"Some chaps at Symbian with way too much time on their hands have compiled the current version of the OS onto an Intel Atom processor - proving that you don't have to follow the ARM road to Symbian nirvana. The chaps concerned work for 'S60 in Symbian Customer Operations' and did the port to see if it would work, and if anyone would take an interest. The port is to an Atom reference board from Intel, but demonstrates that Symbian could probably run on a netbook if anyone wanted such a thing."
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Member since:
2005-07-11
Member since:2005-08-28
Member since:2006-02-15
Presumably it was specifically the Atom, because Atom is the x86 chip most likely to be used in cell phones or MIDs or other places that run Symbian.
But there isn't anything special about Atom from software development viewpoint: it sports exactly the same instruction set as any other modern x86 chip and as such the same code will run on any of them. As such, they ported Symbian to x86.
Now, however, I have no idea why would anyone want Symbian on x86..It's buggy, insecure, slow..Oh wait, so is Windows, nevermind then!
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-08-08
Probably wouldn't run on a different atom board either, as it really is the drivers that needs to be there to make the whole thing work. SymbianOS has always been compilable for x86, but the question is how much of the insane parts from the (x86) emulator is still left in this port.
They could have run windows and then run the emulator on top of that and play around and got it to work. But that would just be silly. But it can be done:)
