, but in the sub-notebook category it still makes sense to use x86. I am working with ARM specifically for the low power and low heat benefits, but as I said it's a completely different class of applications. Even if you're not dealing with graphics like x-windows, there is little source compatibility, except where no hardware specific drivers are involved. There is no such thing as BIOS on ARM, most systems boot from a kernel loaded onto flash with embedded file system and scaled down versions of standard tools for example busybox. There is lots to learn and more work to do when developing software, setting up a cross platform development toolchain, often JTAG is required to flash the kernel, you're generally much more concerned about memory limitations and other implications of using a smaller scale architecture. Also, Intel is a brand name, they made StrongARM which evolved to X-Scale, also RISC and uses the original ARM as core with Intel specific extensions. So using the name Intel is only a brand, the discussion was x86 versus ARM, in general x86 is preferrable for anything larger than PDA, ARM for PDA and smaller. -- Doug
