

Lava Xolo X900 Review - The First Intel Medfield Phone - Aissen
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone

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sciwizam
"The x86 power myth is finally busted"

All that's remaining is a cutting edge GPU to blow everyone away and major
OEMs to take notice. I wonder if Motorola would use the same SoC or the dual-
core variant.

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bryanlarsen
Very impressive: Medfield is a single core processor that's competitive with
the dual core Krait-based S4 and faster than a quad core Tegra3 in a $400
phone, unsubsidized.

If I was an ARM manufacturer, I would be very afraid. Intel has 3 obvious ways
to produce faster CPUs soon: go dual or quad core, be the first to 22nm, or
base their mobile CPU on Core rather than on Atom. OTOH, 28 & 35nm Krait & A15
will be the best Intel's competitors will have available for a while.

~~~
Someone
Performance per core is not the thing to optimize; performance per milliWatt
is. I think that is hard to judge from this review, but it seems at least to
be in the same league.

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ConstantineXVI
I wonder how complete their native ARM->x86 translator is. I'd expect to start
seeing a lot of unexplainable bugs in native apps once Medfield phones start
shipping in volume. Another side effect: presuming it's dependent on the cloud
service w/o any local fallback, there's no way for apps distributed outside
Play (Amazon, etc) to be recompiled w/o the developer doing so manually.

(Note this is mainly relevant for games; the vast majority of other apps are
pure Java and don't need any translation)

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zobzu
"hardware emulation" that's kinda cool tho. I wonder how fast it is. I also
wonder how many parts of the benchmark software uses some ARM EABI binaries
(JNI or NDK).

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yread
"a reference design that an Intel partner can just buy, barely customize, and
ship"

perhaps there is a space for a company to focus on the software side of
things?

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nextparadigms
So Intel is finally getting into the market, and all it can do is be half as
good as the best ARM chips right now? Besides the Javascript test, which is
almost irrelevant by now, being such a simple test, it scores about half as S3
and Tegra 3 in pretty much all the other benchmarks, including for how smooth
the browsing is and its GPU performance.

Even if Atom was "as good" as high-end ARM chips now, which it isn't, it would
still be nearly impossible to take any market away from ARM. You can't take
market away from an absolute incumbent with 98% of the market when at best
you're just as good, but usually half that.

I also don't see them mentioning pricing, but the Atom package should cost
somewhere in the $80-$100 range. High-end ARM chips cost maybe $35 at most.

The only reason the Xolo is somewhat fairly priced is because it's made by a
noname company. It's like worse than being made by ZTE.

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zobzu
Err the intel chip is usually among the 2nd and 3rd best and it has 2 fewer
cores. And far from "50%" slower. Its rather close to them. I find that pretty
good. In fact, Anandtech found that pretty good as well.

You seem to be looking mostly at the GPU scores, and intel doesn't make those
GPUs. Switching to a faster GPU in the future would solve that. Not that the
current GPU they use is any slow anyway, there will not be a single Android
app lagging on this.

And all this with a crappy assembler as you said. It's also running GB vs ICS.
ICS makes some of the benchmarks a lot faster (specially your favorite, the
webkit bench ;-)

I'm also surprised by the exposure time setting. I've no idea how useable it
is on a phone but I always wanted that, at least to be able to try it.

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twiceaday
Isn't X pronounced as CH in some places?

