Why Moorestown Matters
How big of a deal is Moorestown to Intel? Two of the first factoids Intel dropped at its briefing were these: 1) Globally, there will be one billion new “connected” users by 2015 than there are today. 2) By 2015, there will be 10 billion connected devices in use. How much of this will be PCs versus non-PCs? In June of 2008, Gartner declared that “the number of installed PCs worldwide has surpassed 1 billion units” and that “it will surpass 2 billion units by early 2014.” Even assuming that Intel’s projection is overly optimistic and that a large swath of these future “connected devices” will be things like gaming consoles, connected cars, or whatever, we’re still talking about multiple billions of connected handheld devices in use. Is this feasible? Considering that the International Telecommunications Unions’ 2009 annual report pegged global mobile phone usage at 4.6 billion units, yeah—I’d say billions of “PC-like” handhelds is totally feasible. Intel might just sell more ultramobile processors in the next five years than it has sold into the PC market over its entire history.
Looking back across the last couple of weeks, taking in the specifics of Moorestown, its evolution, and what information Intel has fed (and not fed) to the press, I believe that this launch is roughly equivalent to the arrival of Conroe and the Core 2 family. Conroe put a final stake through the heart of NetBurst and confirmed Intel’s commitment to abandoning frequency as the central measure and means of processor performance. It led Intel down a different path for desktops and notebooks and allowed Intel to keep up a pace of innovation that competitors have been unable to match.
I believe Moorestown, and especially the Lincroft SoC architecture, will do the same for Intel’s ultramobility pursuits. Silverthorne was simply a warm-up, a prelude. Are there still blemishes waiting to be discovered in shipping Moorestown devices? Almost certainly. It seems very unlikely that even Intel could go from a chip as maligned as the original Atom to a miraculous revolution in just one generation? I suspect if the platform were that good, I’d have a unit in my hand right this minute. It would rival the iPad, cure the sick, game the stock market, and draw the fairer sex like moths to a flame. Heck, I’d settle for any one of those things.
No, the message of Moorestown is not that Intel is suddenly the best mobility platform on the planet. Even company reps admitted that the Moorestown scorecard is mixed. Compared to its rivals, Moorestown is allegedly on par for browsing and standby power, trailing on audio playback, and excelling on video—and excelling so much that direct comparisons are often impossible. Moorestown debunks the common belief that IA architecture is too power-hungry to succeed in ultramobility. As of now, IA is ready to fuel the rocket in your pocket.
With power needs met and performance at least on par with the competition, Intel finds itself with a familiar challenge. If the company can scale Atom on ultramobiles in the same way it scaled Core 2, then the future of ultramobility and perhaps mainstream computing seems all but sure to remain in Intel’s corner. One engineer commented, “Intel sees the Internet as a primary means to the end...and the end itself.” If that’s true, if the race in mainstream hardware is really a race to enable the best browsing experiences possible, regardless of size, shape, or location, then Moorestown seems likely to bring that end within Intel’s reach.
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The sheer amount of adoration in this article is stunning. Did you get an orgasm while writing this? Or did some cash pass under the table?
On a more serious note: yes, it sure looks good. But where will it be used? Tablets are already using the full blown Atom, so I doubt we'll see a transition soon. Lower-end handsets don't need the power this offers. High end headsets certainly could be a willing customer, but current phone OS'es are heavily coded for ARM based chips. Even if devs are willing to transcribe it for Atom, it will take long enough for ARM to come up with something of its own, or so I believe.
Yes, it's an excellent products. But it won't be used in billions of handsets. As far as I can tell, it will occupy a minor part of the high end mobile phone market, which is a niche by itself. A minor market share in an average market segment isn't really spectacular, is it?
still 45nm?
or should that say poke, talk about a love in, bet he can't sit down for a week.
Arm have a big advantage in this sector, their RISC architecture is more suited to parallel computing than that of the X86 platform, and it's innate low power only compounds this. This is a classic Adidas, Nike battle, I know where my money is being wagered.
It's obvious that Intel's tightly controlled demonstration environment was able to effectively neutralize the technically-minded critique of this tom's writer
Love for VIA to get there act together and update their chip lines, should give the Atom and good kicking.
Selling tripe to the masses... as a consumer salesperson of technology here in Australia I can tell you the gloss is starting to wear of the small form factor as people have realised the atom for the 486 performance it delivers (ie slow)!
Honestly I don't give a crap what a phone can supposedly play, do, when in fact we're not ALLOWED to do most of what WE want with OUR device and OUR OS that are crippled beyond legal advertising usage...
These devices are nothing but eye-candy fraud for Vzn/ATT/TMob etc, so they can load these things up with more free advertising banners and crap for them. More "accidentally" placed "Get-ripped-off-now-4-$1.99-a-press" buttons that NOBODY in their right mind would use Vs just connecting the phone to your net/laptop/Desktop device and UL'ing whatever YOU want on the device, not what they think you might want (for a fee of course), aka them telling you what you should want to do and use YOUR device for.
Who cares about how fast your car (device) can go, when the controllers of the road (OS), won't allow you to drive your car as they advertised it to you (some stupid-fast commercial with drifting and sh!t)? The only real way to get near full functionality and power from your car is to void your warranty by unlocking the detuned aspects of it, thus now you're car is a warranty-less ticking time-bomb awaiting failure, then you've gotta reflash it and pretend that you werent drifting and speeding when they ask "so... how did it break?"
__Come on here people, how can they advertise these devices to do so much, yet when you get it they are FILLED with bugs, glitches and general unfinished functionality, yet all the while they MARKET it to you as being alleged to have said capabilities etc... I digress.
Screw speed/mCPUs if the OS is going to be crippled, controlled and infested with bugs. There's more important things consumers should be concerned about before eye-candy = this is just used to continually push more devices to us and create more consumer fanaticism: OMG I've GOTTA HAVE *NEW* everything!
Bunk.
I'd add two more factors to consider namely 1) screen real-estate or lack thereof and real-life connectivity being either sub-optimal or lacking.
Either way you turn that: in the home/lab/office or on the road/train/plane, there still seems enough here that for a lot of "real" computing tasks (I am thinking spreadsheets, long wordprocessing, coding) the devices are simply not suitable.
I'd grudgingly accept my employer giving me a netbook to work on but I wouldn't go further down the line (I'm a webmaster working in federal gov't) - I need screen real estate and my fingers need a real keyboard for hours I work with technology.
Would I love a faster smartphone? Sure! But lets be certain how and where these devices are useful.
I'd add two more factors to consider namely 1) screen real-estate or lack thereof and real-life connectivity being either sub-optimal or lacking. Either way you turn that: in the home/lab/office or on the road/train/plane, there still seems enough here that for a lot of "real" computing tasks (I am thinking spreadsheets, long wordprocessing, coding) the devices are simply not suitable. I'd grudgingly accept my employer giving me a netbook to work on but I wouldn't go further down the line (I'm a webmaster working in federal gov't) - I need screen real estate and my fingers need a real keyboard for hours I work with technology. Would I love a faster smartphone? Sure! But lets be certain how and where these devices are useful.
Well both the N9 and the N900 runs OpenOffice / LibreOffice. It can edit just as well as MS Word, calculate spreadsheet better than Excel (with Gnumerics) and compares in speed with a Samsung Galaxy S2 - because now you can overclock it.
The N900 has a tiny keyboard, but also code to attach one on the Bluetooth port or USB. The N9 can attach a BlueTooth keyboard. The N900 has analog TV out 720 dot, the N9 regular HDMI - 1050p.
If you trave a lot or operate from multiple offices it is a gem. Mine rune 64GB of storage, comparable with a laptop a couple of years ago. The Maemo is better and well tested and regardless of what the media says, this is where the advance applications are developed first - because it is so simple to work on any regular Linux laptop and test and debug here, and then copy the system to the device.
Android is very similar to Linux, so that is the next platform. iPhone is censored by Apple, so they are the last to get the apps.