Intel unveiled at CES its much anticipated entry in the smartphone
battle. Previously code-named Medfield, the Atom Z2460 lacks a snappy
name, but it arrives with promising features. Intel has struck a
partnership with Motorola as well as Lenovo to get the chip into a
commercial devices as early as Q2, but only in China initially. There
was also Clover Trail, Intel’s SoC for tablets and hybrids.
It has taken some time until Intel was ready to show off a
production-ready Medfield and the result may not be entirely convincing
at first sight. The Z2460 uses just a single-core CPU, albeit with
hyperthreading support and a virtual second core, and there seem to be
some limitations that may raise, at least in some places, eyebrows –
such as the 1 GB LPDDR2 (400 MHz) memory limit.
For an entirely new product that is supposed to blow the competition
out of the water, this appears to be somewhat underwhelming on the spec
side. Also, at first sight, the integrated graphics engine, a 400 MHz
version of Intel’s GMA with 240 megapixels per second throughput seems
to be below the spec of the upcoming Adreno GPU unit in Qualcomm’s
Snapdragon S4 SoC. The system is, of course powerful enough to run
1080p/30fps video for output, but only at 1280×1024 on the local
display. Additionally, this is a 32 nm part, while Intel’s rivals are
already moving toward 28 nm. It’s not going to kill Intel, and it won’t
decide the smartphone race, but the manufacturing process is one of
Intel’s key strengths and it will be important for the company to move
its Atom SoCs to 22 nm for simple marketing reasons.
Intel has a beautiful spec phone as a Z2460 reference platform at its
booth and the performance of the device appears to be doing well as far
as the responsiveness of the display and app load times are concerned.
At the very least, the phone appears to be very competitive with
everything else that is one the market, but we have to wait and see how
it performs in the real world. Intel engineers are confident that the
Z2460 will deliver. Usually, their performance estimates are on the
conservative side, so we are optimistic that the hardware will be, at
the very least, on par with high-end ARM SoCs when the Z2460 is
released.
The reference device has a 4.03-inch screen, a 1.3MP and an 8MP
camera, 14 days of standby power and 45 hours of audio playback. The
best argument for the Z2460 is Intel’s claim that the engine has been
fine-tuned to work well with the Android software core and excel in
Javascript and HTML5 code execution – in speed as well as battery
efficiency disciplines.
Pretty hardware alone won’t allow Intel to push the chip into the
market. So it is not surprising that Intel is partnering with Lenovo and
took the shortcut to Motorola via Google, which some claim annoyed
Microsoft, but could have simply been a small payback for Microsoft’s
decision to stab Intel in the back by partnering with ARM and inviting
more chip companies to equip compact Windows 8 notebooks. Intel isn’t
exactly happy that there will be Nvidia-, Qualcomm- and Samsung-based
Windows 8 notebooks and the move to work with Google on smartphones all
the way is a conclusive move. To respond to the ARM threat in the tablet
and low-end computing market, Intel showed off Clover Trail, a 32 nm
SoC Intel will pitch for tablets as well as hybrid notebooks
(Windows/Android), which will be its offering to compete with ARM in the
compact computing space.
The Atom Z2460 will launch in a smartphone in China in Q2. Motorola
confirmed that it will be shipping an Intel-based smartphone in the
second half of this year.
Wolfgang Gruener in Products on January 10
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