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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Fresh news out of Taiwan is that Intel and AMD, despite their keen interest in the tablet market, "cannot compete with solutions from ARM in terms of price." The statements, purportedly from various notebook manufacturers, are meant to imply that the two manufacturers (especially Intel) must reduce costs if they ever hope to gain any traction in the market. Then the article at DigiTimes coughs up this gem: "Intel debuted 32nm-based Medfield processors with power consumption reduced to 11W to match Android 4.0 in January 2012 and will launch Atom processors with power consumption of less than 10W specifically for use in smartphones and tablet PCs in the second half of 2012, the sources indicated."...
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Intel announced its Q4 and end-of-year results with $54B in revenue and $17.5 billion in operating income, both records for the CPU giant. Q4 income was $13.9B, driven by a 17% rise in sales from the PC Client Group. Revenue growth was positive across all sectors save for Atom; sales of the diminutive processor fell 57% year on year, to $167 million. Growth continues to be driven primarily by the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries; sales in Indonesia and India grew 22% and 37% year-on-year, while China now accounts for 20% of Intel's worldwide demand. 2011 was an excellent year all around for Intel, and the company had quite a bit to crow about on its earnings call, including...
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In this latest episode of HotHardware's Two and Half Geeks, Marco, Iyaz and Dave discuss highlights from CES 2012 in Las Vegas, including OCZ's new blistering fast PCI Express and SATA SSD technologies, Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga, Intel Medfield Smartphones, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T, Samsung's Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD, and AMD's Trinity APU. We also cover some recent HotHardware articles featuring a Toshiba Ultrabook and Intel’s Core i7-3820, and talk about our current contest in which someone could win great PC gaming gear from Gigabyte... Show Notes: 01:36 - Storage Vision, OCZ's Suite at the Aria - ZDrive R5, Everest 2 etc. ...
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If there's one fact that's emerged after Steve Jobs' death this fall, it's that the man hated Android. Really hated. As in, declared thermonuclear war on it and dedicated himself (and Apple's bank account) to wiping it from existence. In light of Steve's Khan-like level of loathing for Google's operating system, it's a wee bit surprising to hear the "other" Steve sing its praises. “My primary phone is the iPhone,” Woz said. “I love the beauty of it. But I wish it did all the things my Android does, I really do." According to Woz, the iPhone is a better option for anyone who's plugged into the Mac ecosystem or suffers from a fear of computers, but Android wins out in terms of...
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After years of work and a few false starts, Intel is finally ready to take the plunge into the smartphone market. At the CES keynote tonight, the CPU giant is officially launching Medfield, the 32nm smartphone SoC the company has built to take it into the next generation of smartphones (and a few tablets). The chip, now officially named the Atom Z2460, is ready for prime time. We visited Intel HQ in December and were briefed on the next-generation phone and what Intel expects it to do. After Moorestown's disappointing performance in the space, the CPU giant is keen to put its best foot forward, and our time with the company reflected that. Intel isn't trying to position Medfield as an ARM-crusher,...
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After years of work and a few false starts, Intel is finally ready to take the plunge into the smartphone market. At the CES keynote tonight, the CPU giant is officially launching Medfield, the 32nm smartphone SoC it's built to take it into the next generation of smartphones (and a few tablets). The chip---now officially named the Atom Z2460--is ready for primetime... x86 Everywhere: Intel Announces Medfield Phones ...
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When AMD announced its first tablet APU earlier this year, codenamed Desna, it was obvious that the chip was more a proof-of-concept than an actual shipping part. Factors outside AMD's control, such as the limitations of Windows 7 when running on a tablet, have kept consumer interest in x86 tablets to a minimum. Nevertheless, MSI's AMD-powered Windpad 110W is about to have company. A Taiwanese manufacturer, Bungbungame, has developed a device based on AMD's Z-01, dubbed the Photon-100. The tablet features an AMD Z01 APU, Windows 7 Home Premium, a 10.1-inch multi-touch screen, 4GB DDR3 memory, 64GB SSD and a weight of 820 grams, BungBungame indicated. The tablet PC is produced by Taiwan-based...
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The second day of IDF began with Mooly Eden, Intel VP and General Manager of the PC Client Group, and his keynote discussion, detailing the current state of the company’s business and Ultrabook plans. Eden also spoke of the adaptability of the PC and the many transformations it has made over the years to meet market demand and dictate new usage models and experiences. From Ivy Bridge DX11 performance to new power saving LCD technologies, Intel's new Identity Theft Protection suite, Haswell demos and Thunderbolt IO for PCs, Mooly covered a lot of ground as usual....
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