x86

61 Articles

The Intel-powered Arduino

October 3, 2013 by 149 Comments

Dev boards based on microcontrollers and ARM System on Chips are everywhere, but finding a small pocketable computer based on an Intel processor has been difficult to find. [Massimo] of Arduino just unveiled a new Intel architecture Arduino-compatible board at the Rome Maker Faire. It’s called the Galileo, and it has everything you’d expect from a juiced-up Arduino running x86.

The main chip is an Intel Quark SoC running at 400MHz with 256 MB of DRAM. On board is a Mini-PCIe slot, 100Mb Ethernet port, Micro SD slot, RS-232, and USB host and client ports. Here’s the datasheet for the Galileo with all the applicable information.

The Galileo can be programmed with the standard Arduino IDE, but from the getting started guide, it looks like this board is running Yocto, a stripped down Linux for embedded environments.

Realistically, what we have here is a board with about the same processing power as a Raspberry Pi, but with Arduino compatibility, and a Mini PCIe port for some really fun stuff. It will be interesting to see what can be made with this board, but if you have any ideas on what to do with a Galileo before it’s released in two months, drop a note in the comments.

Running X86 Apps On Windows RT Devices

February 18, 2013 by 44 Comments

Windows RT, the version of Windows being loaded onto ARM-powered tablets and netbooks such as the new Microsoft Surface, has one drawback: there are tens of thousands of apps written for x86 hardware that simply won’t run on this new ARM-powered architecture. While this may present a problem for hospitals, banks, and other institutions needing a proper Wintel platform, we’re wondering how to get classic games such as Civ III and Age of Empires running on these new tablets.

It seems with a lot of black magic, [mamaich] over at the XDA Developers forum has a solution for us. He’s created a tool for running x86 Win32 apps on Windows RT. Basically, he’s created an x86 emulator for ARM devices that also passes Windows API calls to Windows RT.

So far, [mamaich] has been playing some classic Windows games on his Windows RT box, including Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and Space Cadet Pinball from Windows 95. A few utility apps such as 7Zip and WinRAR also work.

[mamaich]’s plans for his build are to make x86 emulation more automatic without the need for a separate launcher tool. Then, finally, we’ll have the perfect portable platform for RTS games.

Gizmo Board, A Tiny X86 Dev Board

January 26, 2013 by 86 Comments

Gizmo

With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a very tiny x86 dev board called the Gizmo, a four-inch square board that shrinks a desktop computer down to the palm of your hand.

The Gizmo is powered by a dual-core x86 Brazos CPU running at 1 GHz with an included Radeon HD 6250 graphics engine. Also on the board is 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a SATA, Ethernet, USB, VGA, Audio, PCI and PCIe ports, and a ton of GPIO pins that include ADCs and DACs. All this in a four-inch square package that boasts about twice the performance of a Raspberry Pi.

While the price of the Gizmo – $200 for an explorer kit – will probably preclude it from being as popular as a Raspberry Pi or other ARM board, sometimes you just need an x86 platform to do the job. With the powerful graphics potential of the Gizmo, we could easily see this board being used in a few computer vision or autonomous robot builds.

Android On Your Netbook

March 28, 2012 by 40 Comments

Looks like there’s a pretty easy way to install Ice Cream Sandwich, the newest version of Android, on your Netbook. Actually this is limited to a few types of hardware including netbooks like the eeePC. That’s because the ISO files used during installation have been tailored to the hardware used on those devices. As with other Linux distros, the ISO file can be loaded on a thumb drive using Unetbootin. From there you can give it a whirl as a Live CD (or USB as it were) or choose to install it on your hard drive. We haven’t given it a spin as the eeePC version doesn’t want to boot on our Dell Mini 9, but we don’t see a reason why this couldn’t be set up as a dual boot option.

Now why would you want to run Android on your netbook? We’ve already seen that there’s a way to run Android apps in Ubuntu. We bet some people just love Android, and others just hate the Unity desktop that Ubuntu now uses… especially when the Netbook Remix had a lot of good things going for it.