Intel Announces Clover Trail+ Atom Platform For Smartphones and Tablets 56
MojoKid writes "Today, Intel announced the follow-on to their Medfield Atom platform for smartphones, code-named Clover Trail+. Clover Trail is powering a few Windows 8 Pro tablets currently. However, Clover Trail+, Intel's new performance and feature-optimized version of Clover Trail for smartphones and tablets, has a long row to hoe versus incumbents like Qualcomm, Samsung and NVIDIA, at least in the highly competitive handset arena. What's interesting this time around is that Clover Trail+ seems to really have the chops (at least on paper) to keep pace with the performance of current, best-of-class ARM-based architectures that have been so dominant in smartphones. Clover Trail+ is another 32nm design and Intel has beefed up almost every major functional block on the platform. From its now dual-core, 4-thread capable Atom CPU, to its new PowerVR SGX 544MP2 graphics engine, 2GB of LPDDR2 1066 DRAM, up to 256GB of NAND storage, a higher resolution 16MP camera and Intel's XMM 6360 HSPA+ 42Mbps modem, with LTE support from their XMM 7160 radio moving forward; Intel's Clover Trail+ smartphone reference design brings a lot more to the table than Medfield ever did."
Mythbusting time! (Score:4, Insightful)
Myth 1: Intel can't make x86 power/performance competitive with ARM: Being busted as we speak.
Myth 2: ARM can't scale up performance: Beginning to be busted with the A15, more to come with the 64-bit chips.
Myth 3: ARM can just press a button and get Intel level performance without using any extra power: Busted wide open by ARM themselves with the whole "littleBIG/BIG/little/etc" approach and by the conspicuous lack of high-end A15 chips in smartphones (note Tablet != Smartphone, and look at the Cortex-A9 based Tegra4i for the latest example of manufacturers not putting high-clocked A15s in smartphones).
Re:Mythbusting time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact 2: Compilers exist.
Fact 3: x86 compilers exist.
Fact 4: NDK for x86 exists.
Fact 5: ARM fanboys who say that ARM will win simply be recompiling Linux while claiming that it is physically impossible to run Linux on an x86 architecture are almost as amusing as they are ignorant.