Intel Says 'Medfield' Smartphone Coming Early Next Year
Linked by David Adams on Wed 18th May 2011 03:11 UTC
Intel Intel has showed a prototype smartphone based on its low-power Medfield processor and said Intel-based phones from "major players" would be in the market next year. Intel has struggled to get its chips into smartphones and tablets, markets that are dominated today by processor designs from Intel's U.K. rival ARM Holdings.
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RE[3]: To Little - To late
by fran on Wed 18th May 2011 14:26 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: To Little - To late"
fran
Member since:
2010-08-06

just to counter my "new technology" argument..in my view one of Intel biggest problem is going to be
what are we going to use all that processing power for.
Majority of PC users read email, type letters and open there browsers. These task already benefit much more from new storage technologies like SSD than processing power.
These new technologies will really only be viable if it is cheap.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[4]: To Little - To late
by jgagnon on Wed 18th May 2011 15:15 in reply to "RE[3]: To Little - To late"
jgagnon Member since:
2008-06-24

There is no shortage of ideas to use new processing power. Video processing on a phone is not too far fetched. Soon you will have full HD video recording on phones, so why not allow them to do a little editing? Maybe with near-field technology you can walk up to a larger screen with your phone and use it, allowing you to do "big screen stuff" while having your tiny portable phone be your main CPU. This future is not that far off.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[5]: To Little - To late
by vodoomoth on Thu 19th May 2011 13:48 in reply to "RE[4]: To Little - To late"
vodoomoth Member since:
2010-03-30

And how credible, usable, nifty or "wishable" is that future? Really, editing full HD videos on mobile phones?

I don't see the point of using a smartphone as a main CPU when the scenario you depict still requires a bigger screen and the mobile CPU is inherently limited... and I'm only thinking about battery life here.

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[4]: To Little - To late
by vodoomoth on Thu 19th May 2011 13:45 in reply to "RE[3]: To Little - To late"
vodoomoth Member since:
2010-03-30

And yet these new machines are just as slow as a dead snail.

Don't worry, software makers are very talented in wasting CPU power. I keep asking myself what could justify the fact that a dual core Vista machine is three times slower booting than my 1998 Olivetti laptop running Windows 95. USB? Bluetooth? the wide screen ratio? or the shrinking feature added to the task tray? or maybe support for HDMI, SATA and whatnot?

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[5]: To Little - To late
by Neolander on Thu 19th May 2011 14:59 in reply to "RE[4]: To Little - To late"
Neolander Member since:
2010-03-08

I think the terrible performance of modern desktop OSs mostly has to do with a bad sense of priorities...
-Do you need your operating system to initialize the network stack before displaying the login screen if you log in locally ?
-Do you need your operating system to initialize all peripherals including things like webcams, scanners, printers or USB sticks before displaying that login screen, or do you only want main graphics output and input devices like the mouse and the keyboard to be initialized now, and the rest to be initialized in the background later ?
-When you're encoding an HD movie in the background and browsing your HDD hierarchy in the foreground, which task should receive the highest HDD access priority and provide maximal reactivity ?

Then there are also more classical ways to waste CPU power. Like, you know, this habit of many graphical toolkits to fully redraw a window each time it's moved a few pixels around, instead of just keeping a copy of its contents in a buffer and blitting that copy around.

Reply Parent Score: 1