AMD Brazos Tablets Running Ice Cream Sandwich – Android 4.0.1
The Google Android 4.0 operating system, otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), has been released for x86 platforms! We found out this week that the ICS x86 branch based on Android 4.0.1 was recently released for download and works on AMD Brazos platoforms. It appears that the open source community working on the x86 version of ICS has been receiving a lot of support from AMD. When installed the OS is functional and the OpenGL ES Hardware acceleration for AMD Radeon GPU works! It’s not perfect though as several things don’t work yet. Who needs sound or a camera? If you are interested in trying out the build on a Brazos platform you can download Android x86 here.
The project is seeking to port the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) android-4.0.1_r1 release build to the x86 platform, and Chih-Wei Huang, one of the enthusiasts involved, told The Register that AMD had not only donated two tablets to the cause, but also has a couple of engineers helping out. As a result, the porting to AMDs Brazos platform is now largely complete and the source code has been made available. The first porting of Android to the x86 platform was actually done by Google engineers, but he explained that the Google team had not been continuing with the project since Android version 1.5, aka Cupcake. While the developers submit patches to Google, they seldom hear back, although some Google engineers are helping out privately with the project. Intel, too, hasnt been keen.
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