Posts by LemmingO 8 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2013
A long long time ago, in a not-so-distant memory of things, one Intel veep said that their Mobile offering would only become truly competitive when they reached 14nm - that's where the power envelope of the x86 architecture would become manageable enough for mobiles. Until then, the company was well aware it had to bite the bullet as it wouldn't be able to ignore a market that big.
I'd hardly call the mobile chip biz at Intel "moribund".
The market is currently flooded with cheap quad-core Z3735/Z3745 Atom tablets, capable of running both Windows and Android (something people tend to forget - ARM can't manage that, because it's up to Microsoft to fully support Windows. Now, mobile phones, that's a whole different story. There are only a handful of Atom-based smartphones around but since devices still sell "by the spec", quad-core/octa-core 2GHz+ ARM devices are still the main draw.
If you're talking financials, maybe you should try interviewing stockholders at Intel and ask them what their expectations are instead of rehashing what world+dog has already published ... or at least get comment from stock analysts that might give the article something unique.
You gotta hand it to the bigwigs to recognise things for what they're not and being late to the game. I know that juxtapositioning "Apple" on anything will make the faithful converge on your stores, but honestly, I have never seen so much drivel said about the damn watch. I actually saw magazines print in big bold F-U letters, this Christmas, that the Apple Watch was the thing to buy for your loved ones. That's how deluded the media is.
Effing snap out of it, everyone.
The Moto 360 is probably the best design-meets-functionality-meets-aesthetics wearable out their right now, and it happened 5 months ago. That was the tipping point, that was the exact moment when half the industry facepalmed and recognised a buck could be made.
Even Glass - the "other" wearable that - for me - got the ball rolling on wearable technology, has been sidelined while faced with the onslaught of smartwatches.
So, summing up: a bunch of products that actually exist in our space-time continuum are simply whitewashed and discarded because of an unreleased toy?
*sigh* Faith in humanity NOT restored.
I fail to see what Warsaw brought to the table... in fact it seems no-one knows. For example, the AMD Opteron 6366HE is a 1.8GHz part with a higher turbo core speed (3.1GHz) , but some $20 cheaper and an 85W TDP. The new Opterons don't really feel new, do they?
So 6366HE vs. 6370P is 10% slower, 15% less power-hungry, but 25% faster in Turbo mode. It's also cheaper. They are both 16-core CPUs and use the same socket. What concealed architectural feature did AMD implement that will make us give a damn?
I find it amusing that there is this entire argument about 64-bit processing when the first real improvements won't be on "performance" but will actually be on "efficiency", and on a smartphone efficiency translates as power savings. That's all. Of course if Apple is in fact using a Cortex A53 dual-core processor with an attached Cortex-M3/M4, then they are just following common sense.
Apple did not disclose the amount of RAM on the iPhone 5S (we can safely presume 5C will be identical to the 5, ie: 1GB), but if all you are looking at is memory addressing then you're looking in the wrong place. A 64-bit processor like the A53 will bring with it some nice enterprise features, including virtualization, which is like the Pandora's Box of enterprise computing. If Apple can bridge iPhone and Macs properly, you've got a world of software possibilities at your fingertips.
What astounds me is that Apple hasn't really presented anything worthy of praise. They've taken concepts that have been around for a while and just repackaged with the iPhone brand value. It's worth a lot, but some time down the road, even the flock will start questioning the shepherd.
What Apple did:
Let's call it "C" for Colorful and we'll let people think "C" is for Cheap...( £469 is not cheap, or affordable). It's cheaper to make, no doubt, but it's definitely not affordable. On the other hand, let's up-price the 5S by a tenner and say it's 64-bit, that'll shut the techies up.
I have a dual-core 1.5GHz Windows Phone 8 with 512MB of RAM, FWIW. I'm ecstatic with it. It's cheap, it's cheerful and it DOESN'T slow down like my previous Android phones. I'm far from a Windows fanboi, but I recognise that you don't NEED to pay an arm and a leg to have better-than-iPhone kit.
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