Phone will launch in UK, France, Germany, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico to start with.
If you can cast your mind back to the week before the iPhone 5 announcement, you might remember that it was a pretty big week for the mobile industry. Between new Kindles, new Lumias and a new Motorola Droid Razr M, we definitely weren't short of devices to talk about. However, for all the newly announced gadgets we had to talk about, one that caught our attention was one that hadn't yet been announced. When asked about availability for the United Kingdom, a Motorola spokesperson said that the Droid Razr M would be coming to the UK but with an Intel processor under the hood.
Today, the company unveiled its brand new Intel-powered phone at an event in London. The company has called this device The RAZRi, though it is very similar to the just-announced Razr M. Packing a a 4.3-inch AMOLED display, an 8-megapixel camera with HDR and Android 4.0, the biggest difference is the Intel chip that's replacing the 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor in the Razr M. According to Intel, this Atom chip boasts a max clock speed of 2GHz.
Though Intel and Motorola mentioned nothing more specific than the beginning of October as far as availability is concerned, UK retailer Clove told us they expect first shipment in the first week of October. They also confirmed SIM-free price of £342 and already have the phone up for pre-order from their website.
"what instruction set does this atom have?"
x86
subasteve:
2 GHz? Sounds like they are using clock speed to make up for an IPC deficit. Doesn't bode well for battery life.
Nope! Just the opposite, in fact. The Atom outpaces the ARM designs by a wide margin and the Atom's FPU isnt crippled like in the ARM designs. We can expect FLOPS numbers in the GFLOPS range from Intel while ARM is still struggling to reach 1 GFLOP.
ARM has something to worry about.
what is a RARZ?
"what instruction set does this atom have?"
x86
subasteve:
2 GHz? Sounds like they are using clock speed to make up for an IPC deficit. Doesn't bode well for battery life.
Nope! Just the opposite, in fact. The Atom outpaces the ARM designs by a wide margin and the Atom's FPU isnt crippled like in the ARM designs. We can expect FLOPS numbers in the GFLOPS range from Intel while ARM is still struggling to reach 1 GFLOP.
ARM has something to worry about.
Last I checked, most of the Android stuff runs in Java. Intel chips shouldn't have a problem running most Android apps if that's true. There might need to be a minor emulation/translation layer or something like that for the little that isn't compatible Java code or some other clever trick(s), but it shouldn't be overly difficult to run Android on x86 CPUs with full compatibility. It is definitely possible, although I don't know for sure what method(s) would be used.
2016 we will have phones that can run BF3 at 1080p, calling it.
A wide margin? It's pretty small if none. Depending on the usage scenario, this is what you will get out of each architecture. If you want something done as close to real-time as you can, you cannot use x86 which only Intel supports.
This is like comparing a xbox360 to a ps3 cpu's.
At this point it all depends on the design and how well you utilize it on that one architecture you are targeting.
Excluding Apple's custom design, Medfield's integer performance per core per Hz meets or beats the best of ARM-compatible CPUs. If Medfield uses a modern FPU, then as JustPosting23 said, the difference in floating point performance could be huge. If this is a dual-core 2GHz model that also has Hyper-Threading, then it could easily compete with even the top quad-core or better ARM CPUs. Furthermore, you claim that things can't be done anywhere near real-time with x86 which is just plain wrong.
This is not like comparing a Xenon to a Cell. This Intel CPU and/or the Android version that it runs would be specifically designed to natively support ARM-based Android apps and would also need to be optimized for them to run them properly. That's also assuming that given the focus on Java code, the apps wouldn't run properly even without additional compatibility layers. The Cell and the Xenon have no such compatibility intended in their designs that I'm aware about.
That's extremely unlikely.
I am sorry to inform that you are incorrect. Android uses the Java with the Dalvik vm instead of the JVM.
Let me google it for you.
Dalvik is the process virtual machine (VM) in Google's Android operating system. It is the software that runs the apps on Android devices. Dalvik is thus an integral part of Android, which is typically used on mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers as well as more recently on embedded devices such as smart TVs and media streamers. Programs are commonly written in Java and compiled to bytecode. They are then converted from Java Virtual Machine-compatible .class files to Dalvik-compatible .dex (Dalvik Executable) files before installation on a device. The compact Dalvik Executable format is designed to be suitable for systems that are constrained in terms of memory and processor speed.
NDK is the native API, not the Java one. Most 3D games use NDK. Sure, it won't affect most apps.
Even for apps that aren't just Java or something like that, there could easily be compatibility in a wide variety of ways. All Android apps can be compatible if Intel makes appropriate designs and/or if Google's x86 Android is designed to translate the code as needed.
-SK
Perhaps, but they would most likely take a hit somewhere, either compute power, or the loss of x86-based native apps, or similar.
The CPU switch is because Intel decided that they wanted in on this market and they got some backing by Google. As for the heat and efficiency, we don't know about that yet.