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Intel Relying On Ice Cream Sandwich For Tablet Push
An anonymous reader writes "Intel thinks tablets live and die by their software, not their hardware. So as they get ready for a big push into the mobile device market, they're relying on Ice Cream Sandwich to provide competition with Apple's products. From the article: 'The company has largely watched from the sidelines as mobile device makers have used processors based on ARM's microarchitecture to power their products in recent years. This despite the fact that Intel actually predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs, several years ago, and built a chip, Atom, for such gadgets. For all that [Intel CEO Paul Otellini] touts the software over the hardware when it comes to tablets, Intel knows it's got a lot of ground to make up to wrest design wins away from ARM. The Medfield System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is a promising but still uncertain step in that direction.' Otellini thinks the tablet market will get much more competitive over the next year as ICS devices mature and Windows 8 devices arrive."
when you shove an ice cream sandwich up your ass and then eat it. Melts alot of the ice cream too.
You waited too long intel, sitting on the sidelines. You probably even thought that this tablet thing was all just a craze and would fade away as quickly as it had come (but call it a wait and see approach just incase you were wrong). But now ARM is the big boy in the tablet (and mobile phone) field. Just like microsoft had a wait and see attitude with mobile phone OS then iOS and Android swept the market and then they released windows mobile 7 to a world that didn't care. So you'll release your tablets with ICS and windows8. Everyone will root their windows8 device to install ICS anyway because Win8 is terrible and people will figure it out quick. Any tablet device slapped with an 'Intel Inside' sticker will most likely flounder as everyone buys iPads and samsung galaxy tablets. In short Intel stick to desktops and laptops also get nvidia to produce a video card driver that doesn't crash every 5 minutes thank you gtx560.
And Intel, you seem to have fallen for your own trickery of putting most of the stuff into the northbridge, so the CPU looks all efficient.
But that won't work, when in the end, a full ARM *system* still is 10 times more efficient than the best you can offer.
The ugliness of your machine language doesn't help things either.
And your anti-competitive behavior is another reason to avoid you, from a tablet manufacturer standpoint.
But what am I talking here... tablets have no point, other than being an e-penis, anyway. Same as SUVs. They are expensive, impractical, slow, and basically all the bad things in one, and the best in none. ^^
In the long run, they will be replaced by mobile phones. Or from my p.o.v., they never found a place that a real computer or a proper smart phone (one at least offering what S60 offered 10 years ago, like a file manager, communications tools, media playback, Internet surfing, install whatever you like, 3d and video acceleration, big display, full-featured hardware) hadn't already taken.
Intel won't succeed with its first iteration but it will slow down ARM a bit in an overall growing market, Intel might even take the low to mid of the market and leave the high end to ARM for now as Medfield is only competitive with ARM processors from a year ago. Both ARM and Intel will gain marketshare and eventually the market might become split between them, I don't foresee a 3rd player, maybe MIPS in the form of the Chinese-derivative Loongson?
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Otellini thinks the tablet market will get much more competitive over the next year as ICS devices mature and Windows 8 devices arrive.
Intel should know that from last year, there's not been a tallet market save for an Ipad market. I do not think matters will change until Google and its partners tame the chaos within the Android ecosystem.
You ask your self: Why has a hugely successful company like Samsung released a [very compelling] Galaxy Note tablet based on already outdated software? Promising an update does not cut it either. It only showcases the chaos within the ecosystem, giving trolls fodder to feed on. Sad.
Bad move, Intel. I used to rely on an ice cream sandwich. Then Häagen-Dazs stopped making 'em and everything else in my life went to complete shit for about three months. Take it from someone who's been down that road: if you're going to rely on ice cream sandwich, do not commit unless you have control of the supply chain.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Intel lost a lot of time with high end processors for desktop and servers thinking it was the most profitable market. It seems more profitable market, or at least markets that be considered as part of core strategu, are in mobile devices where computational efficiency is a must ( energy consumption per computation) Computational efficiency is not only relevant in mobile devices but also in server farms where hundreds if not thousands of CPU are running in parallel.
Yeah, it's a good chip. In performance-per-watt, it'll outdo any other Intel chip with ease. By x86 standards it sips power, even if you include the northbridge. But that is by x86 standards... by ARM, it just can't compete. If Intel really want to succeed in mobile, they'll need to take a big risk: Abandon the thirty-year heritage and backwards compatibility of x86/64.
ice cream sandwich is yummy for tablets and i would prefer ICS tablets than iPad :D
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Actually, the best platform for Intel's Tablet push would be Microsoft's Windows 8 - it could do some minimal salvage of both Intel & Microsoft in the tablet market by offering a key advantage not there in iOS or Android - Windows compatibility. Windows 8 for ARM ain't gonna run those gazillion Windows apps out there, but Windows 8 on an Medfield may, and that would be the main selling point of Wintel tablets.
Otherwise, concede that the tablet market is an ARM monopoly (unless anyone comes out w/ MIPS based Androids) and an Apple/Google duopoly.
Good info
Google has a reputation of backstabbing vendors left and right (ask Dell or Juniper) and is better not to do business with them at all. I don't understand why Intel doesn't dedicate resources to Meego/Tizen and frees themselves from Andy "hypocrite" Rubin and the other Google assholes.
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Jordyn Buchanan, clueless shithead of the day.
You gotta be kidding.
This statement was probably taken out of its original context and I would bet it was "Intel will rely on ICS for Android tablets".
In fact, this whole thing is so bold, it does not really deserve commenting on it. ICS, really. Pitty.
How weard is it for somebody to claim that the hardware it not important, the important thing is the software, and go on talking on how they'll create a product with the same software everybody else uses.
Yeah, the hardware is not important... I'll belive it when you stop using Android.
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Does calling your operating system "Ice Cream Sandwich" sound really gay and unnecessary to anyone else? Like, say hypothetically. "Yeah man, I'm multi booting Linux, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Windows."
Is this what it has boiled down to? ChaCha? Twitter? Blogosphere? Web 2.0?
Couldn't we name use apt names for stuff, not drool spattered about by the UGA advertising major type?
I don't get it.
Sure, Intel may port android to atom platform.
But what about apps?
The average dev builds ARM binaries, and that it not about to change.
Even if they build for other architectures, it is hard to test without actual hardware test devices.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Yea totally agreed.
I prefer crushing them up and having them with some sugar.
Ice cream does sound a bit more delicious though.
Dalvik is nothing but a bit translator that turns Java bit code into something else in an attempt to fake the fact that Android runs Java (ie: Google does not want to pay for licensing tech others created).
Without a Sun/Oracle Java compiler, Dalvik doesn't work.
Now there is a thought - people bye a table not as a brick or a decorative object, but to get something done with the software on it. Very advanced thinking!
Why do they then go on to promote Android? As much as I love Android, it is just good enough, and not an example of really excellent software.
Unfortunately tablet manufacturer either ship Android pretty much unmodified, or even worse make some dubious "improvements" that makes everything even more inconsistent. How about some decent software and interface design for once? It has been done before, so why is it so difficult? I mean just look at the settings menu, it is about as uninspiring and as easy to navigate as a 1980's text adventure.
Sorry, Intel only 'predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs' AFTER Nokia had the 770 and even its successor N800 out. (And this is not to say Nokia was first, either, just one that was popular at the time.)
Intel's MID racket was basically the same future everyone in mobile tech saw, with the one exception that they saw it as a way to sell Intel CPUs, even though their CPUs sucked mightily for the application. To rectify that, they developed the Atom processor family, which would suck less than existing x86es, and were still way behind everyone else. They've finally closed the gap to a couple years behind, but everyone else producing ARM SoCs is still moving forward, and there's no reason to suspect Atom will ever get ahead, and it's not clear they'll even catch up. So why are we paying attention to them again? Oh, that's right, because journalists go to press conferences, then regurgitate whatever is told them there.
It specifically calls for a the Sun/Oracle JDK to use Dalvik.
The only person not making any sense is you and not the previous poster. You must have very poor reading comprehension.
Core 2 Duo 291m transistors
Nvidia Tegra2 (Arm) 260m transistors
The latter is loosely broken into 2 general purpose ARM processors and 6 audio/video processors that can be switched off independently when their function is not required.
Intel have no hope of bringing x86 to the smartphone market unless they start from scratch with an 80386 (275k transistors) modify the hell out of it for power consumption and work forwards from there.
I'd actually be interested to see a genuine 386 processor running at smartphone speeds.
Intel should be relying on an unlocked bootloader so people can decide what they want instead of having Win8/ICS/Other rammed down their throats! They just might find that people having a choice might result in increased hardware sales.
They do understand that if Apple wanted to, Apple could run iOS on Intel chips, right?
It sounds like Apple has told them they won't do that, and Intel is trying to change their minds by mounting a seemingly concerted competitive effort.
At the least, Intel's new chips, which have surprised even ARM's CEO with their speed and economy, are going to make Intel rich yet again.
The question is whether Apple wants to be in full-frontal competition with them, or do what it did with the PowerPC/x86 decision and go with the one that has taken the technological lead.
As a recent post just highlighted, Windows still sells more licenses than OSX, iPhone, and Android combined... Intel's real push will be with Windows 8 tablets. Having ICS in the wings is just icing on the proverbial cake.