Intel's Medfield & Atom Z2460 Arrive for Smartphones: It's Finally Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2012 8:00 PM ESTARM Compatibility: Binary Translation
Similar to Apple's move from PowerPC to x86, Intel finds itself in a difficult position with bringing Atom to Android. The OS isn't an issue as it has already been ported to x86 and all further releases will be available in both ARM and x86 flavors. The bigger problem is application compatibility.
There's already support for targeting both ARM and x86 architectures in the Android NDK so anything developed going forward should be ok so long as the developer is aware of x86.
Obviously the first party apps already work on x86, but what about those in the Market?
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.
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french toast - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
Im sorry, although this isnt an area that i have a huge amount of knowlege on, i can say with some certainty that both Qualcomm and ST-E will have on die baseband shipping this year on 28nm, In qualcomms case the s4 processor that is being demoed with the Asus idea pad has one in.I can also say it has 2 main advantages that i know of (and likely many more that i dont)
1) When put on die and using the same process as in qualcomm and ST-E case it vastly improves power effiecency, a big problem with currant 4g.
2) As most of the components are included on die that you have mentioned, that means more space out side of the die, less hastle for the manufacturers and more space inside the device/phone for things like battery/or smaller device.
Regards to Apple, apple bought PA semi, back in 2007/08 and use it to design its A-series chips, whilst it hasn't used a complete custom licence, they have done some soft optimisations, im not privvy to what they are.
Samsung also acquired intrinsity around the same time, and used their custom logic to some minor power improvements to the cortex core..first seen on the hummingbird..as Apple uses samsung to manufacture there chips, you can bet some of that is licenced too.
Qualcomm ,nvidia (not tegra)and Marvel also have full custom license.
aury - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
"We did manage to run SunSpider on the K800 though, which yielded a score of 1,971 -- just a hair faster than the 1,985 that we saw on the Galaxy Nexus."So either your test is off by about 600 points, or Engadget is blind.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
I haven't played with the K800 that was being shown off but I am not familiar with the state of Lenovo's Android skin at this point, nor the details of how SunSpider was run. Our SunSpider numbers were run on the Medfield reference design which is what the K800 should be based on though.I'll try and do some digging.
Take care,
Anand
paul878 - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
Who is going to hurt more?Intel entering into the Mobile Space or Arm entering the PC Space?
tipoo - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
Well, Intel has plenty of padding to live on should things go sour. Plus they have compatibility on their side. I'd guess Intel will be fine no matter where things go, ARM now has the pressure on to be competitive.name99 - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
"but one stand out issue was the A9 has a great execution core but seems to be more limited on the memory interface. Atom can support far more outstanding misses in L2 than the Cortex A9, which chokes bandwidth to the processor for anything not already in the L2 cache."It will be interesting to see if ARM take this seriously. Memory performance was THE downfall of PPC. It seems that companies and engineers think connecting to memory is not sexy compared to the core CPU; and I'd love to think that ARM are beyond this sort of childishness, but I honestly don't know.
guilmon19 - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
ARM's A15 platform was also designed with servers in mind, and servers address and use the RAM alot more then basic applications so i think they'll, hopefully, have that fixed by A15IceDread - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
I've always said that Intel would gain on ARM and eventually pass ARM. While I believed it would take a year more or two before they were this close on ARM, I'm still right :pThis will be interesting to follow, hopefully Amd gets their thump out and also does something on this market and then we have both Intel and Amd competing with cpu and gpu power for mobile devices.
varunkrish - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
I believe Anand Chandrasekher who was the brain behind Medfield left Intel due to failure of Intel-Nokia partnership. Any insight on that ?Android does seem a good choice for Intel compared to MeeGo as the ecosystem is already present.
stadisticado - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
I'd more characterize him as the brain behind the Nokia tieup, not the silicon. Silicon would have been controlled by the design teams, not the product division GM, which Anand was.