Intel Announces Atom x3, x5 and x7, First SOCs With Integrated 3G and LTE Modems 112
MojoKid writes Intel is unleashing a new family of Atom processors today, taking a cue from its highly successful Core series with model branding. Similar to the Good, Better, Best strategy with the Core i3, i5 and i7, Intel is renaming its Atom family with x3, x5, and x7 designations. The biggest news comes from the low-end Atom x3, which will be available in three distinct variants; all of which will come with integrated modems — a first for the Atom family. All three variants are 64-bit capable cores. The Atom x3-C3130 tops out at 1GHz, incorporates a Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and includes an integrated 3G (HSPA+) modem. The Atom x3-C3230RK bumps the max clock speed to 1.2GHz, throws in a Mali 450 MP4 GPU, and the same 3G modem. Finally, the Atom x3-C3440 clocks in at 1.4GHz, features a Mali T720 MP2 graphics core, incorporates a Category 6 LTE modem, and can optionally support NFC. Using handpicked benchmarks, Intel claims that the Atom x3-C3230RK can offer up to 1.8x the media editing performance of competing SoCs from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Then there's Intel's Cherry Trail-based Atom x5 and x7. These are the first 64-bit Atom SoCs to be built using a 14nm manufacturing and they incorporate eighth generation Intel graphics. While the Atom x5 and x7 don't feature integrated modems like the Atom x3, they do support Intel's next generation XMM 726x and 7360 LTE modems. Intel claims that the Atom x7 offers two times the graphics performance of the existing high-end Atom Z3795 in the GFXBench 2.7 T-Rex HD benchmark and 50 percent greater performance on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark.
One way into mobile market (Score:3)
As the subject says, this is one way to get into the mobile market or cement a position in it, assuming the modem is high performance, good quality, good support, like their other networking products.
Spyware (Score:3)
That or it's a way for three-letter government agencies to spy on users of detachable laptop computers, using a built-in hardwired SIM card even when the user thinks the cellular radio is off.
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They don't need a SIM card, my phones can make emergency calls without a SIM card.
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Am I the only one who is generally confused by Intel Marketing and rebranding blitz on their products.
Back in the olden day, We had 286, 386, 486... Life was easy, sure there was the SX vs DX (Math-co-processor addition). Then instead of the 586 we got the Pentium. Then is the Pentium pro the 686 or was that the Pentium 2. Then they added the budget Celeron to the name, but still it made sense. Finally at a point where the Ghz peaked around 3ghz, We got the Core and the Core Dual, then the Core 2, after th
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Pick a benchmark that's representative of your computing needs. Look at relevant benchmark scores.
Recent Intel CPUs are differentiated by their GPUs and TDP moreso than clock speed or thread performance, which is probably why a brand new Haswell i3 is only just a bit faster than an original Nehalem i7 from all the way back in 2008.
If you want top-end per thread performance, you probably want an i5. If you want that and need more cores than a typical desktop, get an i7. You probably don't need to worry about
Deja vu all over again (Score:3)
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In this case there is no legacy software advantage for x86, and a lot of cost disadvantage. Intel are subsidising their products in the mobile area massively but that can't last forever.
In addition, some manufacturers are doing their own chips now, and will not see any benefit to losing control of design to Intel in this area.
The Atom core is not great either in terms of performance - an A57 core should be more powerful, and Samsung have got their 14nm process working so that advantage for Intel is not as c
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There wasn't really a legacy software advantage for x86 in the Mac arena either.
Indirectly there was and that's all that matters: The x86 legacy advantage was unassailably strong in the wintel world. And wintel had the lions's share of teh sales. As a result, Intel had more money than the competitors to invest in both processor design and process technology, the result of which is that intel eventually overran their competitors.
The processors for macs just couldn't keep up because Motorola and then IBM didn
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On the plus side, they bend all their resources to fabbing the top end PC chips.
I wonder how long this strategy can be profitable as peoples that really need top end PC represent a relatively small market.
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Ah, but you're forgetting the impact on the server market. All those smart phones and tablets accessing the web drive the need for more servers. Guess who dominates the server market? There's a reason Intel keeps breaking revenue records every year.
Also, the PC market is far from dead. Despite periodic predictions of its demise, PC shipments picked up last year and modest growth is predicted for 2015.
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Well, on the server market, the arm64 introduction will be interesting. The first chips will probably not be top performers, but there could potentially change the market price of there performance segment.
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I have trouble seeing room for the ARM chips at the moment.
I mention this in manu such threads, but you can already buy quad socket, 64 thread, 512G (1TB if you're very rich) RAM 1U boxes. There's very little spare room in those. It's mostly CPUs and RAM. There's a small gap above the rest of the motherboard, where an expansion PCIe card can sit, room for a few drives at the front and sometimes a second power supply.
Very dense, very fast and excellent VM performance: that's one area where AMD do particularl
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As mentioned, first arm64 will not touch the top server market. It will more likely take place on the low end.
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I don't know what the use case for ARM would be. They have less performance per thread, a smaller maximum system image and a few other downsides.
ARM servers should have lower power per operation, which is a critical factor for data centres. So far this theoretical advantage hasn't been fully realised, but neither has it been comprehensively disproved.
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Back on x86 legacy advantages: The other issue I'd raise is that there are quite a few "tablet operating systems" that are languishing in "Not Android" land that might well do well if more hardware comes out supporting x86. The stuff Ubuntu and GNOME are trying to make work might, for example, end up turning into something very, very, powerful if they can get the UIs fixed and if a surfeit of x86 tablets comes out.
Why would that help them? Not being cruel but being open source and ARM a recompile away was supposed to be their big boon and with so much running on Android that's likely the primary source of ports. If they can't make it as a first party OS then they'll never go anywhere in the mobile world that's full of custom, poorly supported, one generation hardware, I don't see any compelling reason why you'd buy a Linux/x86 tablet if Linux/ARM tablets don't sell. And the aftermarket install market is probably just
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There wasn't really a legacy software advantage for x86 in the Mac arena either.
Indirectly there was: either bootcamp or Parallels. If people were tempted to move from Windows, this let them still run essential applications that were Windows only, with excellent performance (as compared to previous full emulation products). By being able to still run Windows applications at full speed, this removed compatibility as a reason to not buy a MAc
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In this case there is no legacy software advantage for x86
There could be a native code advantage if Intel keeps all their chips compatible.
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Like for Itanium and the Xscale for example...
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Just FYI...
ARM is based on RISC architecture
The 1980s called and they want their reference architectures back.
RISC ceased to be a thing that meant anything useful for high performance CPU architecture sometime between 1990 and 1995. The Huffman like encoding of CISC instructions is certainly more beneficial for performance than the benefits of a 'simpler' instruction format which take twice the instruction bandwidth to do the same thing.
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The Huffman like encoding of CISC instructions is certainly more beneficial for performance than the benefits of a 'simpler' instruction format which take twice the instruction bandwidth to do the same thing.
This is far from certain. Most instruction sets are decoded into mutliple RISC-like instructions (uops) which are then executed. The advantage of having a more compact instruction set is balanced by the greater energy required to decode those instructions, so there is no clear winner either way.
If the benefits of CISC are so great, why did ARM remove complex instructions from their 64-bit architecture rather than adding new ones?
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It's certainly not simple. But there is a linear relationship between code density and the functional bandwidth of the instruction caching at every level.
I don't presume to understand why ARM do what they do. Whoever came up with that interrupt architecture needs a serious talking to.
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there is a linear relationship between code density and the functional bandwidth of the instruction caching at every level.
Even if this were true (which it isn't), and even if you were right that CISC has twice the code density of RISC (which it doesn't), it would still be a long way short of proving your claim that CISC gives better performance than RISC.
I don't presume to understand why ARM do what they do.
I don't need to presume, I know that they removed some complex instructions because they made the hardware more complex and reduced performance.
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there is a linear relationship between code density and the functional bandwidth of the instruction caching at every level.
Even if this were true (which it isn't), and even if you were right that CISC has twice the code density of RISC (which it doesn't), it would still be a long way short of proving your claim that CISC gives better performance than RISC.
I don't presume to understand why ARM do what they do.
Certainly not 2X, that was normal slashdot hyperbole. 1.2-1.5X depending on what you compare with. But you are putting words in my mouth. Nowhere did I claim RISC was better than CISC or visa versa in any general sense. I said that compact instruction encodings are better than inefficient instructions encodings, which they clearly are for a broad class of CPU memory hierarchies that have been around in recent years. The decoding benefits of RISC were tangible for 1990 era CPUs, but the decoding overhead ha
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I'm not seeking to prove a claim. It's just the way things are.
Nice.
Accordingly a CPU with a real Huffman coded instruction set might be even better.
The additional cost of caching, decoding and branching with bit-aligned variable-length instructions would outweigh any benefit from reduced instruction fetch bandwidth. It would take more gates and more energy, which is why nobody does it. Talk to the people at Intel and ARM who know about this sort of thing, or look at the trends in instruction set design for high-performance CPUs and ask yourself why none of them have gone in this direction.
The exception to this is situations where code space is ver
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>Talk to the people at Intel and ARM who know about this
I am one of those people.
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>Talk to the people at Intel and ARM who know about this
I am one of those people.
If Intel think that bit-aligned variable-length instructions are a good idea then they are in more trouble than I thought.
Quite a weak X3 line ... cost determines success (Score:4, Interesting)
The X3 line is very weak, and will be competing against $5 to $10 SoCs from MediaTek, AllWinner, etc. This market is very price sensitive, and battery life is also important.
The X5 and X7 look more capable, it will be interesting to see how they compare against the competitor SoCs using A57 cores. The 14nm process will also help with the battery life significantly.
Re:Quite a weak X3 line ... cost determines succes (Score:5, Informative)
MediaTek and AllWinner don't have integrated modems. Intel is aiming squarely at Qualcomm and Samsung with these chips.
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Until the price and the modem support and performances are verified, it's too early to pretend that integrated modem is an advantage. On the SoC market Intel have for years making big press release of chips that vanished into insignificant niche market compared to the SoC leading chips that massively use ARM cores.
Re:Quite a weak X3 line ... cost determines succes (Score:5, Informative)
Well I work for an actual company that offers integrated modems. And the silicon price is basically the same. The additional cost we add to the chip is to pay for the R&D investment.
A big company like Intel can soak a lot of R&D costs initially if they wish to make a long term play into the market.
I have no doubt that the Atom X3 is going to make it cheaper to put an x86 into a LTE capable tablet/phone. And Intel gets to get paid for the modem instead of a third party, so it's a big advantage for them.
The only barrier I see at this point is if their modem's performance is good enough to compete with Qualcomm. I'm familiar with other vendors [gizmodo.com] that failed to take over the mobile market with wireless integration.
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I have no doubt that the Atom X3 is going to make it cheaper to put an x86 into a LTE capable tablet/phone. And Intel gets to get paid for the modem instead of a third party, so it's a big advantage for them.
Not really, the X3s are all made with third party GPU and modem functionality at TSMC. It's a bought design where they add a CPU and a brand to pretend they're competing in a market they're really not. The X5/X7s are Intel's homegrown solution with their own graphics and LTE modem and aimed only at the premium segment. You will not get Intel tech for cheap.
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I wonder why Intel have to buy an external design to bring the X3 chips on the market. What prevent them to cut down the X5 into a X3 ?
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Possible that this do not make a difference, but I still don't see why this is an advantage to buy an external design over cut down an internal one.
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AllWinner and MediaTek are made with 3rd party everything. The only thing they do is the glue.
NVIDIA makes GPU and sometimes CPU, but most of the Tegra's license the CPU from ARM.
Tegras aren't cheap either.
Intel can charge pretty much anything they want to because they don't need to make a profit up front. That is the case with the current mobile Atom processors like the Z3740. Everyone in the industry is certain Intel is charging below cost, maybe only charging the manufacturing cost (assuming very high yi
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Everyone in the industry is certain Intel is charging below cost, maybe only charging the manufacturing cost (assuming very high yields) and writing off all the operation costs.
Intel is overcharging there products, just look at the Intel annual benefice. If it's true that the Z3740 is charged below cost, it's not only a bad sign of weakness but probably an illegal way to gain market.
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Intel is overcharging there products, just look at the Intel annual benefice.
Could you please explain what this means, I am not able to parse it.
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Low-end SoC market is already full of competitors. A new ugly chip (external design with Intel label, and no previous base) is unlikely to change anything. The bad Intel records into the SoC market don't help either.
Re:Quite a weak X3 line ... cost determines succes (Score:5, Insightful)
Weak?
These chips don't even compete in the same markets.
The intel offerings easily offer 5-10x computational power over the budget-minded SoCs from the likes of AllWinner. The /previous/ gen baytrail based Atom SoCs can run a full-fat windows 8.1 installation in a tablet formfactor. A real tablet. USB charging, thin, touch screen fanless device with no BS tablet battery life. I've got two. (Dell Venu 8 pro and Asus transformerbook T100)
I'm not saying that Allwinner and company don't sell a lot of chips, but those devices mostly go in to ultra-budget android devices, "stick" computers, and media set top boxes. They're also really really really poorly supported and are generally useless for anything other than the build of Android that comes shipped with them.
The Intel offerings, however, are standard architecture and can run whatever OS you want. Android, Windows, Linux, or even iOS or MacOS if Apple cared. (Don't fool yourself. There's a skunkworks x64 build of iOS somewhere int the depths of Cupertino, waiting in the event that Intel throws its literally 2 generations superior chip fabrication technology full on in to the mobile chip market. These new Atoms are EXACTLY the sort of thing that would tempt Apple)
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Apple plays the long game.
Yes, the "long game" being that they want to use their own custom chips.
Their entire mobile product line relies on ARM chips they develop (Remember who's shipped the first 64 bit arm cpu in a production product when no one else was even sampling one?) Of course they're going to continue to develop Arm in the near term.
Why would they be spending hundreds of millions on acquistions and billions on R&D for their custom chips just to throw all that away for some Intel chip that has yet to appear? Apple has already long since proved that they don't need Intel in either the iPhone or iPad.
Keeping a quiet team working on an intel port of iOS would cost next to nothing in comparison and would reap HUGE benefits if Intel manages to upset the market. They would, frankly, be stupid not to.
iOS already runs on x86(_64). It's called the "iOS Simulator" (previously the iPhone Simulator). There isn't any need for a "quiet team" since it's all out in the pub
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The long game is that they are not going to bet their whole existence on their being able to keep ahead of the performance curve.
They will be testing the Atoms and if the Atoms happen to produce a better power and performance package, you can bet that they will flip over to Intel.
One of the advantages they have is that they already differentiate the binaries by device, so it's not a stretch for them to recompile all submitted code right away and have it working on an x86 iPhone if they need it to. Seamlessl
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The long game is that they are not going to bet their whole existence on their being able to keep ahead of the performance curve.
Says you. Their actions say otherwise.
They will be testing the Atoms and if the Atoms happen to produce a better power and performance package, you can bet that they will flip over to Intel.
People claimed that regarding the iPad for years and years and years. And yet Apple continues to not care about Intel's mobile chips. While in the universe of all possible things is clearly a possibility, it is highly improbable based on their actions.
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Huge different between shipping a product with Atom, and having an internal product that can be brought to manufacture quickly.
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They already pay developers to make x86 iOS. It's the very people who create the iOS SDK. The simulator runs iOS as native x86 code.
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Your Apple speculative theory is interesting but completely unproved at this stage. Or did you have some information to share ?
Someone building iOS on x86 ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Such an effort can pay for itself simply through the bugs it will find. What is a very subtle and sometimes currently unnoticed bug on one platform may become a highly visible bug on another platform. Bugs sometimes manifest differently on different platforms. I've been on several teams over time where we moved good "working" code to a new platform and watched it crash spectacularly over and over again. Each time the original devs who thought their code was in great shape were shaking their heads wonder how it ever ran on the original platform. Lucky values in uninitialized variables and such.
So yes, someone is probably building and testing iOS on x86 but it has little to nothing to do with any plans regarding using x86 on any devices. Sort of similar to the Microsoft's efforts to internally build and test Windows on a non-x86 platform after it gave up on shipping MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha binaries. Its more about testing and future proofing a core asset than any short term plans.
And if I were running Intel I would be supplying the engineers to do so if Apple was not doing it on their own initiative.
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Lucky values in uninitialized variables and such.
CFLAGS+=-Wall -Wextra -Wshadow -Werror -pedantic-errors
And then use tool like http://valgrind.org/ [valgrind.org]
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So yes, someone is probably building and testing iOS on x86 but it has little to nothing to do with any plans regarding using x86 on any devices. Sort of similar to the Microsoft's efforts to internally build and test Windows on a non-x86 platform after it gave up on shipping MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha binaries. Its more about testing and future proofing a core asset than any short term plans.
Yeah, this isn't something surprising nor some secretive thing. You do realize that the iOS simulator runs x86(_64) compiled code, right? That's how it's always worked.
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, this isn't something surprising nor some secretive thing. You do realize that the iOS simulator runs x86(_64) compiled code, right? That's how it's always worked.
Yeah, I realized this just as I typed the word "simulated" in another post. :-)
... I've tended to have core code runnable in a console environment for testing on
However I still expect that much iOS specific code is run in regression tests completely separate from the various device simulators.
But then I'm biased. Giving all the porting I've done I'm a little "enthusiastic" about separating core code from UI code and other platform specific code. Windows apps, Mac OS apps, iOS apps, Android apps, etc
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Of course it does. Most of the iOS code is simply Darwin.
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Of course it does. Most of the iOS code is simply Darwin.
No. For example the frameworks account for a lot of code and some differ between Mac OS and iOS and some are unique to iOS.
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UIKit is pretty much the only major difference when it comes to frameworks. The rest is pretty much all the same code as OS X with sometimes certain APIs not exposed. Either way, as I said, the x86 version is already long since available as the iOS Simulator. So there is no need for "secret teams", etc. when all the work is already long since been done by the Xcode/iOS SDK developers. Anyone who has done any sort of iOS development in the last 6 years has already used "iOS for x86".
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Familiarize yourself with Xcode
Mac OS X based iOS device simulators (Score:2)
Wait, speaking of "simulated", we have the Mac OS X based iOS device simulators used during development. Doh!
{ Oops, forgot to log in, didn't mean to post AC }
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Yes, the iOS simulator is iOS compiled for x86. It runs directly on the CPU and is not an emulator.
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Yeah, the iOS simulator is iOS compiled for x86 running on the Mac's CPU. What you are talking about has already existed publicly for around 6 years.
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not if (Score:1)
BMW has anything to say about that
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If true, this is unlikely that a single customer like BMW will really impact the market share of the x86 SoC compared to the ARM Soc. More likely BMW could be a an opportunity for Intel to test the current state of there x86 SoC strategy on a real project with a real customer in the hope to get more customers.
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BMW has anything to say about that
The funniest thing is that the BMW X-series are the big, heavy, stupid and inefficient ones.
Closed source GPUs (Score:4, Interesting)
Incorporating Mali GPUs is bound to piss off the OSS crowd - they tried that before with PowerVR before, and those chips were the bane of any nettop user. They should have tried to slim down their own GT chips.
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Even more strange is the fact that there don't integrate one of there own GPU core.
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An admission Intel's graphics are too big/thirsty/costly for a phone SoC.
From this I speculate that PowerVR will soon be acquired by Apple, since their Ax chips powering iOS are the main licensee now.
Re: Closed source GPUs (Score:2)
agreed (and they know it) - this is probably their 18-month holding pattern while the Israel team gets the power out of Iris. Not having a market position until then is a worse option for them. Not paying a video royalty is obviously better for cost/profitability and developers.
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Just open source users? Those blasted things are the bane of ALL users.
I had the misfortune to be on a project using a Toughbook CF-U1. It's a tablety thing and the toughest of the toughbooks. One project user dunked it in a sink of water to see if it really was up to spec. It was. Our one was dropped on to rocks, fell into snow and I think someone actually started to slip down a snowbank with it and dug the machine in to stop himself. By the end it didn't even have a scratch on it.
Great hardware!
But oh go
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Incorporating Mali GPUs is bound to piss off the OSS crowd - they tried that before with PowerVR before, and those chips were the bane of any nettop user. They should have tried to slim down their own GT chips.
Perhaps, but I suspect Intel could more than balance it out by adding a few developers to the Lima project.
Is it finally happening? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love to be able to install my x86 desktop aps on my mobile devices, even on my phone! This is all I have ever really wanted from mobile devices.
Sure.. a lot of them will suck cramped into a small screen and a touch interface they were never designed for. But.. they would not be totally unusable when I really need them. If they weren't then nobody would bother with vnc or remote deskop on their phones!
If such an environment was common then new versions of applications would be developed to scale well to both small and large screens and to work well with both keyboard/mouse and touch interfaces. Proving it is possible I have seen some Android devices that do this really well on a lapdock when they switch between their phone and tablet modes. In the tablet mode they don't just blow up the same view, they have different layouts with additional controls enabling more desktop-like features.
This is how mobile computing should have played out in the first place. Blackberry and Symbian plus the later iOS and Android have been only a poor imitation of what could have been and have slowed down mobile development as all the wheels have had to be re-invented.
Over the weekend I had an opportunity to play with a friend's Intel Windows 8 tablet. It was nice using real, full featured applications for once. An x86 Windows phone would definitely tempt me away from Android although I would much prefer a Linux (as in real Linux desktop) phone. That did almost exist once. There was an alternative desktop named GPE which ran on old Zaurus and HP PDAs back in the day. It used GTK on top of X. Qt was available as a separate package. So.. pretty much any Linux software, if you had the source it could be built! It even had a phone dialer although I don't know of any hardware that the dialer could be functional on. Unfortunately the cross-compiler was nearly required a PHD to get working and there weren't enough tools included to build packages on the device itself. It would have been a mini-desktop if it weren't for that.
Maybe someday....
Oh.. also on my wishlist.. these desktop-software running mobile devices should have HDMI out and USB host. When it does everything a desktop does there is no reason we shouldn't be able to plug it in and use it like one when we are not on the go.
Additionally... there is no reason it shouldn't work with something like the Motorola Lapdock. Except.. there should be some upgrades on that device which Motorola never offered. How about a touch screen? Better speakers? And.. why not make that keyboard removable. Then it becomes just a bigger screen for your phone.. your phone is a tablet.. is a laptop. Of course you could still have the HD docking station so it's a desktop too! Unless you want an always on-server then your phone is the only computer you need!
This is how it should be. What we have now sucks in comparison.
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^ this.
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I've been saying that for 15 years. I just hope I don't need to wait another 15.
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Well, I'm not really sure about that. The ultrabooks are generally quite high end as laptops go. Sure, they're not a match for a 17" luggable but unlike the cheap small laptops, they tend to be pretty fast, and have a decent i5 or i7 on board and a decent amount of RAM and drive space. So, the little pocket sized computer would perform awfully compared to an ultrabook.
Re:Is it finally happening? (Score:4, Interesting)
The end game that Intel is considering is everyone running Windows 10 or 11 on their phones using Intel processors. Android can go run on whatever cheap architecture is out there, but if you want to run full-on Windows, you'll have Intel and pay a premium. Or at least, that's what Intel hopes.
The hardware is getting fast enough to put Windows on a phone. The Dell Venue 8 Pro is over a year old and runs Windows 8.1 in a small form factor on an old Intel Baytrail. It's not a far leap to expect a Windows phablet about the size of a Galaxy Note 4 that runs freaking Windows. Windows RT got eaten up by Windows 8. Windows Phone will eventually get eaten up by Windows 8 as well.
Docking will be wireless and easy. Just walk up to a BT keyboard/mouse and connect to a Miracast device. If your phone supports wireless charging, just drop your phone on the charging pad. Are you afraid that you'll lose your data if you lose your phone? Don't worry! Use Microsoft OneDriveâ"it's 100 GB free for two years! (Don't ask how much it'll cost later.)
Is Intel cost-competitive with other mobile solutions? Probably not. But why chase commodity markets on SoCs when you can ride along the Windows/Office monopoly?
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Not sure what you mean by "eaten up", but my little Nokia 635 ARM-based phone ran the Windows 10 Preview reasonably well for a few days, before I reverted it back to Win Phone 8.1. The Windows OS convergence seems to be well under way (although I do wish I had thought to see if Win 10 would finally support a BT keyboard on the phone - WP 8.x does not, and that kills a real key convergence feature).
I am interested to see how Firefox OS will work on phones coming to US carriers in the next few months suppose
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"Docking will be wireless and easy. Just walk up to a BT keyboard/mouse and connect to a Miracast device."
I hope not but yes, that does seem to be how it is going. There is no need for wireless in this kind of application. Just stick the device to it's dock by the electrical connectors, hdmi and usb. If the thing is wireless it is going to be less efficient, less secure and less capable.
That miracast dongle... it has another processor in it sucking more electricity from your battery. The wireless signals f
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The Windows tablets already have HDMI out and USB host ports. The only remaining steps: shrink one down to phone size and add calling capability. These new chips should make it feasible. I hope they go with a separate HDMI port rather than rolling it all up into MHL, because you may also want to connect USB devices when you are using the tablet to run desktop applications. (Using a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse decreases the need.)
A phone won't have the handy full size USB port that my WinBook tablet has (no
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Having an HDMI port is good but it also needs the ability to change resolution and modes when you use it. I don't know about Windows devices, not all Android devices with HDMI out do that.
This is the reason I'm stuck on Jellybean on my Motorola Bionic. Sure, I can update to KitKat with Cyanogenmod (even Lolipop though it is unusably buggy). But.. when I dock it with that all I get is the phone screen blown up. With stock ROM when I dock it the phone's display turns off, the HDMI uses a higher resolution
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I hadn't heard of the Padfone. That looks like a decent upgrade path from the Lapdock. I would miss the USB ports though, I actually use those a bit for running an RTL-SDR stick.
Unfortunately I am stuck on Verizon. We are grandfathered into the unlimited data plan still and use it enough that we need to keep it. I know T-Mobile has unlimited data too and I have heard both that Sprint does and does not have it but neither have very good coverage in all the areas we would want to use it in.
First? No. (Score:2)
First x86 SOC perhaps..
Re: (Score:2)
Strategically, it locks AMD out of the $100 Windows tablet market.
Only 3G? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't it say "3G *AND* LTE"? LTE usually refers to 4G.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The summary says 3G only on the x3 and x5 models. You only get LTE on the x7 model.
Reading fail...
The summary says:
x3-C3130: integrated 3G (HSPA+) modem
x3-C3230RK: integrated 3G (HSPA+) modem
x3-C3440: integrated LTE modem
x5 and x7: no integrated modem, but support for Intel's next generation XMM 726x and 7360 LTE modems
X3 is Rockchip/Spreadtrum/RDA, NOT intel (Score:3)
Intel was forced to "invest and partner' in China, or face same sanctions Qualcomm did. They decided to throw China a bone in form of $1B and license for lowest performance Atom CPU cores.
X3 will be made 100% by chinese 'partners', if at all - previously Intel dropped ATOMs $40 sticker price down to $4 Allwinter 4core level and there still were almost no takers.