Re:Android security in 2016 is a mess
by userbinator on Monday November 28, 2016 @10:21PM
(#13060508)
Do you think the situation would be the same if there were 10 different x86 chip companies with at least 5% market share each?
In the 90s, that's actually what happened.
Tracing the history of those various competitors is really interesting. Some (Transmeta) failed completely in a relatively straightforward manner and just disappeared. At the opposite end of the spectrum, NexGen became AMD's future when AMD's in-house design was a flop. Parts of Cyrix ended up with VIA and parts with AMD. Almost all of the big semiconductor companies either owned one of these x86 design firms for a time, or sold those chips under license.
Well, there are 3.
Intel, AMD and... VIA?
Re:Android security in 2016 is a mess
by nickpsecurity on Monday November 28, 2016 @11:11PM
(#13060713)
VIA, thanks to Centaur, was first with the low power plus had PadLock Engine with TRNG and crypto acceleration. Their ARTIGO's made nice little boxes for $300.
That's the thing. You said "Intel". Intel is not an architecture. It's a company - that happens to dominate the x86 market. Do you think the situation would be the same if there were 10 different x86 chip companies with at least 5% market share each? If we wanted everything to just work, as it does on "Intel", then we should probably wish for a Qualcomm monopoly with 90% of the market. And hope it's profitable enough that they can support their own chips for more than 18 months.
I can only describe Intel's chips as a rip-off for the most part (and it's only gotten worse in recent years). I mean, they're now selling Atom chips for $160 (about 4-5x more than a similar performance ARM chip) to notebook manufacturers, with very little difference in performance between them and the older Atom for smartphones. So I would certainly hope Intel's chips would be better supported. Although I actually don't think its Atom chips are as well supported as its Core chips.
Now, not having a single company completely dominate the ARM ecosystem is certainly a "problem" from this point of view. However, I still mostly blame Google, who mainly just wants its ads to run well on these devices, which seem to do that rather well in the current situation, as well as OEMs who want to be "different" and are probably even hostile to the idea of allowing say an LG ROM run on a Samsung phone. I would try to fix this Google/OEM situation first and aim my complaints at them.