AMD AppZone Brings Graphics-Accelerated Windows and Android Apps to PCs Worldwide

[NostaSeronx]

Now which Hondo tablets are we speaking of?

Acer and MSI. The only two I can confirm that will be making fanless Hondo tablets.

 

[frozentundra123456]

So I may put an old AMD card in my old Core 2 computer. Would that work or do you need an apu or a recent discrete card?

Does anybody have some apps that are particularly fun or useful? I have an android tablet and it is loaded with apps, but none of them really held my interest for long. Maybe on a PC they would run better and be easier to control with a kb/mouse. The tablet overall is underwhelming to me, as it has a lot of neat features but does not do any of them very well.

 

[Olikan]

For Intel it doesn't matter as the new atom is as bad as you say . It won't matter.
A 9 watt haswell has my interest tho. These new tablets some will actually have real power of a PC . These aren't Apple toys or flash gamers. Haswell will kickass at the highend tablet market. As for Medfield it must be as bad as clover leaf screw up. you alude to. Intel just needs to fold up its 1 horse show and leave the market.

Haswell in tablets?

 

[ViRGE]

So I may put an old AMD card in my old Core 2 computer. Would that work or do you need an apu or a recent discrete card?

It works on any computer regardless of hardware. The emulator is licensed from another company; it's not tied to AMD's hardware in any way.

 

[Idontcare]

this is a very big win, for those hondo tablets

Its huge. I bet intel didn't see this coming. I expect some pretty big announcements leading up to the Win8 launch from AMD.

I get the same feeling. I wish Jaguar was about a year ahead of its current schedule, it would have been able to intersect a Win8 tablet launch quite nicely. Still though, AMD stands to make some inroads here. And they can go where Intel cannot in terms of gross margins.

 

[piesquared]

There's a lot of good news coming out of AMD lately. Part II of the reviews should be interesting, not for the same tired old CPU benchmarks, but for what's happening on the compute side of things. I imagine there is a lot of information forthcoming, I'm glad they chose 2 separate articles.

 

[CHADBOGA]

TPart II of the reviews should be interesting, not for the same tired old CPU benchmarks, but for what's happening on the compute side of things.

LOL, so the CPU side of things that is directly relevant to just about everyone, is a tired old scene, yet the "compute side of things" which only a tiny minority use or care about, is the exciting thing.

I imagine there is a lot of information forthcoming, I'm glad they chose 2 separate articles.

Little doubt what will be forthcoming is underwhelming CPU performance, again.

But as we all know, CPU performance amazingly stopped being important in 2006.

Can anyone tell me what happened in 2006 to bring about this radical change in how one assesses a CPU's merits?

 

[IlllI]

so do you need an amd cpu or gpu or both? i briefly checked the site but i didnt really see what was required.

 

[piesquared]

so do you need an amd cpu or gpu or both? i briefly checked the site but i didnt really see what was required.

It appears to run on any hardware, but its optimized for AMD GPU's and APU's.

 

[Ferzerp]

It appears to run on any hardware, but its optimized for AMD GPU's and APU's.

Which means it will only be 20% slower on AMD hardware than the usual 30%?

Your fake consensus really fools no one.

Your attacking of other members grows tiring. It needs to stop.
-ViRGE

 

[LogOver]

It appears to run on any hardware, but its optimized for AMD GPU's and APU's.

You're kidding, right? Most of Android apps optimized to run on a weak 600MHz ARM cpu. Heck, even mobile i3 cpu runs native arm apps through android arm-emulator two time faster than state of the art arm 4-core cpus. What optimization you're talking about? "Angry Birds" will run faster?

 

[LogOver]

It works on any computer regardless of hardware. The emulator is licensed from another company; it's not tied to AMD's hardware in any way.

The emulator, used by BlueStack is well known free QEMU emulator. QEMU actually 2-3 times slower then Intel's houdini arm emulator.

 

[Fox5]

this is a very big win, for those hondo tablets

Certainly makes my Desna tablet more interesting. The windows 8 market place is not a fun place right now.

 

[ViRGE]

The emulator, used by BlueStack is well known free QEMU emulator. QEMU actually 2-3 times slower then Intel's houdini arm emulator.

Oh good heavens, BlueStack is using QEMU?! Well that certainly explains some things. They're probably compiling everything down to ARM and then emulating it.

 

[LogOver]

Oh good heavens, BlueStack is using QEMU?! Well that certainly explains some things. They're probably compiling everything down to ARM and then emulating it.

Yes, their effort was concentrated on porting Android graphics stack (routing OpenGL ES calls to OpenGL calls). All java code is compiled to arm native and then emulated, which is much less efficient than Android (dalvik) x86 + dynamic ARM emulator for native libraries.

 

[Fox5]

Oh good heavens, BlueStack is using QEMU?! Well that certainly explains some things. They're probably compiling everything down to ARM and then emulating it.

Ooo, I would have thought they'd have written a Dalvik interpreter and just ran those apps!

 

[Phynaz]

So what you guys are saying is that this thing from AMD to run Android apps is nothing other than software that has been freely available already?

 

[Idontcare]

So what you guys are saying is that this thing from AMD to run Android apps is nothing other than software that has been freely available already?

Hey Debbie Downer, AMD has only had 6yrs to get ready for Fusion (it's teh future if you haven't heard)...you expecting miracles or something? They just haven't had enough time to pull together anything better than this

 

[LogOver]

So what you guys are saying is that this thing from AMD to run Android apps is nothing other than software that has been freely available already?

Yep. Pretty much true. Free beta version of BlueStack software has been available for months. But there is a general lack of interest in running android apps on desktop (especially that if you really need android, you can install x86 version directly on your pc or on a virtual machine). Recently AMD decided to invest some money in the company, and to put AMD label on it.

 

[BenchPress]

"AMD AppZone Brings Graphics-Accelerated Windows and Android Apps to PCs Worldwide"

That's a very misleading title. None of those applications has any GPGPU use. Hence they do not specifically benefit from AMD's APUs or HSA efforts. It's fundamentally no different than Intel's AppUp or the Mac App Store. So how can AMD possibly monetize this investment?

It looks like this is yet more proof that heterogeneous computing can't deliver on its promises. Homogeneous throughput computing is far more promizing, which is spearheaded by Intel's AVX2 technology. AMD doesn't even have it on its roadmaps yet.

 

[Phynaz]

"AMD AppZone Brings Graphics-Accelerated Windows and Android Apps to PCs Worldwide"

That's a very misleading title.

Good marketing on their side...Read it and it says nothing about the Android apps being accelerated, it just says the Windows apps are accelerated.

 

[piesquared]

Another great article here.

http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/10/01/amd-appzone-brings-android-mobile-apps-to-windows-8-pcs/

This sure is getting a lot of attention around the net. I wonder what the competitions response will be. My guess is another round of viral marketing.

Pie, I'm not sure how a thread about AMD software turns into you thread crapping WRT Intel. Knock it off
-ViRGE

 

[sm625]

I'm surprised apple never swooped in and crushed bluestacks (somehow... who in gods name knows how but does it really matter anymore?). I installed it once back in february, and started playing some tower defese game. It was pretty fun and I got pretty far. But then my ocz ssd crapped out on me and I never did reinstall bluestacks...

 

[ViRGE]

Ooo, I would have thought they'd have written a Dalvik interpreter and just ran those apps!

The advantage of just emulating every last bit of ARM is that it should have near-perfect compatibility, since some Android applications are written using the NDK and as a result are native ARM binaries rather than Java. However the performance hit for doing so is going to be rough; this no doubt is brutal on Brazos.

The "technically correct" solution is to use x86 Dalvik on Java apps, and only use the ARM emulator when running ARM apps. But of course that's harder to implement.

I'm surprised apple never swooped in and crushed bluestacks

Why would Apple crush BlueStacks?