The Nexus TV box that Google just announced is the company’s latest attempt to take over the living room (after Chromecast). This one runs Android 5, so punters can download and run apps from Google Play. This will include games, of course, and there is to be an optional games hand controller. However, what no one seems to have noticed is that the NExus TV box has an Intel processor, not an ARM.
Although simple Apps are written in CPU independent Java code, or, strictly speaking, a similar VM either Dalvik or ART depending on which version of Android you. It’s interpreted on the target platform, and therefore slow. When high performance is needed then code has to be written C and compiled to native code (i.e. using the NDK). This hasn’t been a problem thus far, as all Android devices on the market used the ARM core, and were machine-code compatible. I wonder how many games are written this way? Quite a few, probably.
Tesco has also just launched a non-ARM Hudl tablet. The mass media had yet to comment.