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I'm guessing that Intel cut Motorola a really sweet deal to get them to sign an exclusive contract. The decision probably had little to do with Intel being a be

by dlevine 15y ago

I'm guessing that Intel cut Motorola a really sweet deal to get them to sign an exclusive contract. The decision probably had little to do with Intel being a better platform, and more to do with cost per chip. Let's face it - Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to Intel. They knew that they had to have a major win, or risk getting disrupted in the near future. So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to get an exclusive contract. When you look at it, Medfield is 3 year-old desktop chip technology, which itself wasn't exactly new (the Atom had some improvements, but wasn't a radical departure from what preceded it). Intel isn't bringing anything new to the table - they just keep shrinking the same old chips, and reducing power requirements. At the core, they are still a PC chip company - they just figure out how to shoehorn those chips into smaller and smaller platforms. The new ARM-based devices (such as Tegra 3) are actually much more innovative and better-suited to mobile devices than Medfield. I think that we will see a lot more innovation in chip design from ARM licensees going forward (such as the low-power 5th core on the Tegra 3), and this will eventually disrupt Intel from the bottom up.

rbanffy 15y ago
> Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to Intel. Windows 8 stil hasn't shipped, won't ship for quite some time and won't run most current Windows PC software. Don't forget non-x86 Windows NT ran on MIPS, PPC, Alpha and Itanic (and i960, Clipper and SPARC, IIRC) processors and it mostly failed because it couldn't run software compiled for x86's.
- mikeash 15y ago
  It also failed because, to within a small margin of error, nobody owned MIPS, PPC, Alpha, or Itanium systems. ARM systems, on the other hand, are selling tens or maybe even hundreds of millions a year right now.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    And for the foreseeable future none will be able to boot Windows 8. Unless Microsoft wants to ship an installer that jailbreaks and installs W8 on iPads.
    - mikeash 15y ago
      Sure, but there's still an established concept of "ship an ARM tablet and get people to develop for it". In other words, there's no Wintel monopoly to contend with as there was before. I think that's largely what NT-on-not-Intel fell victim to, despite coming from one of the Wintel companies.
    - rat87 15y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised at all if they come out with windows phone 8 based on windows 8 and not windows mobile. That way they could have one os for phones/tablets/pc's/ect. They could use their market/repository as a way to force people to modify uis. Since all of the 3rd party apps are written in a version of silverlight(they haven't dropped this restriction yet right?) it should have few incompatibilities.
np1782 15y ago
"So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to get an exclusive contract." Not to take away from the overall point of your comment, but isn't Google in the process of finalizing[1] their purchase of Motorola Mobility, so wouldn't Google have been deeply involved in the decision. In essence a phone to Jha, Rubin, and Page. I think it's too early to tell weather Medfield is a hit or miss. Anandtech seems to be impressed with the Medfield Platform[2], so far based on what they have seen "Intel finally did it. After almost five years of talking about getting into mobile phone form factors, Intel went out and built a reference platform that proved what they've been saying was possible all along. Furthermore, Intel also finally landed a couple of partners who are willing to show their support by incorporating Medfield into their product portfolio. The releases are still a few months away at the earliest (possibly even longer for Motorola) but it's much better news than Intel has ever reported before in this space. The partnerships aren't out of pity either: Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start. Even today it appears to deliver better CPU performance than anything on the market, despite only having a single core. GPU performance is still not as fast as what's in the A5 but it's competitive with much of the competition today, and I fully expect the dual-core version of Medfield to rectify this problem. Based on the data Intel shared with us as well, the x86 power problem appears to be a myth - at least when it comes to Medfield. I'm still not fully convinced until we're able to test a Medfield based phone ourselves, but power efficiency at the chip level doesn't seem to be a problem. Medfield and the Atom Z2460 are a solid starting point. Intel finally has a chip that they can deliver to the market and partners to carry it in. Intel also built a very impressive reference platform that could lead to some very interesting disruptions in the market. While I'd like to say that Intel's Medfield team can now breathe a sigh of relief, their work is far from over - especially with more competitive ARM based SoCs showing up later this year. I'm really interested to see where this goes in the next 12 months..." [1] http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-acquisition-of-motorola-mobility-paused-by-eu-to-get-more http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-acquisiti... [2]http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z246...
- wisty 15y ago
wmf 15y ago
There's nothing exclusive about the Moto deal; I'm not sure what you're saying there. IMO Atom is radically different from Intel's previous designs — radically worse, that is. But it sure is cheap.
- dlevine 15y ago
  Apologies. I misread "extensive" as "exclusive" in the article. It doesn't matter - I'm sure that Intel gave Motorola a sweet deal to get an "extensive" commitment.
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
I haven't seen anything to indicate this is an exclusive deal.
fieldforceapp 15y ago
MMI has been shifting away from proprietary app and comms processors for a number of years and this is a a continuation of Jha's policies. This news is more of a loss for QCOM as they were certainly hoping to have an "in" with Jha to possibly displace TXN parts on Motorola devices. INTC isn't done with Medfield, of course, you should expect more cores & and aggressive push on process nodes. I would consider it is a validation for their new mobile strategy: http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=559064 http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=559064 And as to your point about ARM-based devices being more "innovative," to some extent all the ARM-based devices are basic shared-memory architecture with the same mix of IMG GPU's as Medfield. You could argue, conversely, that Intel is at least trying to innovate on their pipeline and memory architecture (an increase the L2 cache for example) which the ARM-based SOC's are not doing. Of course I guess this just means you'll see ARM A15 designs coming to market sooner in an attempt to separate from Medfield?

by dlevine 15y ago

rbanffy 15y ago

> Windows 8 running on ARM was a pretty big wake up call to Intel. Windows 8 stil hasn't shipped, won't ship for quite some time and won't run most current Windows PC software. Don't forget non-x86 Windows NT ran on MIPS, PPC, Alpha and Itanic (and i960, Clipper and SPARC, IIRC) processors and it mostly failed because it couldn't run software compiled for x86's.

mikeash 15y ago
It also failed because, to within a small margin of error, nobody owned MIPS, PPC, Alpha, or Itanium systems. ARM systems, on the other hand, are selling tens or maybe even hundreds of millions a year right now.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  And for the foreseeable future none will be able to boot Windows 8. Unless Microsoft wants to ship an installer that jailbreaks and installs W8 on iPads.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    Sure, but there's still an established concept of "ship an ARM tablet and get people to develop for it". In other words, there's no Wintel monopoly to contend with as there was before. I think that's largely what NT-on-not-Intel fell victim to, despite coming from one of the Wintel companies.
  - rat87 15y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised at all if they come out with windows phone 8 based on windows 8 and not windows mobile. That way they could have one os for phones/tablets/pc's/ect. They could use their market/repository as a way to force people to modify uis. Since all of the 3rd party apps are written in a version of silverlight(they haven't dropped this restriction yet right?) it should have few incompatibilities.

np1782 15y ago

"So they called up Sanjay Jha, and figured out what it was going to take to get an exclusive contract." Not to take away from the overall point of your comment, but isn't Google in the process of finalizing[1] their purchase of Motorola Mobility, so wouldn't Google have been deeply involved in the decision. In essence a phone to Jha, Rubin, and Page. I think it's too early to tell weather Medfield is a hit or miss. Anandtech seems to be impressed with the Medfield Platform[2], so far based on what they have seen "Intel finally did it. After almost five years of talking about getting into mobile phone form factors, Intel went out and built a reference platform that proved what they've been saying was possible all along. Furthermore, Intel also finally landed a couple of partners who are willing to show their support by incorporating Medfield into their product portfolio. The releases are still a few months away at the earliest (possibly even longer for Motorola) but it's much better news than Intel has ever reported before in this space. The partnerships aren't out of pity either: Medfield is fast. I firmly believe had it been released a year ago it would have dominated the Android smartphone market from the very start. Even today it appears to deliver better CPU performance than anything on the market, despite only having a single core. GPU performance is still not as fast as what's in the A5 but it's competitive with much of the competition today, and I fully expect the dual-core version of Medfield to rectify this problem. Based on the data Intel shared with us as well, the x86 power problem appears to be a myth - at least when it comes to Medfield. I'm still not fully convinced until we're able to test a Medfield based phone ourselves, but power efficiency at the chip level doesn't seem to be a problem. Medfield and the Atom Z2460 are a solid starting point. Intel finally has a chip that they can deliver to the market and partners to carry it in. Intel also built a very impressive reference platform that could lead to some very interesting disruptions in the market. While I'd like to say that Intel's Medfield team can now breathe a sigh of relief, their work is far from over - especially with more competitive ARM based SoCs showing up later this year. I'm really interested to see where this goes in the next 12 months..." [1] http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-acquisition-of-motorola-mobility-paused-by-eu-to-get-more http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/12/2630134/googles-acquisiti... [2]http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z246...

wisty 15y ago

wmf 15y ago

There's nothing exclusive about the Moto deal; I'm not sure what you're saying there. IMO Atom is radically different from Intel's previous designs — radically worse, that is. But it sure is cheap.

dlevine 15y ago
Apologies. I misread "extensive" as "exclusive" in the article. It doesn't matter - I'm sure that Intel gave Motorola a sweet deal to get an "extensive" commitment.

ConstantineXVI 15y ago

I haven't seen anything to indicate this is an exclusive deal.

fieldforceapp 15y ago

MMI has been shifting away from proprietary app and comms processors for a number of years and this is a a continuation of Jha's policies. This news is more of a loss for QCOM as they were certainly hoping to have an "in" with Jha to possibly displace TXN parts on Motorola devices. INTC isn't done with Medfield, of course, you should expect more cores & and aggressive push on process nodes. I would consider it is a validation for their new mobile strategy: http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=559064 http://www.intc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=559064 And as to your point about ARM-based devices being more "innovative," to some extent all the ARM-based devices are basic shared-memory architecture with the same mix of IMG GPU's as Medfield. You could argue, conversely, that Intel is at least trying to innovate on their pipeline and memory architecture (an increase the L2 cache for example) which the ARM-based SOC's are not doing. Of course I guess this just means you'll see ARM A15 designs coming to market sooner in an attempt to separate from Medfield?