Items tagged with Medfield
Last year, at IDF, Intel announced that it would soon make a concerted push into both the Windows and the Android tablet markets, with an aggressive contra-revenue strategy (meaning, they'd ship devices at a loss) and a huge set of marketing campaigns. On the Windows side we've seen the fruits of that push; many companies now offer Bay Trail devices in the 8-10 inch market. On the Android side of the market, however, things have been almost entirely silent -- Intel has demonstrated a few systems and made a little noise, but it hasn't done much to actually field designs in the US market. Today, that may finally be changing. Dell, Asus, and Acer all announced various Android systems based on Intel's...
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Earlier this week we covered a deal between Intel and Rockchip that will combine Intel's Atom with Rockchip's graphics IP and considerable share of the Chinese market. I'm returning to the topic because there are some interesting big-picture facets to this move that we didn't cover with the initial announcement. Over the long term, this partnership could transform Intel's entire mobile division -- or cause it no end of headaches in the future. First, in order to partner with Rockchip, Intel must have definitionally granted the company some form of x86 license. This wouldn't necessarily be a license to design its own x86 processors (in fact, it almost certainly isn't), but the only way for Rockchip...
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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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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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There's a bit of quoted wisdom that's been making the rounds in tech news, recently. Up until now, I've ignored it, in the hopes that it would die out and go away. Instead, it seems to be showing up with greater frequency. It looks something like this: "Like Intel, AMD was caught flat-footed in recent years with the emergence and fast growth of mobile devices..." This is the sort of sound byte analysis that's often spread by analysts who really ought to know better. The rationale behind it, we'll assume, is the following: Smartphones and tablets are really popular Intel and AMD don't dominate those markets Intel and AMD aren't going to dominate those markets in the next 12 months Therefore, Intel...
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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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Back at the Mobile World Congress in February of this year, which seems like forever ago at this point, Intel and ZTE promised to deliver smartphones built around Intel's Medfield platform. That promise comes to fruition today with ZTE unveiling its first smartphone with Intel hardware inside, the ZTE Grand X IN. The Grand X IN is powered by an Intel Atom Z2460 processor with Hyper-Threading technology. It has a 4.3-inch qHD (960x540) touchscreen display, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, microSD card slot, 8MP rear-facing camera, 0.3MP front-facing camera, HSPA+ support, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, Dolby Sound, DLNA support, and a 1,650 mAh battery. "The Grand X IN is ZTE's first flagship smartphone...
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Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia's CEO, is a canny and intelligent leader who has capably helmed the company through both rough patches and successes, not least of which is the recently launched GTX 680. He's known for strong opinions, but not crazy, off-the-wall statements, which is why his recent remarks regarding Intel are so surprising. Speaking to a group of analysts last week, Jen-Hsun casually suggested that Intel, one of Nvidia's chief rivals and competitors, ought to open up its foundries and manufacture hardware for the ARM SoC ecosystem. "Why not be a foundry for all the mobile companies?" Huang said. “There’s no shame in that." No shame -- but an awful lot of crazy. Intel has made...
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We've been looking forward to Windows 8's Consumer Preview for months. This, after all, is Microsoft's big chance to show what they've been working on and unveiling bit by bit for the past year; a chance to evaluate the sum total of changes and advancements baked into the next-generation operating system. We'll discuss some of the features of Metro and Desktop (aka Classic) separately, but our overall focus will be on how the two environments interact with each other. Metro, Microsoft's new UI, is bold, a dramatic departure from anything the company has previously done in the desktop/laptop space, and absolutely great. It's tangible proof that Redmond really can design and build its own unique...
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We've been looking forward to Windows 8's Consumer Preview for months. This, after all, is Microsoft's big chance to show what they've been working on and unveiling bit by bit for the past year; a chance to evaluate the sum total of changes and advancements baked into the next-generation operating system. We'll discuss some of the features of Metro and Desktop (aka Classic) separately, but our overall focus will be on how the two environments interact with each other. Understanding Metro: Metro, Microsoft's new UI, is bold, a dramatic departure from anything the company has previously done in the desktop/laptop space, and absolutely great. It's tangible proof that Redmond really can design and...
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Intel launched its Medfield platform only six weeks ago, but the company is moving ahead with plans for additional processors based on the 32nm SoC. At Mobile World Congress today, Santa Clara announced plans for two additional system on a chip (SoC) designs to flesh out its product roadmap. The current Z2460 that we covered in January will be augmented by the Z2000 at the low-end and a new dual-core chip, the Z2580. Of the two, the Z2000 will ship in retail products in the second half of this year, while the Z2580 won't be available for purchase until early 2013... Intel Debuts New Smartphone Chips at MWC Event...
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Intel launched its Medfield platform only six weeks ago, but the company is moving ahead with plans for additional processors based on the 32nm SoC. At Mobile World Congress today, Santa Clara announced plans for two additional system on a chip (SoC) designs to flesh out its product roadmap. The current Z2460 that we covered in January will be augmented by the Z2000 at the low-end and a new dual-core chip, the Z2580. Of the two, the Z2000 will ship in retail products in the second half of this year, while the Z2580 won't be available for purchase until early 2013. The already-launched 1.6GHz Z2460 is also getting a performance nudge; the core is now officially capable of a 2GHz maximum...
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