Intel Inside Your Phone: Part II

Fifteen months ago I reported the Intel - based mobile phone presented at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress 2012 was the top news from the show. At least for me. But it somehow went unnoticed. Playing with the phone I was amazed by the speed it offered. I could not test the power drain and was expecting it to be much higher than the average of the ARM-based competitors crowd.

Last week I read the test / teardown report by ABI Research. ABI tested the Lenovo K900, the 5.5 inch "phablet" powered by 2GHz Clover Trail + Z2580 Intel processor. This was the original Lenovo phablet design I mentioned back in 2012, but upgraded from Medfeld to Clover Trail+.

And obviously the news is not the speed of the Intel processor, outperforming the rest. The news is the Intel chip won the race consuming only HALF the power the competitors did. And this is huge news. This simply means Intel can take the smartphone and tablet market by storm. Especially the most lucrative premium segment, the iPhone 6, the iPad 5, the Samsung Galaxy 5, the Samsung Note III and the already confirmed Clover Trail+ - based Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Two weeks ago I debated the future of ARM versus Intel race favoring ARM due to its near monopoly in integrated low power processors Internet of Things market. But as ARM moves down to the turf occupied previously by other 16-bit cores, so does Intel: from PCs down to phones and tablets. Such moves are possible now because the software base migrated from the low level machine language up to at least C / C++ (which is portable across platforms) and  API (or an Operating System) is more important than the machine-level instruction set. This I speak from my own experience: our WiHo.me IoT middleware platform relies on Linux but can be compiled for either x86 or ARM, without any special effort. Android has x86 builds too and most apps are written in Java, meaning the machine architecture is irrelevant. The iOS runs on ARM but I am more than certain Apple has internal / experimental x86 builds too. They know how to switch platforms. Last time they did this moving from PowerPC to Intel was a very well prepared and smooth move.

So the software is already available. Hardware is too. It does not require much to imagine every major smartphone player (Samsung, Apple) must have Intel-based designs in their labs. And if they see the results ABI Research has shown us, they will rush out to start the assembly lines making the more powerful and less power hungry devices. After all there is never a speed that satisfies us enough. Nor the battery life we would not want to have longer. Smartphones are the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) today. We keep on replacing them every couple of months. We are talking about the market of 1 Billion devices. It is hard to imagine a higher stake...