On The Competition
TH: This now looks to be a catch-up race for Intel against ARM. Has Intel caught up? Or is it going to take one more generation? Either way, what’s the technical basis for your opinion?
TT: On power, if we take the top five smartphone designs and look at them on standby, video, browsing, and talk time using similar battery sizes, we are in the same range. On things like audio, we are actually showing in just one generation that we are better than the best ARM implementation out there. You can imagine where these numbers will go when we reach the next generation, Medfield, if we can make such dramatic improvements in our first smartphone product. So on power, bottom line, I would say we are competitive. We are not greater than them, we are competitive. On performance—compute, video, graphics, Web page downloads, and so on—we are at least 2x better across the board.
On integration, the ARM guys have a smaller number of chips than we do, right? We have two chips. Qualcomm Snapdragon, that would be one chip. But it doesn’t matter, because when I as a consumer go to buy a smartphone, I don’t ask how many chips it has. I look at how thin the design is and how long the battery life is.
The Aava Mobile design we showed is thinner and lighter than a BlackBerry Bold. So when we are able to deliver such small smartphones, the number of chips is irrelevant. And by the way, our cost structure is pretty damn good because of our process advantage. So, the grade I would give is we’re competitive on cost and integration, competitive on power, and our advantage is on performance. And obviously, you have to consider the x86 goodness on the software side.
Actually, to me its an understatement just to say 2x, because if you compare side by side, look at the Google or iPhone and how they deliver Web pages. Look at how fast we deliver. Look at the richness of the stuff on the devices, like all the Flash content. Then our graphics performance blows away all the benchmarks. By now, I presume you’ve seen first-hand that we are significantly faster than any of the other devices available in the marketplace today.
TH: [laughs] The competition doesn’t necessarily agree with your imminent dominance.
TT: No, but there is a lot of FUD out there. We see competitors comparing their tablet SKUs with our smartphone SKUs and comparing our netbook SKUs with their phone SKUs, right? That’s how sometimes they say their performance is higher or their power is better. If you do your own homework, you will find these apples to oranges comparisons.
Before we launched Moorestown and brought it public, the perception built up that we couldn’t cut it on power, right? We’ve now debunked this myth. You saw the actual absolute numbers, and they don’t lie. If we can hit 21 mW on standby, that gives you more than 10 days of standby battery life. Job done. If we can give you 48 hours of music—I don’t know many people who want to listen to music more than 48 hours continuously, but still—job done. If we can give you five hours of video time using the same size battery as the Blackberry Bold, we’re where we need to be. Is there a perception out there that Moorestown power will be high? Yes...because we haven’t shared the data until now.
