Why aren't smartphones made using X86 or X86-64 compliant CPUs?

[Amol S.]

Its been many year since the first smart phone has comeout, other than the hardware accessory and speed improvements, and all the other stuff, there has been little to no push towrds changing the CPU architecture used in cellphones.

With the current world demands of making more portable and powerfull divices, shifting cellphone CPUs to the X86 and X86-64 archotecture would be a great achivement.

Flash drive chips have already reached a storage size of 500gb, smart phone RAM has already reached 4-6GB range, most cellphones now support the use of external peripheral devices as mouses and keyboards. Then why not change the architecture?

If the actecture was chamged to x86 and x86-64, cellphones would be able to run the desktop versions of Mac or Windows. Apple would be able to topple overAndroid scince Android has no widely successful (as Mac or Windows) desktop PC variant.

 

[vailr]

There have already been cell phones that use an Intel low power x86 CPU, but have never sold very well.
Battery life with cell phone x86 CPU's is still lacking in comparison with ARM CPU's.
AFAIK, Intel has basically given up trying to compete with ARM CPU's for cell phones.
The latest ARM CPU for tablets is now able to run a special "Windows 10 for ARM" edition, which is advertised as being "always connected" devices, via a cell phone connection.

 

[ElFenix]

intel passed on making chips for the first iphone, then spent billions trying to money-whip themselves into the phone space. it hasn't happened. x86, with its big, power hungry decoder, is at a disadvantage in sub 1-watt workloads compared to arm. intel couldn't accomplish that with a big manufacturing lead over the mobile processor guys. intel (apparently) doesn't have that lead anymore. (there's also modem patents and some other things that have helped keep intel out of mobile).

further, desktop operating system paradigms are completely different and don't necessarily translate well into mobile form factors (and vice versa). iOS's big trick over, say, windows mobile at the time was that it didn't try to be like MacOS. completely different way to use it. and then MS tried to leverage its desktop leadership into the mobile space (trying to make the interface the same) by completely changing the desktop interface with windows 8. which was a terrible debacle.