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Intel Medfield SoC Specs Leak
MrSeb writes "Specifications and benchmarks of Intel's 32nm Medfield platform — Chipzilla's latest iteration of Atom and first real system-on-a-chip oriented for smartphones and tablets — have leaked. The tablet reference platform is reported to be a 1.6GHz x86 CPU coupled with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios, and an as-yet-unknown GPU. The smartphone version will probably be clocked a bit slower, but otherwise the same. Benchmark-wise, Medfield seems to beat the ARM competition from Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia — and, perhaps most importantly, it's also in line with ARM power consumption, with an idle TDP of around 2 watts and load around 3W."
Awesome, with smartphones these days containing 6 watt-hour batteries you'll get 3 hours standby time! Thats nearly as much an an iPhone 4S
I did read the story - but did you? Its idle TDP stands at 2.6W. A 1700mAH battery (typical in a cell phone) @ 3.6V = 6.12 Volt-Amps (i.e. Watts). So, you'll get around 2.5 hrs of uptime under idle conditions, assuming the battery is new. Good luck trying to charge that monster ever 2 hrs!
Who cares about performance when your phone will be dead before making a single call? Not much better in tablets either!
So, what is this chip competing against? Other laptop chips from Intel?
Yeah... no.
vr-zone
As it stands right now, the prototype version is consuming 2.6W in idle with the target being 2W, while the worst case scenarios are video playback: watching the video at 720p in Adobe Flash format will consume 3.6W, while the target for shipping parts should be 1W less (2.6W)
extremeTech
The final chips, which ship early next year, aim to cut this down to 2W and 2.6W respectively. This is in-line with the latest ARM chips, though again, we’ll need to get our hands on some production silicon to see how Medfield really performs.
And which ARM SoC's idle at 2W? That's at least an order of magnitude greater than any ARM SoC - those typically idle at a few tens or hundreds of milliAmps. ARM's big.LITTLE architectures will bring that down even further.
So, Medfield may be competitive on speed and TDP at full load, but if you are a mobile device maker, would you care? You would probably be more interested in eking out more uptime from your tiny battery.