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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."
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).
If the market at issue is the retail market for cellphones, there might be some validity to that. The market Intel is actually entering is the market for supplying processors to smartphone manufacturers, which they've entered as soon as they have a product available for those manufacturers to order.
That is their claim in the graphs in the article. Graphs that don't mention which competing devices are being compared and which have no numbers. But they are claiming to be middle of the pack in idle power consumption, which has always been the fatal flaw in x86 mobile devices until now. If they have really managed to get an x86 to idle at a couple of milliamps of current then they are probably in the hunt. If not, it is all bogus like an x86 tablet. Who wants a phone you have to charge daily even if you don't call or even light up the display? It is all about idle time with these more mobile devices, not how many HD frames you can push for the hour or so the battery can hold up.
Anand has done a really good job analyzing Medfield's performance and power usage, with actual comparisons against other shipping competitors.
So, to answer your questions:
1. Performance comparison -
Sunspider javascript benchmark (lower is better) -
Intel Medfield - 1331 - compare to iPhone 4S - 2250 & Galaxy Nexus running Android Icecream Sandwitch - 1988
Browsermark benchmark scores (higher is better) -
Medfield - 116425 - compare to iPhone 4S - 87841 & Galaxy Nexus running Android Icecream Sandwitch - 97381
Intel's Medfield has a good 20-50% performance lead against currently shipping top of the line ARM. Granted most ARM phones are due for a refresh in 6 months which will give them an expected performance boost of about 30-50%, Medfield will still be in the same ballpark performance. Its definitely a viable option. Plus, a Medfield upgrade will also come out in 9-12 months.
2. Power consumption on standby -
Medfield standby - 18mW - compare to iPhone 4S - 38mW & Galaxy S2 - 19mW
3. Power consumption during 3G web browsing -
Medfield standby - 1W - compare to iPhone 4S - 1.3W & Galaxy S2 - 1.2W
Power consumption during 720p video playback -
Medfield standby - 850mW - compare to iPhone 4S - 500mW & Galaxy S2 - 650mW
Barring video playback, Medfield actually has better power consumption numbers than iPhone 4S and Galaxy S2. Even in video playback, Medfield is only a little bit higher. Unlike what people have been warning about, Medfield is NOT a power hog and is in fact at par with currently shipping ARM.
Instead of getting into fanboyism, people should be excited by this news. Firstly, Intel is the small underdog here, while ARM is the 800lb gorilla. Secondly, it sounds like a cliche but competition is almost always A Good Thing. Thirdly, I am personally extremely excited at the idea of a Medfield based tablet - it would give us enough flexibility to run multiple OSes and the millions of legacy x86 apps and games sloshing around in the great wide interweb. It would also allow us to run Win8 when it eventually releases which is also an attractive proposition.
Lastly, if you put aside the purist RISC/CISC debate, x86 over the years has promoted and ensured an open ecosystem of OSes, applications, websites, and open source projects/communities. For all the goodness that ARM contains, its advent into smartphones and now tablets has caused more walled gardens and vendor lockdowns, not less. The root cause may very well be greedy corporations (heck, even El Goog is turning into one) and nothing to do with ARM per se, but I'm calling it like I see it.