Intel, Google team to optimize Android for smartphones

Intel and Google announced Tuesday that they would partner to optimize future versions of the Android OS for smartphones and other mobile devices using Intel chips.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini demonstrated a smartphone with the upcoming Medfield chip running on Android during a keynote at the Intel Developer Conference being held in San Francisco. However, Otellini didn't mention the version of Android running on the smartphone.

Intel wants to make x86 the architecture of choice for smartphones, and porting Android will provide a larger opportunity to the chip maker in the smartphone market, Otellini said.

"This is a significant step forward to bring Intel phones to market," Otellini said.

Intel doesn't have a presence in the smartphone market yet, but Otellini said a smartphone based on the chip would reach the market in the first quarter next year. Medfield includes a low-power Atom processor. A smartphone with the chip was due in the third quarter this year, but has been delayed multiple times. Intel also is holding a technical session at IDF to show Medfield running on tablets.

Intel and Google will work on optimizing "all" future Android releases for Intel mobile chips at the kernel level, and also in specific areas such as memory management and graphics, said Andy Rubin, senior vice president for mobile at Google, in an on-stage appearance.


Some versions of Android, such as Android 2.2, code-named Froyo, have already been ported to Intel. By porting all future Android versions, Intel and Google are now expanding their relationship, Otellini said.

Intel faces the tough task of unseating ARM, whose processors are found in most smartphones. Intel chips are considered more power-hungry than ARM processors, but the company hopes that it can establish a beachhead in the market as it continues to advance its manufacturing process to make faster, more efficient chips.

During the keynote Otellini also shared more details about the upcoming chip code-named Haswell, which is due in laptops by 2013. Haswell will achieve a 30% power reduction in standby compared with current Core i5 laptops that go into laptops. The company is engineering a new low-power framework that will enable "all-day usage" of laptops, Otellini said.

The Haswell chips are targeted at ultrabooks, which Intel is promoting as a new category of thin and light PCs with tablet-like features. Intel hopes to deliver 10 days of standby time on always-connected ultrabooks using Haswell chips, Otellini said.

The Haswell microarchitecture is a follow-up to Ivy Bridge, due early next year for ultrabooks, and also more power-efficient than current Intel Sandy Bridge chips.

Otellini also said Intel wants to drive power consumption of chips down to a point where solar cells could run computers. To illustrate Otellini's point, an Intel engineer demonstrated a computer powered by a solar panel running a small animation. But once the solar source was blocked, the computer froze. Otellini said the point of the demonstration wasn't to productize the prototype chip, but to show where Intel wants to take its chips on power consumption.

Haswell will be on ultrabooks and a range of other devices, the engineer said during the demonstration.

Download and Install Windows 8 On a New Partition

So you want to try out Windows 8. Excellent! But you're not foolhardy enough to try using a developer preview build as your main work/play operating system--you just want to dabble. We'll show you how to download and install the Windows 8 developer's preview on to a separate partition (or separate hard drive, if you have a spare). If you don't feel like mucking your hard drive with another partition, read How To Download and Install Windows 8 to a Virtual Machine for a less intrusive way to get Windows 8 up and running on your PC.

If you have a spare hard drive lying around, this process is pretty easy: Download the appropriate Windows 8 ISO from the Microsoft Developer Network site, burn it to a DVD, turn off your PC, slap the hard drive in your case, and connect it up to your motherboard. Then you just turn your system on and either press the key that allows you to access your motherboard's boot menu (or change the boot options in the BIOS so your optical drive is recognized before your main hard drive), and you should boot off your new Windows 8 disk. From there, just fire up the Windows 8 installer, and install the operating system to your new drive.


However, if you only have one hard drive in your system, you're going to have to get a little bit more creative in order to install Windows 8 without having to nuke your existing Windows installation. Welcome to the world of drive partitioning: In layman's terms, partitioning takes a hard drive's total storage and splits it into separate chunks of data. Your operating system then treats these separate data partitions as separate storage volumes.

Assuming you're currently running Windows Vista or Windows 7, open your Control Panel and open up the Administrative Tools screen. From there, double-click on the "Computer Management" option. When said window appears, look for the "Disk Management" submenu under "Storage" on the left-hand sidebar. Click that.

You'll see your hard drive (and optical drive) on the screen: Your primary drive should already be split into a "System Reserved" volume and your primary C:\ volume.

Right-click on the C:\ volume and select the "Shrink Volume" option, and then reduce the size of your volume by at least 16 gigabytes for a 32-bit installation of Windows 8 or 20 gigabytes for a 64-bit installation.

You'll now see a new, monochromatic, "Unallocated" hunk of storage appear next to your C:\ volume in the graphical display. Right-click on it, select the "New Simple Volume" option, and hit the "Next" button until you reach the screen for assigning letters and drive paths.

Feel free to assign your new volume whatever drive letter you most prefer. Click "Next" one more time and give your volume a witty name, and then hit "Next" (and then "Finish") to quick-format the volume as an NTFS partition.

Next, burn the Windows 8 image to a disc using a freeware app like Imgburn or CDBurnerXP, then reboot your PC, access your BIOS setup menu (typically by pressing Delete or another specified key while booting up), and change the boot order so your PC will boot from your optical drive instead of your primary hard drive when you restart your computer. Once your PC boots from the Windows 8 DVD, just install Windows 8 to your new partition (identifiable by the drive letter and name you picked out).

And here's an extra tip: Once you've loaded up Windows 8 for the first time, you'll be able to edit Windows' boot settings to make Windows 7 boot by default instead of 8 (which happens after a short time delay if you don't select an operating system yourself).