[nawitus]

>So Moore’s Law might be right after all, but it is right in a way that would require the entire mobile ecosystem to transition to x86. It’s not entirely impossible–it’s been done once before. But it was done at a time when yearly sales were around a million units, and now they are selling 62 million per quarter. It was done with an off-the-shelf virtualization environment that could emulate the old architecture at about 60% speed, meanwhile the performance of today’s hypothetical research virtualization systems for optimized (O3) ARM code are closer to 27%.

Why do you need virtualization if the code is Java bytecode? Sure, this doesn't work for iPhone, but Android should be able to easily change the processor architecture. (If I'm not missing something here). There's already Android-x86 project.

[brokenparser]

Besides ARM and x86, Android also runs on MIPS and PPC.

[jordanthoms]

And even for native code, it's generally easy to support multiple architectures (unless your code is arch-specific).