Andy Rubin: Future Android builds to support Intel processors

By on Sep 13, 2011 at 7:00 PM
mobile September 13, 2011

During the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google’s Android head Andy Rubin took the stage with Intel CEO Paul Otellini and announced that future versions of Google’s Android operating system will be optimized to support Intel’s Atom processors. Intel has been glaringly absent from the smartphone space, which has been dominated by NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. “By optimizing the Android platform for Intel architecture, we bring a powerful new capability to market that will accelerate more industry adoption and choice, and bring exciting new products to market that harness the combined potential of Intel technology and the Android platform,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. “Combining Android with Intel’s low power smartphone roadmap opens up more opportunity for innovation and choice,” said Andy Rubin. Otellini confirmed in May that Intel’s first Medfield-powered smartphones would hit the market next year. Read on for the full press release from Intel.

Intel and Google to Optimize Android Platform for Intel Architecture

Santa Clara and Mountain View, Calif., Sept. 13, 2011 – Intel Corporation and Google Inc. today announced that they will work to enable and optimize future versions of Androidâ„¢ for Intel’s family of low power Atomâ„¢ processors. This means that future versions of the Android platform will support Intel technology in addition to other architectures.

The joint effort is designed to speed time-to-market of Intel technology-based smartphones running the Android platform. Intel will take advantage of the open-source accessibility of the Android platform to provide its customers with technology products that inspire continued innovation and also help enable powerful personal computing experiences that fully leverage Intel technology across a range of devices. This work will enable mobile device OEMs and wireless operators to draw upon the performance and low power capabilities of Intel® architecture and tap into the scale of the x86 developer ecosystem to further drive the adoption of the Android platform.

“By optimizing the Android platform for Intel architecture, we bring a powerful new capability to market that will accelerate more industry adoption and choice, and bring exciting new products to market that harness the combined potential of Intel technology and the Android platform,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini.”Together we are accelerating Intel architecture and bringing new levels of innovation to a maturing Android platform.”

“Combining Android with Intel’s low power smartphone roadmap opens up more opportunity for innovation and choice,” said Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google. “This collaboration will drive the Android ecosystem forward.

Today’s announcement builds upon the two companies’ recent joint initiatives to enable Intel architecture on Google products, which include Chrome OS and Google TV along with the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) and Native Development Kit (NDK).

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  • http://twitter.com/peterjohn Peter John

    Seriously – whats with these tech geek executives tryin to look all prolific in pics these days?

    • Anonymous

      I would guess the photographer tells these guys to pose here like this and doesn’t give the guy too much thought. He’s just looking for a “cool” picture, with no concern of what/who it is of.

    • http://twitter.com/GRZLA Grizzly Atoms

      Whats with you trying to look like Billy Badass in your Twitter picture?

  • IPwn

    NOOOOOO!!!!

  • Gunblade209

    DDon’t do it Andy. They’re gonna charge OEMs an arm, leg, and a small child for their procs.

  • Anonymous

    Yaaaaahoooooooo! First!

  • Anonymous

    Andddd with that, MeeGo is dead because Intel obviously does not need to push its processors through its own OS anymore.

  • http://it-diary.com/ Rizwan Asif

    it would be excellent to see android supporting intel, may be in near future we will see powerful intel tablets running android

  • Bringit

    With each Android phone purchase of over 99 cents, you get two free Charlie Brown shirts just like Andy Rubin is wearing.  applesuckstitties loves those shirts as well to clean up his douche mess with.

  • Anonymous

    Who cares, they’ll still suck up too much juice.

    Intel lost this battle, still for another 2 gens of mobile chips.

    Unless one wants to lug around laptop sized batteries and be content with 4 hour battery run-time, this is not very worthwhile new – yet.

    When Intel finally ships something competitive, it’ll be.

  • Carmen

    I don’t know.  I don’t see Intel’s love affair with their coveted x86 architecture playing out in the ultra-portable space in the near future.  Don’t get me wrong, x86 is GREAT, but ARM is the baller in this space.  If Intel would’ve just licensed the ARM instruction set and made processors based off of it, I think you would see a great deal of market share from them.  Atom is a great product, but I see it limited to ultra-small form-factor PCs used for special-duty purposes.  For example, a friend of mine is using an Atom-based nettop to run Homeseer in his house.  This is what it’s gonna be used for for now, simply because ARM is too engrained in the space now.  It’s the same reason that x86 became the de-facto standard in PCs that the ARM will remain a leader in the market of ultra-portable devices.  Sometimes it’s better to join ‘em instead of try to beat ‘em.

    • Carmen

      Plus, the Atoms that will work well in phones and tablets (the ones that start with “Z”) are only x86 and not x86-64.  So we’d be bringing back an architecture that we are trying to kill.  I just don’t get it.

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