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.
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.
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.
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)
"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).
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.
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.
I heard the argument that Intel has a much better manufacturing process. Die size reduction is the only way they can compete with ARM. But first they need to get their foot in the door.
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.