Qualcomm Wants a Piece of the PC Market 215
jfruhlinger writes "Much of Intel's story of the past few years has involved its so far fruitless attempts to break into the smartphone and tablet market. But as it keeps trying, it may find competition on its home turf: Qualcomm, which makes many of the ARM-based chips in those smartphones and tablets, wants to make PCs, too. The advent of Windows 8 for ARM and Android will make this possible."
...but not the piece that makes PCs. (Score:4, Informative)
But as it keeps trying, it may find competition on its home turf: Qualcomm, which makes many of the ARM-based chips in those smartphones and tablets, wants to make PCs, too [itworld.com].
The article linked to says
The company is talking with PC makers about building thin and light computers based on its Snapdragon chips, Jacobs said during a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show.
which isn't quite the same as "Qualcomm ... wants to make PCs".
Re:Not going to work... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-desktop-apps-will-run-on-windows-8-on-arm/10756 [zdnet.com]
They can't even duck thrown chairs yet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The ARMy of fanboys is getting repetitive. (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, this Intel Medfield thing is, at this point, nothing more than a publicity stunt, specially its power consumption. To put it in perspective, Intel's only official statement with vaguely objective numbers puts Intel Medfield with a power usage of over 2W. This isn't particularly bad when compared to Intel's previous offering.
Yet, once you compare it with today's ARM-based products, it still can't compete. Let me explain.
If you put it in perspective with today's real world ARM-based systems, you will see that they all have a less than 1W power usage. You can check link which you provided to AnandTech's article on Intel Medfield to learn that. So, this might not appear much, but it demonstrates that Intel Medfield is a power hog that drains at idle at best over 2x the power required by ARM systems at peak demand [extremetech.com]. Intel's official figures puts Intel Medfield with a idle power usage at around 2.3 Watts. With ARM-based systems, the idle power is at worse around 40mW. That is, according to Intel's marketing department, Intel Medfield uses 60x the power that ARM-based systems use at idle. Is that what you describe as shooting a claim "out of the water"?
Then you go on boasting Intel Medfield's performance. Yet, what you don't understand is that synthetic benchmarks don't matter in the real world. All that matters is that a computer is able to perform some task with an acceptable level of performance. So, a user may not notice any performance difference between two systems whose WhateverMark is over 200% apart. Why would it matters if a system is able to play three or five concurrent HD video streams if a lower-spec system is quite able to play only one HD video stream? After a certain point, performance is irrelevant, as Intel's Atom line demonstrates.
So, knowing that Intel Medfield's computational power is irrelevant and knowing that Intel Medfield's future best-case propaganda power requirements are huge when compared with today's ARM products, why exactly are you claiming that Intel's tomorrow showcase product even competes with yesterday's ARM systems?