AMD supports Android on PC development

One of the implications of Android's open source nature is that Google cannot control all the developments around it - at least, not without angering many partners, as it did when it kept the Honeycomb release for its inner circle. So various groups have grown up without Google's sanction to adapt Android, and its huge applications base, for other platforms - set-top boxes, industrial equipment and now PCs. The interesting aspect of a project to port the new Ice Cream Sandwich release to x86 PCs is that it is not backed by Google or Intel, but by the latter's x86 rival, AMD.

The move to port the new sourcecode comes from the Android-x86 group, run by Taiwanese developer Chih-Wei Huang. It targets notebooks and desktops rather than mobile x86 variants like Atom - which are directly addressed by the recently expanded Google-Intel partnership - and is not part of the official Android Open Source Project (AOSP), headed by Google itself. But this is no maverick, independent effort - it is funded and backed by AMD, which has been heavily criticized for its slow progress in pushing its chips into new form factors like tablets

As EETimes points out, Intel and Google have been working on porting Android to x86, and the former has contributed about 120 patches to the open sourcecode for Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich. But Intel's Google program manager, Alec Gefrides, explains that this work is specifically for tablets and smartphones, while conventional PCs would need different drivers. "If you pull the x86 version of Android down from the AOSP and compile it, it will run on any x86 device, but that's not the intent, neither ours nor Google's," Gefrides told the news service. "Our focus is to get phones and tablets on our Atom product line-up and running on Android." OEMs who might use the Huang project would lack the drivers to make all the components work, he added.

The x86 project highlights the ease with which Android can be fragmented, and the difficulty of keeping firm control of an open source platform. Officially, any party using Android signs an agreement promising to contribute their work back to the open source center, but AMD is not a signatory, and the x86 port as not been submitted to Google.

Gefrides commented to EETimes: "At this point, who knows whether Android will ever end up on a PC or not?" and noted that Google also offered Chrome OS for netbooks.