Intel's Medfield & Atom Z2460 Arrive for Smartphones: It's Finally Here
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2012 8:00 PM ESTFinal Words
Intel finally did it. After almost five years of talking about getting into mobile phone form factors, Intel went out and built a reference platform that proved what they've been saying was possible all along. Furthermore, Intel also finally landed a couple of partners who are willing to show their support by incorporating Medfield into their product portfolio. The releases are still a few months away at the earliest (possibly even longer for Motorola) but it's much better news than Intel has ever reported before in this space.
Medfield (left 1) vs. Moorestown (right 2)
The partnerships aren't out of pity either: Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start. Even today it appears to deliver better CPU performance than anything on the market, despite only having a single core. GPU performance is still not as fast as what's in the A5 but it's competitive with much of the competition today, and I fully expect the dual-core version of Medfield to rectify this problem.
Based on the data Intel shared with us as well, the x86 power problem appears to be a myth - at least when it comes to Medfield. I'm still not fully convinced until we're able to test a Medfield based phone ourselves, but power efficiency at the chip level doesn't seem to be a problem.
Medfield and the Atom Z2460 are a solid starting point. Intel finally has a chip that they can deliver to the market and partners to carry it in. Intel also built a very impressive reference platform that could lead to some very interesting disruptions in the market.
While I'd like to say that Intel's Medfield team can now breathe a sigh of relief, their work is far from over - especially with more competitive ARM based SoCs showing up later this year. I'm really interested to see where this goes in the next 12 months...
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
164 Comments
View All Comments
french toast - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
You dumbass, cant you see it has got nothing to do with that, its the VERSION that the phones run on and then compared against...2.3.7 is much faster than 2.3.3 or 2.3.4..to make it an equal fair test you would have to run EQUAL software.You would also have to do a number of different tests that stress the cpu under LOAD, then measure the power consumption.
Anand has taken some very biased intel run power slides and benched these phones on limited single thread benchmarks, and yes it shows an advantage, BUT that could just be the android version its self, not representitive of medfield superiority.
Add to that the fact that Atom runs alot faster per core and only slightly beats old hardeware on such single thread tests like caffeinemark, and looses others on quadrant and antutu, as well as offering worse gpu performance than a galaxy s2, note, and iphone 4s that were released mid last year on 40nm.
Krait on 28nm with on die 4g in quadcore configuerations and with a next gen 320 gpu will release THIS year about the time Intel releases a chip that is barley competitive with chips LAST year.
baros - Monday, January 16, 2012 - link
Why didn't intel go with meego instead ?diulaylomochohai - Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - link
Why did the battery test omit numbers from HTC 1S and 1X?jaffa62 - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
Typical smartphone malware leverages platform vulnerabilities that allow it to gain root access on the device in the background. Using this access the malware installs additional software to target communications, location, or other personal identifying information. Thanks.Regards,
http://www.scottsdale-azsearchforhomes.com/scottsd...