Display And Memory
In the notebook world, most displays are based on low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS). Lincroft supports LVDS at resolutions up to 1366x768—plenty of pixels for the sub-notes in which you might expect Atom to appear. In the handheld and MID spaces, though, displays are gravitating to the Display Serial Interface (DSI) put forward by the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance. The purpose of MIPI is to establish industry standards for wired and wireless interconnects in the ultraportable world, which often have different priorities than those in the desktop or server worlds. DSI uses a form of LVDS serial bus but seeks to specify lower-cost approaches to LCDs specifically in the ultramobile market.
Today, Intel specifies that Lincroft can handle MIPI-DSI output at up to 1024x600. So, even if someone were to create a Moorestown-based device with a big enough LCD to accommodate native 1080-resolution video, Lincroft tops out at 720p to the screen via LVDS, and even less via MIPI-DSI. Why, then, should we get excited about Moorestown’s ability to handle 1080p video when no other phones can? In part, because the horsepower able to decode 1080p can also decode multiple 720p or lower streams. But also keep in mind that if your video collection is standardized on 1080p content, you don’t want to have to waste time transcoding everything you transfer over to your ultramobile device. Just copy and go—the device will take care of the rest.
Lincroft’s embedded controller supports two memory formats: LPDDR1 at speeds up to 400 MT/s and DDR2 up to 800 MT/s. Why two formats, given that memory is hard-mounted on the platform board? The answer has to do with market segments. Moorestown currently targets two device application groups, one based on communication and the other on entertainment and productivity. The communication models are the ones with 400 MT/s LPDDR, and they don’t presently span up to 1.9 GHz with BPT. That falls to the entertainment/productivity group with its 800 MT/s DDR2. Interestingly, only the latter group will support 1080p decoding. As of this writing, we still don’t have confirmation that the communication platforms will decode 720p, although it appears likely.
Typical power consumption for Lincroft and Langwell combined in standby is about 3mW. This applies to both the communication and entertainment/productivity groups. However, under active use, the higher clocks of the latter group start to take a toll. Whereas communication platforms land in the 300 to 500mW range, entertainment/productivity platforms run between 450mW and 650mW, at least on pre-release hardware.
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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.