Intel has showed a prototype smartphone based on its low-power Medfield processor and said Intel-based phones from “major players” would be in the market next year. Intel has struggled to get its chips into smartphones and tablets, markets that are dominated today by processor designs from Intel’s U.K. rival ARM Holdings.
IMHO, this move by Intel is directly aimed at Microsoft.It is (again IMHO) a attempt to get MS not to move to ARM.
Having only a single core CPU is also a failure.
I expect one or two Phone makers to put a toe in the water buy with the architectural freedom that the ARM model gives them I hardly think that this will succeed.
As for the quote ‘we will have to pay ARM royalties for every CPU we make’. I had to laugh.
Didn’t Intel read the small print on the contract when they signed up for the ARM license? WTF?
Anyways, I hardly think that the small ARM fees per CPU would matter if Intelr were making millions of them in a Fab that might othewise been standing empty & unused.
Fail for obvious reasons.
A single core x86 wouldn’t be a failure if it outperforms a dual-core ARM, which is entirely possible (even probable). Intel won’t have to match ARM in power efficiency, they just have to significantly beat them in performance while being close (within 20%, I’d say). I fully expect ARM will make significant performance enhancements over the coming years as well, so I don’t expect an “Intel landslide”. But ARM will have to do more than just add cores to compete on performance. nVidia is on the right track with ARM and I see them as a major player going forward.
As for Intel’s ARM license, they’ve had it for years and have used it in the past. There is simply no good reason to use it again since they have the capability to compete with it in this new “low powered” world that mobile devices are creating. Intel is an innovation machine when they want to be and I have no doubt they want the low power mobile market like they do the desktop/laptop market. We’ll see how well they perform, so to speak.
Your repeated fail comment is a little premature.
Not really.
Intel has the infrastructure and is planning to enter the foundry business in a ala TSMC model. Rumours is it’s vying to build Apples next generation Ax series ARM processors.
It’s R&D is pretty strong with external partnerships and research sponsoring of new technologies. Consumers don’t really like patents I know but some bleeding edge technology will Inevitably have Intel’s name on it.
We wont really see this soon as we know they have billions tied in to fabs of 22nm and up and coming 14nm processes.
Only way we are going to see a real expediting of new technologies is when shareholder is forced to write the some fabrication plants faster and push these new technologies which will probable happen sooner or later i guess.
just to counter my “new technology” argument..in my view one of Intel biggest problem is going to be
what are we going to use all that processing power for.
Majority of PC users read email, type letters and open there browsers. These task already benefit much more from new storage technologies like SSD than processing power.
These new technologies will really only be viable if it is cheap.
There is no shortage of ideas to use new processing power. Video processing on a phone is not too far fetched. Soon you will have full HD video recording on phones, so why not allow them to do a little editing? Maybe with near-field technology you can walk up to a larger screen with your phone and use it, allowing you to do “big screen stuff” while having your tiny portable phone be your main CPU. This future is not that far off.
And how credible, usable, nifty or “wishable” is that future? Really, editing full HD videos on mobile phones?
I don’t see the point of using a smartphone as a main CPU when the scenario you depict still requires a bigger screen and the mobile CPU is inherently limited… and I’m only thinking about battery life here.
And yet these new machines are just as slow as a dead snail.
Don’t worry, software makers are very talented in wasting CPU power. I keep asking myself what could justify the fact that a dual core Vista machine is three times slower booting than my 1998 Olivetti laptop running Windows 95. USB? Bluetooth? the wide screen ratio? or the shrinking feature added to the task tray? or maybe support for HDMI, SATA and whatnot?
I think the terrible performance of modern desktop OSs mostly has to do with a bad sense of priorities…
-Do you need your operating system to initialize the network stack before displaying the login screen if you log in locally ?
-Do you need your operating system to initialize all peripherals including things like webcams, scanners, printers or USB sticks before displaying that login screen, or do you only want main graphics output and input devices like the mouse and the keyboard to be initialized now, and the rest to be initialized in the background later ?
-When you’re encoding an HD movie in the background and browsing your HDD hierarchy in the foreground, which task should receive the highest HDD access priority and provide maximal reactivity ?
Then there are also more classical ways to waste CPU power. Like, you know, this habit of many graphical toolkits to fully redraw a window each time it’s moved a few pixels around, instead of just keeping a copy of its contents in a buffer and blitting that copy around.
Microsoft doesn’t really care about the architecture, or even operating system on their phones, as long as they can run the .net / silerlight runtime.
They care. They get paid for licenses.
Sorry, I have to clarify –
Microsoft doesn’t care much about the kernel either, because it’s all abstracted by .net runtime. Of course they want to sell WP7 licenses, but what kernel is underneath doesn’t really matter. They could sell “WP8” with Linux kernel if it appeared convenient, the layer that has all the value in the platform is silverlight.
I really don’t believe that for one moment.
If that was the case then MS would have done so with WP7 rather than rewriting much of Win CE code base. Or they wouldn’t have spend the last 8 years cleaning up the NT kernel.
MS have always cared about owning the complete software stack from the kernel through to web apps.
Microsoft does an “extensive rewrite” of their kernel every second month, according to their own marketing.
I don’t believe that for a second.
Oh for gods sake there’s numerous articles posted on OSAlert about MS work to clean the NT kernel and, being a regular on here for some time, you should have read about this before now.
In fact even ignoring current behaviors, you only have to look at Microsoft’s past to see examples of my earlier point:
* Borland vs Visual Studio
* Lotus vs Office
* Netscape vs IE
* Java Applets vs ActiveX controls
* Java runtime vs .NET
* Flash vs Silverlight
* OpenGL vs DirectX
* IRC vs Microsoft Chat
* ICQ / AIM vs MSN
…I could go on.
Microsoft have always wanted exclusivity on the entire software stack.
In the former case, I think it’s quite interesting news : at last, OS hobbyists would get an open and standard mobile platform to play with as an alternative to the corporate-friendly ARM ecosystem.
I see a use for the processing power and X86 on a phone. I can install WIndows 8 on it and play WOW.
Then I will be raiding anywhere.
Now waiting for Nvidia to make a decent performance 3D chip for phones.