Smartphones on Atom. Achievements and prospects

It has been about a year since the “second coming” of Intel to the mobile processor market - this period is not enough to formulate far-reaching conclusions, but something can already be understood. In this post we will try to find out what has been achieved for this year, in what direction is the development of Intel mobile products and what they will be in the very near future.

The most visible to the naked eye measure of the success of any platform is the number of commercial products released on its basis. What do we have in our case? Now there are about a dozen smartphones based on the Medfield platform and about twenty Windows tablets on the CloverTrail platform. Is it a lot or a little? In terms of market share - of course, a miser. And if we consider these models as the first step in creating a new ecosystem of mobile devices, it is possible that this is enough. The main thing is that the technology has not remained to exist only on paper and prototypes, it is embodied in "living" iron, and there is something to run around it and correct its errors. Naturally, in order for the project to be commercially successful, the first, second, third and twenties should follow the first models - more perfect and attractive to the consumer. As for the plan of Intel offensive on the mobile fronts, then graphically it looks like this.



The Medfield platform in high-performance smartphones and Android tablets in 2013 will replace CloverTrail +. Budget smartphones will be based on Lexington. This is, so to speak, the near term. In the more distant, the transition to the 22-nm process technology and the increase in the number of cores in the new generation of processors (and more precisely, SoC) Merrifield / Bay Trail. Powerful tablets and hybrid devices-transformers will be outsourced to Intel Core i3 / i5 / i7 processors with reduced power consumption.
Let's compare now the characteristics of the current Medfield smartphones with their followers on Clover Trail +.

	Medfield phone	Clover Trail + Phone
CPU	Intel Atom Z2480 up to 2.0 GHz	Intel Atom Z2580 to 2.0 GHz
Technical process	32 nm	32 nm
Kernels / Threads	1/2	2/4
Memory	1 GB LPDDR2 @ 400 MHz (max. 2 GB)	Up to 4GB LPDDR2 @ 1066 MT / s / 800 MT / s
Graphics	SGX 540 @ 400 MHz	SGX 544MP2 @ 533 MHz / 544MP2 @ 400 MHz
Cellular network	Intel XMMTM 6260 (HSPA + 21 MB / s / HSUPA 5.76 MB / s)	Intel XMMTM 6360 (HSPA + 42 Mb / s) / LTE upgrade
Internal storage	16 GB NAND (max. 64 GB)	16 GB NAND (max. 64 GB)
Camera	8 megapixels. with AF / LED flash, video recording 1080p30, 1.3 megapixels. frontal	16 megapixels. with AF / LED flash, video recording 1080p30, 2 megapixels. frontal
Battery	1460 mAh, 5.4 Wh, 3.7 V	2000 mAh, 7.6 Wh, 7.6 V
Supported OS	Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)	Android 4.1 / 4.2 (Jelly Bean)

What benefits do these and other changes promise users? We list the main positions:

• Dual-core processor with HyperThreading versus single-core - improved performance in parallelizable applications;
• Dual-core GPU - triple graphics performance boost;
• 533 MHz dual-channel LPDDR2 memory versus 400 MHz - improved system performance;
• Improved video decoder - support for MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, VC-1, WMV-9, VP6, hardware acceleration HTML5;
• Improved Wi-Di - WFA Miracast support for improved compatibility, additional gaming mode with reduced latency;
• Improved content protection - support for DRM Widevine (Google), Playready (Netflix) and Mediavault (Warner Bros.);
• Improved navigation - support for GLONASS;
• New modem options and improved energy efficiency - DC-HSPA + (6360), LTE (7160), reduced power consumption compared to 6260;
• Energy efficiency of other subsystems - including video and audio;
• Improved camera - in addition to the one mentioned in the table above, it is autofocus, no delay when taking pictures, face detection and much more.

One of the children's diseases of smartphones on the Intel platform was their incomplete compatibility with a number of Android applications, primarily multimedia ones. What is the situation with this now? Without exception, all Dalvik applications run on the Atom “as is” - each system that is being prepared for exit undergoes a special test. Native Android applications (NDK) should also work normally under Intel, however, if they are simply recompiled for x86, the speed of work will increase markedly. Much of this issue depends on the developers themselves; for example, if an application uses specific ARM functions, to correctly execute it under x86, you need to add equivalent functions from the SSE set. To help developers in this matter, Intel has a special automatic translator from ARM NEON to Intel SIMD .
As for the top-end applications from the Android Market, Intel is sure to check their work on a single-piece basis on its platform. This also applies to navigation applications - they are given special attention. Also, developers can hope to help Intel in optimizing their programs.
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If we talk about development tools , then there are also certain advances. The Android SDK now adds support for the x86 platform - just install the x86 image of the system in the SDK manager. In addition, significantly (up to 4 times) accelerated execution of Android applications in the emulator through the use of Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager, which uses the VT virtualization technology of Intel processors. By the way, VT support is now available in Linux. Finally, to test the application on the phone, Intel provides a free tool to optimize the performance and power consumption of the program - Intel GPA System Analyzer . The utility in real time draws graphs of CPU metrics, graphics API, graphics core and power, which allows you to correctly profile your program.


Intel GPA System Analyzer

Intel’s work on optimizing Android for its platform can be easily measured in facts and figures. Such, for example: Intel has made the largest number of external changes among the external participants in the Android 4.2 code.
Or here's another result: the company has prepared more than 750 patches for the WebKit web engine (the second result after Google). Now the creation of new cross-platform tools and development tools is in full swing.

With the release of the new Atom processors, life will definitely be more fun.