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Intel Demos Phone and Tablet In New Mobile Chip Push
holy_calamity writes "Intel is making another assault on the mobile processor market, showing off a prototype phone and a tablet using its newest mobile processor Medfield. The company claims that products based on the chips will appear in the first half of next year. There's reason to believe that Intel might get somewhere this time. Its chipsets traditionally comprise three separate chips, a design that guzzles power. Medfield introduces an all-in-one chip, mirroring the power efficient design of the ARM-based chips that run smart phones and tablets in the market today."
Surely, it is no longer the "Intel Inside" mantra we had become so used to seeing and hearing in the late 90s and early 2000s. Agree?
... I eagerly scan the article to see if the predictions here were true: http://www.tealdragon.net/humor/startrek/power.htm
"It's that miserable 80986 with the 512K bit bus multiplexed down to one pin."
That's so Intel...
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
That's a bit of a cheap shot. Increased component integration has been a driving force for longer than Intel has been a company, and Intel has been as much of a driving force as anybody else. In fact Intel should excel at system-on-a-chip, since it's all about getting lots of transistors on a small piece of silicon, something they happen to be pretty good at.
and
So it looks like a bit of incremental leapfrog (if that), not some kind of breakthrough. Meh.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If you have ever touched the Android SDK, you learn very quickly that doing development on a desktop is rather painful. The main reason is their dev test environment completely emulates an ARM processor (on top of your desktop x86 system), which is extremely CPU intensive. If we get android running x86 (there are already a number of people out there working towards this), we can then do our testing in an x86 based simulator, which will be much easier on desktop system.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Dunno, I remember Centrino being a very good mobile processor line back in the day. I'm more surprised they didn't enter the market until now, maybe it's because they've been dominating the desktop market pretty hard? I have a hard time recommending AMD with a straight face nowadays for desktops... haven't read too much about what came in the past few months, I know AMD released something decent, but all they're doing is joining in on the party, not starting one there.
They didn't enter the market because they rested on their laurels like they often do, and also got completely blindsided by how quickly smartphones and tablet computing took over the world. Intel is a great company in many respects, but too often relies on a kick in the pants to get moving. Traditionally, AMD has done the kicking like they did with x64 and Athlon, which is why Intel got blindsided when the whipping came from ARM. They responded eventually to AMD with Centrino, Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest, and eventually with Quickpath and Nehalem, and AMD is still recovering.
They are finding it harder to do the same with ARM because both companies are moving in different directions - ARM has an extremely low power and low performance architecture while Intel's x86 is extremely high power and high performance. Plus, Intel has to deal legacy support in every subsequently new "tock" which is why x86 improvement will always remain evolutionary in nature. ARM also found it much easier to scale up its performance at a similar power envelope while Intel has found it much harder to scale down its power consumption while maintaining adequate performance.
Atom was probably the first x86 redesign that targeted power consumption first and only then performance. Even with this design goal, it only managed to scale down to single digit wattage while ARM operates in the sub-watt to milliwatt range. This is still a crucial difference - it is the difference between the weight and size of a netbook sized laptop and a handheld device. On top of this, ARM has been steadily integrating more and more peripheral chips back into the chip while keeping the same power envelope, which makes it even simpler and more attractive to device manufacturers.
Anyway, rambling aside, I suspect that Intel gave up the race for a brief period of time and instead waited for its manufacturing process to shrink to a level (22nm) where it could finally combine its process node lead with the Atom architecture to reach the sub-watt power level. It still hasn't got there, but it will - by 2013. Don't count them out, and I say this mainly because Intel is still the only surviving company that still designs AND manufactures its own chips. The advantages of this kind of vertical integration is huge. Companies love to talk about outsourcing everything but there are significant advantages to being vertically integrated as well. To digress slightly, look at how mainframes continue to survive and thrive in this age of commodity computing.
It is also interesting to reflect that this fortuitously coincides with Microsoft's Win 8 release and MSFT's own struggle to compete in tablet and handheld computing. Again, their true credible answer will be Windows 9 if not Windows 8. I suspect that at least in the tablet playing field, Win 8 will be a very credible competitor, and Win 9 will probably merge back almost fully with x86 architecture. The allure of x86 and its backward compatibility should not be underestimated. Legacy app support is extremely attractive for enterprise IT even if it is not so much so for normal consumers.
I just want to see if I understand this correctly. You're suggesting that the world's biggest and most powerful processor company who has shown repetitively that they can produce the processors capable of the greatest performance per watt for general purpose computing shouldn't be able to produce an efficient processor as well?
I'm just wondering... do you really believe that the inefficiency you're talking about is related to an instruction set? Really? It's actually like saying that people are less efficient if they speak Mandarin as opposed to English though maybe more efficient if they speak Spanish. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages of each instruction set, but in truth, all a processor is is a device capable of processing a list of instructions.
Now, to compare it to something more intelligent... if you can cope with intelligence... I hope so.
It is possible to write directions to the your house for someone. Assuming that you have a starting point, you can provide instructions with multiple levels of detail. You can put a great deal of effort into every minute detail and even over compensate. On option you have is :
"Try every single road in this town until you find a blue house with a purple roof and a green football flag on the lawn".
The alternative would be
"Take this road to this road. You'll recognize this road because of the gas station at the corner on your left side. Turn right at this intersection." and so forth.
Which is more efficient? It doesn't matter what language or instruction set you write it in... what matters is the quality of the instructions you provide.
Desktop operating systems which are generally what's run on x86 processors tend to be written by people who know they have access to what feels like unlimited CPU power. The operating systems focus entirely on user experience and not specifically on efficiency. If an OS is designed to be efficient and usable, then there's much to be gained. At this point in time, we're limited to pathetic half breeds like versions of linux that are so covered in band-aids to make it run on small devices you almost want to cry, Symbian which wasn't functional, but was power efficient. Windows CE which was the same... a few others and soon a version of Windows 8 that will be similar to how Linux has been bastardized to run on small devices.
Android has had some of the greatest work done on it to make it more efficient. To compensate for the obvious short-comings in the Linux kernel, Android implements itself on top of something similar to Java which in effect makes it more power efficient. It's not that Java itself or Java programmers are more efficient. It's that by having a virtual machine layer that performs more "traffic control" on the system, power efficiency can be more easily achieved. This would be true for an MSIL or LLVM virtual machine as well. The extra layer makes it so that the virtual machine can do things like shut down or decrease the priority of a given virtual processor as a software function and makes it so that software developers don't have to instrument their apps to achieve it.
The next really big difference between Android/IOS and a desktop OS is simple. All the applications written for these OSes are designed to be run on telephones or "power efficient devices". You could in theory put these operating systems on any processor and their power performance will be quite good.
So... while I'd like to hear from you why you think Intel can't do power efficient, I doubt you'd have much to offer other than stupid buzzy wordy kinda snips.
Try learning something