Intel's smartphone platforms

The dual SIM card support suggests to me that this chip is aimed at the Chinese/Asia market were dual sim handsets are commonplace.
Isn't they stated "emerging markets" explicitly?
I don't see how Lexington could be competitive with ARM unless Intel ask a very low price or "sponsor" manufacturers in some ways.

PS: Sorry for offtopic :cool:
 
Most advanced game I ever played on my phone's Final Fantasy IV. It runs OK. It's also roughly speaking the most advanced type of game I'd ever WANT to play on a phone. I normally use that phone to do things like banking stuff, paying bills, checking bus or train time tables, playing music, checking the weather forecast, looking at maps and loot gold deliveries every now and then from my world of warcraft auctions. All that stuff and more runs just fine.

Dude, your smartphone usage is so 2008.. I used to do all that with my symbian phones.. except for the wow thingie.
 
A 400 MHz clock for the SGX540 is implied by the specs of Intel's new budget/value market SoC, the Z2420. If the clock speed has actually been lowered from the original Medfield, though, I'd expect 320 MHz.
 
According to TechReport's blurb on Intel's announcements at CES:
Clover Trail+ is still built on 32-nm tech, but 22-nm Atom processors are due to hit tablets in time for the 2013 holiday season. These Bay Trail SoCs will feature four cores and more than double the performance of existing Atom designs, Intel says.
http://techreport.com/news/24163/atom-socs-heading-to-cheaper-smartphones-faster-tablets

So it looks like Bay Trail isn't delayed into 2014 after all. Clovertrail+ (Z2580) seems to be meant for phones and will come much sooner. It's probably in the same ballpark of performance as the Z2760, as the latter is almost good enough for phones as it is.

Also announced were 7W Ivy Bridge processors, which bode well for upcoming Win8 tablets/hybrids. Looking a little further ahead, the Haswell Ultrabook reference platform is a transformer style notebook with the tablet part being 10mm, 1.9 lbs, and offering 10 hours of battery life. That's outstanding for something with notebook-class processing power, and it's just the reference.
 
That's outstanding for something with notebook-class processing power, and it's just the reference.
Yes, indeed.

The mobile chip makers and Intel have so far lived in spaces that didn't intersect too much, only due to Intel's refusal/ineptness (take your pick) to really trade off performance for low power.
But the mobile space has no choice to step up performance, there's no other option really, so a clash was inevitable and just a matter of time. Looks like it's about to happen soon. And with Intel's process advantage, I'm not sure if the ARM architecture will be strong enough to resist what Intel will have to offer, at least not for Android. (Windows RT is already dead.)
This will be fun to watch...
 
So it looks like Bay Trail isn't delayed into 2014 after all. Clovertrail+ (Z2580) seems to be meant for phones and will come much sooner. It's probably in the same ballpark of performance as the Z2760, as the latter is almost good enough for phones as it is.
So this raises the question of the origin of the latest leak...

Also announced were 7W Ivy Bridge processors, which bode well for upcoming Win8 tablets/hybrids.
To clarify: 7W is for what Intel calls SDP, not their usual TDP (which is 13W). Interestingly Techreport forgot to mention that :rolleyes:
 
So this raises the question of the origin of the latest leak...

The CES slides only talked about Bay Trail based tablets to be on the market by the end of this year, maybe one or more other Bay Trail based platform were delayed or the entire rumor was bogus?
 
The mobile chip makers and Intel have so far lived in spaces that didn't intersect too much, only due to Intel's refusal/ineptness (take your pick) to really trade off performance for low power.
I don't think they refused because of the tradeoff. I think they refused because margins were too low to bother with and they didn't want to cannibalize higher end sales. Atom could have arrived a long time ago, but Intel resisted and it only came about because Intel saw a threat from Via and AMD in grabbing low end marketshare. It was a really half-assed effort at first, but enough to keep competitors at bay. I think it still sees the phone SoC market as too low margin, but they see some light down the road as more complex apps get run on them so they're putting a foot in.

So this raises the question of the origin of the latest leak...
I suppose, but we've seen all to many fabrications to get page hits, so who cares.
To clarify: 7W is for what Intel calls SDP, not their usual TDP (which is 13W). Interestingly Techreport forgot to mention that :rolleyes:
I don't think that's as misleading as you make it out to be:
http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Confirms-New-7W-Ivy-Bridge-Chips-Haswell-Parts-To-Follow/

I found an anandtech post from someone who plotted Sandy Bridge power consumption from a constant workload and frequency as a function of Tj (adjusted through varying airflow over a heatsink), and there's a relationship that suggests HotHardware is right. I'm guessing that this curve gets relatively steeper for low power parts, since it's due to thermal dependence of leakage power, which is more meaningful for low power IvB variants.

If there's enough cooling to keep these chips at or below 80 degC, then they shouldn't consume more than 7W. If you skimp on the cooling, then power consumption will rise probably to the point of causing thermal runaway (up to the throttle point). I say this because I'm pretty sure that if a cooling solution can't dissipate 7W @ 80C, then it probably won't be able to dissipate 10-13W @ 105C. That's probably why the latter is what you design the cooling solution to, and if you do so, then power draw won't exceed 7W.

If this is all correct, then I think SDP is a fair metric for these chips.
 
@Mintmaster: I never said SDP isn't better than TDP. I just said that claiming the chip is 7W when all people had seen before was 17W make it look like Intel made a breakthrough on power consumption, which simply isn't the case ;)

EDIT: To better illustrate what I mean: http://www.economy-news.co.uk/stocks/2379-intel-corp-grows-in-threat-to-arm-holdings-4534543
Separately Intel also launched a new lower power Core processor for tablets and ultrabooks having a power consumption of 7 Watts, down from the current level of about 17 Watts.
See what is happening?
 
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So for Intel, "emerging markets" = no one wants it, cares about it, low volume ?

Why would an smartphone SoC with an Atom sell in markets like China or India, when the handsets there are completely dominated by companies like Mediatek (or even Huawei with its HiSilicon outfit).
 
So for Intel, "emerging markets" = no one wants it, cares about it, low volume ?

Why would an smartphone SoC with an Atom sell in markets like China or India, when the handsets there are completely dominated by companies like Mediatek (or even Huawei with its HiSilicon outfit).

I'm sure you're going to get people saying that Intel, margins be damned, can out-price anyone on the planet because of their process advantage. Other companies can be added to your list - Allwinner and Rockchip come to mind, even Ingenic.

Frankly I buy this notion. Especially when your chips start getting pad limited and the process advantage becomes moot. And where they aren't pad limited, it's because they're using a ball pitch that the cheap Chinese assembly houses can't handle. Or they require PoP that the cheap Chinese assembly houses can't handle. AFAIK there are even Chinese phone SoCs that can still be had on leaded packages that, while larger, are again cheaper to assemble for anyone who can't handle moderate volumes.

No matter what Intel will still need to pay their workers more, will still need to pay more importing into China, and will still aspire to higher margins beyond any initial deals they make to try to get into the market.
 
The power management behavior of desktop processor architectures would need to be so much more aggressive under most of the usage range, from load to idle, that I doubt they'll intersect with mobile like others anticipate.

I think Atom's existence for that purpose is justified.
 
The power management behavior of desktop processor architectures would need to be so much more aggressive under most of the usage range, from load to idle, that I doubt they'll intersect with mobile like others anticipate.
Doesn't Intel have an incentive to do this for desktop/server processors? There are plenty of use cases where they benefit from aggressive power management also?
 
Which is why Intel appears to be bringing the voltage regulator on die.

Not sure if you've read the article on Arstechnica about the 7W claim for the new Ivy Bridge CPUs.

It's all in the marketing. Intel marketing invented a new "marchitecture" call SDP, which stands for scenario design power or perhaps "normal use case or usage" is a better word. In other words, if you just stick to reading e-mails, browsing and typing some text, the CPU might dissipate not more than 7 W.
 
I don't think Ars is correct. He says that SDP "purports to measure how much power the CPU is using during average use", but average use will need way less than on a tablet.

I think HotHardware's explanation makes more sense, especially given the spec sheet they presented:
In the chart below, nominal TDP is the standard TDP metric we're familiar with. The 10W cTDP Down number means that Intel guarantees the chip will draw 10W or less if the CPU temperature remains below 105C. In typical tablet scenarios, SDP will remain at 7W, provided the chip temperature is 80'C or less.
It seems to me that they can't guarantee that power will never exceed 7W, but if you have sufficient cooling, then for all intents and purposes it won't.
 
I really hope I get the option to purchase that Lenovo K900 in the US. It should have approximately iPhone 5 like performance from the Z2580.
 
I really hope I get the option to purchase that Lenovo K900 in the US. It should have approximately iPhone 5 like performance from the Z2580.
It will lack LTE, won't it? So it's unlikely to land in the US, as all previous Intel based phones it seems.
 
Not sure if you've read the article on Arstechnica about the 7W claim for the new Ivy Bridge CPUs.

It's all in the marketing. Intel marketing invented a new "marchitecture" call SDP, which stands for scenario design power or perhaps "normal use case or usage" is a better word. In other words, if you just stick to reading e-mails, browsing and typing some text, the CPU might dissipate not more than 7 W.

The voltage regulator will definitely come on package with haswell and probably on die with Broadwell. IB is just a stopgap.
 
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