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."

Comments

Re:Yes it's totally software, but

[SeaFox]

What makes you think Windows 8 will be terrible?

I'm using the Developer's Preview right now and I can tell you it's annoying as Hell, and it's not gonna change. Why? Because the things that make it annoying are things Microsoft wants to push.

There's no real Start menu. All programs have to be launched either from the Metro interface, an Explorer window of the program folder, or having the app docked on the taskbar. The Metro-enhanced apps look great on the Metro launcher, but regular apps just get their Start menu files added as tiles.I have several tiles labeled "Uninstaller" but I have no idea what program they uninstall because they aren't grouped at all with their parent programs like they were in folders on the old Start menu. Same with those apps "Read Me" files. But if Microsoft put a regular start menu in people would likely jump right into the Desktop and not even bother with Microsoft's Metro at all, continuing to use their PC like they did in Vista/7. That would threaten Microsoft's plan to steer everyone into using their Metro app store and taking a 30% cut, like Apple does on their App Store. There's also a lack of regular menus in Explorer. It's been replaced with the Ribbon interface. Microsoft sees Ribbons as the future: usability or customer preference be damned.

Re:Yes it's totally software, but

[evilviper]

You missed the mark... What made the iPhone break thorough was the fine integration work. I had a WinCE PDA a decade ago, too, and it was an absolute nightmare to use for anything... Little things like the power button putting the device into standby (instead of just shutting off the screen) made it useless as an MP3/Ogg player.

The apps were all massively crippled. Pocket Office was inferior to Wordpad. Browsers were all crap, crippled compared to desktop versions, and nobody had figured out how to render full sized web pages on a 240x320 screen. They were still massively dependent on desktops. And worst of all, WinCE was just unresponsive crap. It was laggy as hell on 300MHz+ CPUs when Palm and others were snappy on 30MHz CPUs. The start menu model was never a good idea. And I despised having to go download a REGISTRY EDITOR for my PDA first thing to fix insanely stupid default settings...

Now if you actually wanted to get stuff done, Psions were awesome. Slide-out keyboard. Office suite that allowed composing pretty full-featured documents, even embedding charts and drawings into documents, and printing them out directly to the nearest IRDA enabled laser printer. There, some of the limitations were avoided just because the portrait display eliminated side-to-side scrolling with web browsing and whatnot. Even had a PDF reader, but you'd have to squint to read the tiny fonts, or deal with side-side scrolling every line... the software that makes smartphones tolerable today just wasn't even a dream back then.

Re:Medfield

[ozmanjusri]

maybe MIPS in the form of the Chinese-derivative Loongson?

That's already happening, and they're selling like hotcakes. http://www.mobilemag.com/2012/01/12/79-ainol-novo-7-paladin-tablet-does-ice-cream-sandwich/

The problem for Intel is the price of these SoCs:

• $5 TI ARM Cortex A8, 500mhz,
• $7 Ingenic jz4770 1ghz MIPS with a Vivante GC600 3D GPU
• $7 Allwinner A10, 1.5ghz ARM Cortex A8 with a MALI400 GPU
• $75 Intel Atom Z670 Oak Trail 1.50GHz GMA 600 GPU

http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/

They may not be as capable as the Atom, but they're good enough to make very usable tablets at 1/10th the price.

Re:Yes it's totally software, but

[Anne Thwacks]

WinCE delivered professional grade suckiness - frequent crashes with data loss, and no upgrades to fix bugs at all. It looked like a scam to me. Professional non-tech people who used it against the advice of IT people (because it was "windows") were horrified at how crap it was, and could not wait to ditch it.