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Intel-Powered Smartphones Arriving Soon
adeelarshad82 writes "After years of promises to enter the smartphone market, Intel has finally done so. During his keynote at CES, Intel's Chief executive Paul Otellini said that Intel has signed Lenovo and Motorola to contracts to use its Atom processors in smartphones. Unlike past launches, Intel has held Medfield back until its partners were ready to go to press as well. According to an early preview, Medfield pairs a 1.6GHz Atom CPU with an SGX540 GPU designed by PowerVR. This is the same GPU we've seen tip up in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Droid Razr, though Intel is clocking it higher, at 400MHz. Intel's new SoC encodes video at 720p at 30 fps, can playback 1080p at 30 fps, and supports 1920×1080 output via HDMI. The first smartphone to carry an Intel chip will debut on China Unicom during the second quarter."
You haven't entered the market until the phones are available at retail. I would like to see this, but it hasn't happened yet and the announcement is premature.
I would like to see these phones on sale in the US. It would probably be my next phone, as I'm due for one in the fall.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Have they been able to get into power-draw ranges that'd make the battery life compatible with ARM-based devices?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I agree it adds an extra headache for developers, but I like multiple platforms conceptually, because it's an acid-test way of keeping developers from accidentally drifting into platform assumptions that they aren't really supposed to be making, and which will complicate things later. Sometimes even helps find bugs; back when they were more active (and still to some extent), the Debian ports to non-x86 platforms frequently helped uncover latent bugs that were just infrequently triggered on x86 for various coincidental reasons.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Wintel"? Focusing on Apple products? Fanboi much?
MS is moving to an platform of ARM/x86 cross compatibility, and Apple uses Intel on it's notebook products, so really, the only focus here is Intel, but some how you have to add Windows to it anyway?
Trying to figure out if your post is a subtle troll, or you are really just that obsessed...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Having used (and seen the demise of) PowerVR hardware in the desktop (remember Kyro/Kyro II?) I'm glad to see them in the news regarding their technology being affluent in the mobile market. But the SGX540 is dated to 2007 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series_5). Did Intel get an amazing deal on GPU chips at the discount/liquidation bin, or is this a reliable strategy?
720p video encoding, 1080p video decoding and 1080p via HDMI are considered stunning features?
Heck, Apple's been conservative, and the iPhone 4s has got 1080p video encoding, 1080p video decode and 1080p via HDMI. Androids have had it in 2010-2011 (and were mocking Apple the whole time).
So... the bigger question is - what's the battery life? The performance looks spectacular, but x86 is a notable power hog. And more worringly, I see nothing in the articles about battery life, power consumption, or battery size.
Why do people(TFS and TFA notably not excluded) insist on talking about the part in terms of its GPU performance?
Let's see here... Intel is throwing their hat into the ARM-level power arena... we could discuss how fast their processor is, or we could do a bunch of irrelevant jabbering about how fast the SGX540 that virtually everybody licenses from PowerVR is... Hmm. Hey, let's focus on the part that everybody already knows about and make it even more fascinating by not discussing power for GPU operations; but encode and decode of some (unspecified; but quite possibly a restricted baseline of H.264) 'HD Video' format, and the maximum output resolution!
It's actually a pretty impressive way to natter on about the product without the slightest mention of what may or may not make it interesting. In other news, it is probably made of silicon, and in some sort of density-optimized epoxy package!
It's never too late to come out with something wonderful - to raise the bar - to redefine what people expect from their technology in ways that empower and delight and amaze. Is this it? We don't know yet. But it's not too late.
I would just like to point out that handwarmers have been around for ages. Putting them in a cell phone is new, I'll grant you that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
... an android x86 avd for eclipse soon, which - i expect - should be much faster that the arm emulator !!
PowerVR drivers anyone?
intel should be making these on 22nm and new products being released now,
I think the reason they don't is because 22nm requires more power to operate at a high speed.
??? How's that happen, typically the lower the process size, the lower the energy use for the same design (and the higher possible clock speed before heat issues occur).
Mark my words in the next 5 years ARM is going to have a CPU good enough for a laptop. the cost structure of Wintel will make this a huge financial/profit opportunity for laptop makers
I don't think this matters. The CPU is not why laptops are expensive, so even if some ARM manufacturer manages to match Intel in performance (unlikely), what motivation is there to dump all your legacy software that only runs on Intel?
Also, if AMD couldn't overtake Intel with chips that were at times superior, why do you think VIA or Qualcomm could?
The issue isn't cost, but performance. Even a low end x86 (except Atom and AMDs equivalent) can outperform an ARM chip significantly. Also, have you seen the price of replacement notebook CPUs? They are a lot more expensive than similar desktop CPUs. It's not the only reason they are more expensive, but it certainly is part of it.
ARM may in fact catch up to x86 - the question then is, will Intel focus more on their own ARM development? Performance focus has been moving from per-thread performance (where x86 is usually pretty good, and performance/watt is not necessarily a huge concern) to multi-threaded performance (where performance/watt can translate quite well, since you just have to add more cores to up the overall performance). I believe ARM is better at performance/watt than x86, so with ARM catching up on core count (and probably exceeding x86 soon), x86 may indeed lose it's lead. Of course, that only hurts Intel if they focus on x86.
Then again, I can see a slightly different future. Both multi-threaded and monolithic-threaded have their advantages. For notebooks (and maybe desktops/servers) I can see a primary ARM CPU handling most of the work, and an x86 (or Power, or whatever?) taking on the brute force stuff when needed, and otherwise powering down. Of course, applications and libraries will now need to store both ARM and x86 versions, and the OS will need to have code to allow cross talk between x86 and ARM at least at the cross-process level, but possibly even within processes themselves. Then again, that would be a huge undertaking and possibly not worth the effort.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
For the most part, they don't need to. Android has already been ported, and 75% of the apps for Android are written with the standard SDK, meaning they're cross-platform Java applets.
That leaves the 25% of remaining apps that are written with the NDK. Of those, most can be recompiled by the developer with minimal effort (the NDK supports building for x86 or ARM, and most apps wouldn't require any changes to recompile). Of those that can't, or aren't, Intel is going to be supplying binary translation software (read: emulation). That part won't run all that great, but it will run.
Basically, the point is that Android is particularly well-suited to switching between architectures because not much of it (or its apps) is architecture-dependent.
You could probably port Wine to Android-x86 with some effort, so WoW is not off-limits.
> A non-intel laptop is going to take a long time to come up to speed once people realize there isn't a wealth of applications available.
Did AMD stop making chips, or just laptop ones? Hmm, neither apparently.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Intel means Intel.
IA-32 isn't really used. We call this x86.
Given that Windows on ARM does not have the advantage that Windows normally has - of a gazillion legacy apps, this is the best hope for Windows as yet. At least, this way, some Windows programs can be run, if they can accept touch-screen inputs in addition to the usual keyboard & mouse.
Normally, this would be a godsend for Motorola, but given its being part of Google and presumably the most favored Android tablet, I'm surprised that they went w/ this solution. Lenovo makes sense, and I'd have expected Dell to jump into this as well - surprised that so far, they haven't. Done right, this could be a serious challenge to RIM, since it would allow one's work environment to be staged, and employees on the go can keep working on their phones somewhat less optimally than on their PCs, but at least get the most urgent things out of the way.
Here.. Looks quite competitive to me.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I could be), but AFAIK there is no strong ecosystem for x86 software that is geared toward usage on a touch-screen phone. Granted, Win8 will run X86 and will probably garner some touch-oriented software for the small screen, but it doesn't exist yet. So if I get one of these phones which 'apps' will I run? I suppose there is the Android x86 port, but I would imagine that most of the existing Android apps would fail in that environment.
From Anand:
"By default all Android apps run in a VM and are thus processor architecture agnostic. As long as the apps are calling Android libraries that aren't native ARM there, once again, shouldn't be a problem. Where Intel will have a problem is with apps that do call native libraries or apps that are ARM native (e.g. virtually anything CPU intensive like a 3D game).
Intel believes that roughly 75% of all Android apps in the Market don't feature any native ARM code. The remaining 25% are the issue. The presumption is that eventually this will be a non-issue (described above), but what do users of the first x86 Android phones do? Two words: binary translation.
Intel isn't disclosing much about the solution, but by intercepting ARM binaries and translating ARM code to x86 code on the fly during execution Intel is hoping to achieve ~90% app compatibility at launch. Binary translation is typically noticeably slower than running native code, although Intel is unsurprisingly optimistic about the experience on Android. I'm still very skeptical about the overall experience but we'll have to wait and see for ourselves."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
??? How's that happen, typically the lower the process size, the lower the energy use for the same design (and the higher possible clock speed before heat issues occur).
Not strictly true. The switching current is what goes down, but leakage current goes up. For older technologies that power threshold was recently crossed, that's why each new process step isn't just about feature size, but new tech to reduce leakage current so the power draw doesn't go insane. So reducing feature size, particularly at the scales we have now have real leakage current issues that need to be addressed at each step. High-K metal gates at 32nm was key to address this. And now Intel has the 3D Tri-Gate that helps reduce leakage current. I should note that these technologies also help increase/maintain switching speeds at the lower voltages/currents/feature sizes as well, which is a big selling point, but power is a huge part of that equation, particularly now in the mobile space.
I believe you are talking about the old 815 series which was real shite on a crusty roll so IIRC Intel tried to shove 'em out the door by selling them cheaper by the pair and most just chunked the chipset and paired it with an AMD or Nvidia nforce. Meh if its one thing Intel still hasn't figured out how to do its making decent chipsets with awesome graphics. the best you can usually say is "Well its not total shit, just mostly" when it comes to Intel chipsets. great for business users but with this market the consumer and not the businessman is what's driving it.
I just have to wonder how big a market there is gonna be for these things. i mean lets face it the reason we are talking X86 on cell phones is Windows, and even the most stripped down pirate version of Win 7 clocks in at about a Gb of space and then you have to figure in the size of the apps. What are they gonna do, but 60Gb mini drives in all the phones? But its pointless to run Windows without Windows programs so i just don't see the point, its not like Android and Chrome don't already run just fine on ARM, and even if this is for Windows 8 which is touch screen heavy you are still talking about a need for a shitload of storage space into a thing that thanks to iPhone has to be slim and sleek and sexy. To get enough space in the thing to make it useful its gonna have to be fatter than those brown Zunes!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've heard similar things around their GPUs (I'm thinking older ones).
i945 chipset costs $x
i945 chipset + GMA950 = $x + $0.75
Factor in the marketing scam of "centrino" which customers thought meant a certain model CPU, but really meant Intel CPU (Pentium M or better) + Intel Chipset + Intel Wifi. Throw in a 75 cent GPU and you have a laptop that consumers clawed over each other to get.
Even though Intel has a history of making garbage GPUs.
First foray was Intel 740 which was a standalone AGP card. What a joke.
i810 is an integrated version of the GPU, and is pretty crappy. Doesn't even support VESA modes above 640x480x16.
Generations of crappy integrated solutions branded "Exxxtreme graphics"
GMA910 Which Intel forced Microsoft to qualify for Vista Capable even though it was physically incapable of running WDDM drivers and thus couldn't run Aero. Lots of pissed off customers and OEMs and lots of lawsuits. I think they had warehouses full of these things and they were trying to foist them off. This crappy chip popped up again for the Celeron-M in the original 7" EeePC, as well as some early 9 and 10 inch models.
GMA950 represents the bare minimum that can run Aero. It was also forced on generations of Atom users when Intel tried to block nVidia out of the platform (why would users want accelerated HD video on an anemic CPU...)
GMA500 Based on a PowerVR core, the specs are actually good, but it had horrible driver support under Windows and Linux. This was on Z-series Atoms.
Larrabee never panned out as a dedicated GPU either.
And in almost every case an Intel GPU underperforms an equivalent bargain bin integrated GPU from AMD/ATI or nVidia. Most end users do 2d desktop software, and Video viewing, so they aren't demanding users, but the Intel GMA represents poor performance value. I think GMA stands for "Gimp along Media Adapter" or "Garbage Media Adapter". I think some of their more recent attempts are a bit better, but I hate the software associated with whatever's on my i5 company laptop.
Saying Intel means anything using the IA-32!
So by the same token does saying 'AMD' mean 'anything using the AMD64 architecture'?