Items tagged with Clover Trail
Eyebrows were raised earlier this week when it was revealed that Microsoft would not be fully supporting PC systems equipped with Intel “Clover Trail” Atom processors. If these machines are running Windows 10, they can’t upgrade from the Anniversary Update to the Creators Update. Affected Intel Clover Trail processors include: Atom Z2760Atom Z2520Atom Z2560Atom Z2580 Adding salt to the wounds of these customers, Microsoft said that security updates for these systems would only extend into 2018. Most of these systems came preinstalled with Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, and had they stayed with Windows 8.1 instead of Windows 10 (which Microsoft enticed these users to do, for free), they would have...
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Intel is announcing its new tablet and smartphone designs this week at Mobile World Congress, alongside a major push to drive adoption of its 28nm XMM 7160 and XMM 7260 modem technology. It's been two years since Intel launched its first serious Atom-based smartphone platform, codenamed Medfield, and it's safe to say that those two years haven't gone precisely as Intel intended. Originally, the company planned to have a solid market share built up by now. Instead, it's planning a major tablet initiative with multiple partners with a few possible smartphone SoC wins on the side. The chips that will power these efforts are the Z34 and Z35 families, known as Merrifield and Moorefield... Intel Debuts...
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Intel is announcing its new tablet and smartphone designs this week at Mobile World Congress, alongside a major push to drive adoption of its 28nm XMM 7160 and XMM 7260 modem technology. It's been two years since Intel launched its first serious Atom-based smartphone platform, codenamed Medfield, and it's safe to say that those two years haven't gone precisely as Intel intended. Originally, the company planned to have a solid market share built up by now. Instead, it's planning a major tablet initiative with multiple partners with a few possible smartphone SoC wins on the side. The chips that will power these efforts are the Z34 and Z35 families, known as Merrifield and Moorefield, respectively....
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The PC market has tumbled throughout the past 18 months, but Intel believes the worst of the decline is over -- and that the tablet market is poised to boom. At its Analyst Day today, the company forecast stable PC sales through 2014, with gains in the market driven by an estimated 4x increase in tablet sales. And make no mistake -- Intel wants to be in those devices. What a difference a few years makes The Asus Transformer Book T100 has transformed my view of how useful x86 devices can be in the $400 market. True, it has some flaws -- the power adapter is extremely slow to charge the device -- but on the whole, it's absolutely functional for basic traveling and work. Convertibles like this blur...
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Today, for the first time since Atom first debuted, Intel is launching an updated version of the Atom core that does more than integrate additional function blocks and lower power consumption. The tablet iteration of the new SoC is called Bay Trail, and it's aimed at the red-hot tablet and handheld market currently occupied by various chips from Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and NVIDIA. Our first thought? Finally. This is what Intel's Atom architecture always aspired to. Intel has done some impressive things with Atom, including its first serious forays into mobile phones and tablets, but the Bonnell microarchitecture that debuted in 2008 was explicitly designed to emphasize low power consumption,...
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Today, for the first time since Atom first debuted, Intel is launching an updated version of the core that does more than integrate additional function blocks and lower power consumption. The tablet iteration of the new SoC is called Bay Trail, and it's aimed at the red-hot tablet and handheld market currently occupied by various chips from Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and NVIDIA. Our first thought? Finally. This is what Intel's Atom architecture always aspired to. Intel Atom Z3000 Bay Trail Die - 22nm Low Power 3D Tri-Gate Technology Intel has done some impressive things with Atom, including its first serious forays into mobile phones and tablets, but the Bonnell microarchitecture that debuted...
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A few weeks ago, the analyst company ABI Research published a report claiming that Intel's new CloverTrail+ platform (dual-core Medfield) for smartphones was significantly faster and more power efficient than anything ARM's various partners were shipping. If you follow the smartphone market, that was a very surprising claim. Medfield was a decent midrange platform when it launched in 2012, but Intel made it clear that it's goal for Medfield was to compete with other platforms in its division -- not seize the performance crown outright. The dual-core / quad-thread CloverTrail+ has improved on Medfield's performance, but it's still based on 2008-era microprocessor technology. Qualcomm, Samsung,...
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This news has been a long time coming. It's been six years since Intel first began talking about Atom. When it was initially announced, the 45nm, in-order core, based on the Bonnell microarchitecture, was a new product from the ground up. It drew on Intel's expertise in other areas and shared some design elements with the original Pentium, but Atom was its own unique design. And for more than half a decade, Intel has kept that same design. Let's put that in perspective. In the desktop world, we were talking about Windows Vista, Core 2 Duo, and AMD's original Phenom. The Phenom II "Shanghai" refresh was still nine months away, Hector Ruiz was still CEO of AMD. In smartphones, the Cortex-A8 --...
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For the past five years -- and it'll have been nearly six years by the time these new Atom CPUs come to market -- Intel has focused on improving power consumption, improving power consumption, and improving power consumption. Dual-core variants appeared on the desktop in fairly short order, and clock speed nudges have only bumped performance slightly higher. On the one hand, this has paid off tremendously. As someone who spent several weeks with an Intel-powered Gingerbread phone, I can honestly say that yes, you can put an Intel smartphone in your pocket, it works just fine, and battery life is decent. But there's no hiding the fact that Intel's Atom architecture is getting long in the tooth....
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Today, Intel is keeping on track for execution of their roadmap plan in the mobile space, with the release of their follow-on to Medfield, code-named Clover Trail+. Clover Trail, as you’ll remember, is powering many a Windows 8 tablet these days. Intel's latest Atom-based SoC is a more natural fit here, with the intrinsic advantages of being able to run full X86 compatible software on a tablet or convertible device, while still offering strong battery life performance. That said, Clover Trail+, Intel’s new performance and feature-optimized version of Clover Trail for the smartphone and tablet market, has that same long row to hoe versus incumbents, at least in the...
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When we covered Intel’s first significant foray into the smartphone arena, early in January 2012, there was little doubt in our minds that the company had set its sights on the mobile market with a plan and roadmap for execution. Though Medfield and Lexington, now known as the Atom Z2460 SoC, and its lower cost sibling Atom Z2420, looked solid enough on paper, we expected Intel would have an uphill battle versus already well-established players like Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA and the like. As it turned out, Medfield and Lexington Atom SoCs never really made it to smartphones marketed in the US, but they did gain some traction in about 10 design wins for Intel,...
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Intel's François Piednoël is no fan of the competition making claims about what his company can and can't do, so he's taken to YouTube to post a video to showcase what the company's upcoming Clover Trail+ SoC is capable of. A quote that helps lead into the video comes from ARM, which claims that "Intel will never be the leader in silicon power efficiency". That leads into Intel's teasing, "They told you it was not possible", before revealing the Lenovo IdeaPhone K900, first announced at last month's CES. On the phone is Epic's popular Android benchmark Citadel, running smooth as butter at a cool 1080p. While there are many phones out there that can run this benchmark...
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Not long ago, we tested one of Samsung’s new Windows 8 tablets to take a close-up look at Intel’s Clover Trail Atom Z2760 SoC. Now that we’ve covered the chip driving the tablet, it’s time to take a look at the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T as a whole. The tablet runs about $650 by itself, which puts the price on par with a similarly-configured iPad. (Well, as similarly as it can be configured.) Throw in the optional keyboard and dock for another $100, and you’re still looking at a device that should be able to stand in for your laptop or PC in some situations, at an attainable price. Here's what we found when we took the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T for a spin....
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Not long ago, we tested one of Samsung’s new Windows 8 tablets to take a close-up look at Intel’s Clover Trail Atom Z2760 SoC. Now that we’ve covered the chip driving the tablet, it’s time to take a look at the Samsung ATIV Smart PC 500T as a whole. The tablet runs about $650 by itself, which puts the price on par with a similarly-configured iPad. (Well, as similarly as it can be configured.) Throw in the optional keyboard and dock for another $100, and you’re still looking at a device that should be able to stand in for your laptop or PC in some situations, at an attainable price. Here's what we found when we took the ATIV for a spin. Samsung ATIV Smart PC...
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It's getting really difficult not to flat-out fall in love Lenovo. The PC maker doesn't sit around and whine about Microsoft stepping into the hardware space (we're looking at you, Acer), nor does it panic when computer sales start to slow down. The company simply continues to put out solid products (ThinkPad X1 Carbon, anyone?), gain market share, and every once in awhile, surprise consumers. This is one of those times. Meet the K900, Lenovo's flagship phone and the first to sport Clover Trail+ DNA. Yes, it has an Intel Atom Z2580 processor inside and a PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU, but that's not all. The well-equipped K900 also features a 5.5-inch IPS display with a Full HD 1080 resolution and Gorilla...
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We spent some time with representatives from Intel at the Consumer Electronics show and saw a couple of interesting demos in action. In addition to announcing that 7W Ivy Bridge-based processors are coming down the pipeline, Intel was touting the low power characteristics and efficiency of its current Clover Trail Atom processors, which are featured in a number of Windows 8 tablets. Intel is on a mission to rebut the notion that ARM-based processors are more power efficient than Intel’s. In one demo, Intel had wired up a number of sensors to the batteries on a quartet of tablets to monitor power consumption in real-time. Two of the tablets (a Samsung ATIV and Dell XPS 10) were built...
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New leaked slides from Intel have shed additional light on how the company's 2014 platforms will challenge ARM products in the netbook/nettop space. At present, the company's efforts in the segment are anchored by Cedar Trail, the 32nm dual-core platform that launched a year ago. To date, all of Intel's platform updates for Atom have focused on lowering power consumption and ramping SoC integration rather than focusing on performance -- but Bay Trail will change that. Bay Trail moves Atom to a quad-core, 22nm, out-of-order design. It significantly accelerates the CPU core with burst modes of up to 2.7GHz, and it'll be the first Atom to feature Intel's own graphics processor instead of a licensed...
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Windows RT or Windows 8 for ARM devices launched a couple weeks ago and today we have the very first Intel-driven Windows 8 tablet device to hit our labs, powered by Intel's latest low power Clover Trail Atom Z2760 SoC (System on Chip). The Atom Z2760 is a new dual core chip from Intel with integrated engines for graphics, HD video encode and decode and a low power DDR2 DRAM controller. Clover Trail, like Medfield for smartphones, marks Intel's latest effort to break into the exploding tablet market. With Windows 8 finally launched, does Intel's new Atom architecture have what it takes to compete and offer consumers a full X86 compatible solution to complement existing desktop...
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When you consider Intel's competitive position in the desktop and notebook PC markets, one simple word comes to mind, "dominance." Conversely, when it comes to tablets and smartphones, the landscape couldn't be more different. Intel's chief competitor on the desktop and PC side of the equation is AMD and it's obvious Intel is killing it there. Intel's nemesis in tablets and smartphones? ARM, and ARM is killing it. NVIDIA, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Google, Lenovo, Toshiba are all building devices or silicon based on ARM technology and the list goes on... and on. Recently, AMD even stepped up to the plate with ARM and rumors are that Apple is looking to possibly differentiate...
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Though we gave you a glimpse of it in our IDF 2012 coverage, Intel is officially unveiling their new Atom Z2760 dual-core SoC (System on Chip), code named Clover Trail. The Z2760 is a dual-core Atom-based chip with a 1.8GHz clock frequency and support for Intel Hyperthreading technology which allows two cores to process four threads to enhance performance in multithreaded workloads. Clover Trail is manufactured using Intel's 32nm process node and is targeted at ultra-mobile computing applications like tablets and adjacent convertible devices. Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX545 graphics core has been coupled with the Atom architecture...
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Intel's four beat, three second jingle has become synonymous with the company's brand, despite the fact that it contains no spoken words or associated text. To date, Santa Clara has reserved the sequence for its desktop, laptop, and server products, but it's planning a major smartphone marketing campaign as well. Intel is only just now dipping a toe in the US market -- the company has launched several Medfield-based phones this year, but they were destined for markets in China, India, Russia, and the UK. Last week's Razr i from Motorola is the first US phone to use an x86 processor, and it contains a faster Medfield, at 2GHz, than its cousins in other markets. Intel sees smartphone branding as...
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Intel reportedly revealed during IDF this week that its upcoming Clover Trail Atom processor platform will shun Linux support. As Intel explains it, the company's dual-core Clover Trail part is designed for Windows 8 and "the chip cannot run Linux." Oh really? That's a bit of a curious statement. Clover Trail is, after all, a x86 part, so there's no reason that it can't support Linux, even if Intel has plenty of reason why it won't. Rather than some kind of technical limitation that Intel's brilliant minds back by nearly unlimited resources aren't able to figure out, it appears this is an arbitrary restriction as part of an odd power play by the world's largest semiconductor player. Backing up...
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