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ARM: Intel Is Finally Good Enough for Smartphones, but ARM Is Better - X-bit labs

ARM: Intel Is Finally Good Enough for Smartphones, but ARM Is Better - X-bit labs:

Chief executive officer of ARM Holdings, a leading developer of mobile microprocessor technologies, said that Intel Corp.’s latest Medfield system-on-chip is “good enough” for smartphones and the company considers Intel a “serious competitor”. But ARM claims that Intel will never be a leader of the mobile chip market since power consumption of its chips is just too high.

“It is inevitable Intel will get a few smartphone design wins – we regard Intel as a serious competitor. Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not. But they have a lot more to offer,” said Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM, in an interview with Reuters.

ARM continues to offer both energy-efficient and cost-efficient designs for a broad amount of mobile devices, from simplistic feature phones to powerful media tablets. At present ARM architecture is licensed by 275 chipmakers. Intel’s one Medfield chip will not change the trend, moreover, since it still consumes more power than ARM-based system-on-chips, it will not find broad adoption due to battery life constraints it brings.

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Intel Unveils First Ever Smartphone Featuring x86 Microprocessors - X-bit labs

Intel Unveils First Ever Smartphone Featuring x86 Microprocessors - X-bit labs:
At the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, Intel Corp. introduced the world's first smartphone based on the company's Atom Z2460 platform formerly code-named Medfield. The new Lenovo K800 handset will be available in Q2 2012 in China and will be the first smartphone ever to use an x86 microprocessor.

No precise specifications of the Lenovo K800 are available at the moment, but what is known is that the device sports 4.5" screen (with up to 1280*1024 resolution) and has Hyper-Threading technology activated, which points to the fact that the K800 belongs to high-end (so-called "superphones") breed of products.

Intel Medfield is powered by Atom architecture 1.60GHz x86 core with Hyper-Threading technology, enhanced Intel Deeper Sleep, C6E estate, S0i1/S0i3 power reduction features and 512KB of cache. The SoC also includes Intel GMA graphics core (OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL 2.1, OpenVG 1.1, 400MHz) with hardware accelerated high-definition 1080p video playback, 32-bit LPDDR2 memory controller, Intel's new image signal processor and various improvements to speed up various multimedia or security demands. The Atom Z2460 SoC can dynamically scale its clock-speeds and also supports the new Smart Idle technology (SIT) which enables it to switch off while the operating systems remains in the "on" state (S0); the technique takes full advantage of clock and distributed power gating across power islands and can instantly resume from idle states thanks to L2 cache peculiarities. The new chip is in production now using 32nm process technology.

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Intel positions to take on ARM

PC MAG:  Intel Positions Medfield Chips to Take On ARM
 The chip giant is preparing to show off its new mobile System-on-a-Chip (SoC), codenamed Medfield, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Intel has "reference designs" of tablets and smartphones (like the one pictured at left) that sport its new Atom-branded SoC and run Google's popular Android mobile operating system. 

Those two accomplishments, plus the fact that Medfield appears to be optimized for a living, breathing consumer software platform like Android rather than a largely theoretical one like MeeGo, could at long last put Intel in a position to take market share away from ARM. 

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