Intel's Menlow Revealed: Baby Centrino Gets Ready
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 9, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Apple has been very successful because it is a hardware company that has full control over the software stack. Companies like Dell and Gateway are at the mercy of Microsoft when it comes to designing and implementing new features, whereas Apple can pretty much do whatever it wants.
Intel realized that the success of these MIDs is dependent on having a light, responsive, cost effective OS. At the same time, Intel needs the OS to be customizable, at least until Microsoft wakes up and creates a more intuitive version of Windows (or Windows mobile) for these ultra mobile devices.
We suspect that it will only be a matter of time before Microsoft does wake up, and hopefully by then we'll be on to the second or third successor of Menlow. I've always characterized Menlow and its successors as the processors that Apple wanted to use in its iPhone; give it another 3 years and I think you'll actually see it happen.
Intel is the underdog in this battle, the incumbants are the current SoC makers that are in smartphones, set top boxes and virtually all other consumer electronics devices. And like Microsoft, when it's hungry, Intel can do some amazing things. I don't expect Menlow to kickstart a revolution when it hits in Q2 of this year, but I do expect it to slowly build its way to perfection by the end of the decade.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
PandaBear - Wednesday, January 9, 2008 - link
I don't understand why would Intel try to force x86 down a portable device that runs on Linux. For Windows I can understand but ARM (and almost every other architecture out there) can run Linux and in an embedded device you don't want to have the cost and power consumption much more than ARM.Given the fact that ARM based solution are so efficient power wise, and that there are already many ARM based ASIC out there, I don't understand why (other than politics) would Intel want to go the x86 road. They should develop a similar low power RISC core and hardware accelerated ASIC around it instead.
What I sense is that they don't want x86 to go away when non PC take over the Internet browsing and mobile market takes off. So they give you something that is just good enough to hang on to rather than going to an all new platform like iPhone. Without a true Windows (with good usability) this won't help much.
defter - Thursday, January 10, 2008 - link
Intel had a low-power RISC core called StrongARM several years ago, but they decided to sell that...It seems that Intel feels it's important that small mobile devices use the same instruction set as desktop PCs.