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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).
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).
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
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