Anandtech Review: Lava Xolo X900, 1st Intel Medfield Phone

[smartpatrol]

Looks impressive, but I think its going to have to same problem as nVidia's Tegra; ie. Who is Intel going to partner with?

Samsung is going to use their own Exynos SoCs.
HTC is pretty firmly in Qualcomm's camp.
Motorola has been pretty much TI exclusive.
Even Apple has invested heavily into designing their own SoCs.

And those are all of the major players in the smartphone game right now.

From an Ars article by Jon Stokes a year ago:

[Intel will]make its own mobiles, desktops, TVs, and other CE devices, and give away all that work as a set of "reference designs" to phone and consumer electronics makers like HTC and Samsung. These OEMs would take Intel's products, wrap them in some industrial design, and target them at different price points. This is by far the most likely direction that Intel is going to move in, because it already is doing this with different kinds of mobile and consumer electronics products (Smart TV being an example of the latter).

Under this second scenario, Intel becomes basically a mobile device and consumer electronics company that's attached to a giant set of fabs. OEMs would buy fully made, market-ready products from Intel and then tailor them with varying degrees of engineering and design in order to get some differentiation; the OEMs would then sell these products to consumers, who wouldn't really know or care whether there was an Intel or an ARM chip inside them.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-riscification-of-x86.ars

That could be pretty enticing for smaller players looking to get into the smartphone market. Also, didn't Motorola already announce they would use Intel SOCs in future smartphones?

 

[Jodell88]

I'm having dreams of Intel powered Open WebOS phones.

 

[theeedude]

What's the performance like on binary translated apps?

 

[Mopetar]

Good performance, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, I know it's been generally said that Apple devices get good battery life, but holy crap do those normalized charts really make it look staggering.

 

[dagamer34]

Good performance, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, I know it's been generally said that Apple devices get good battery life, but holy crap do those normalized charts really make it look staggering.

It's the only OS running code without a virtual machine. Windows Phone and especially Android hide this with more powerful CPUs.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Good performance, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, I know it's been generally said that Apple devices get good battery life, but holy crap do those normalized charts really make it look staggering.

This particular phone does have a small battery, Medfield itself looks to be as efficient as OMAP4 which is excellent news for Intel.

It's kind of a shame we won't see these on WP7, if Microsoft wanted single cores only Medfield is certainly the way to do it.

 

[lothar]

Looks impressive, but I think its going to have to same problem as nVidia's Tegra; ie. Who is Intel going to partner with?

Samsung is going to use their own Exynos SoCs.
HTC is pretty firmly in Qualcomm's camp.
Motorola has been pretty much TI exclusive.
Even Apple has invested heavily into designing their own SoCs.

And those are all of the major players in the smartphone game right now.

Motorola is an Intel partner now.

 

[stormkroe]

Good performance, but the battery life leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, I know it's been generally said that Apple devices get good battery life, but holy crap do those normalized charts really make it look staggering.

I'd love to see the new Ipad in those normalized battery chart. That car battery would drag down the numbers a bit

 

[Insomniator]

I like it, I like the screen and the performance looks very good!

Always excited for a new (capable) contender.

 

[epidemis]

Looks like ARM's got some competition. I can see Apple switching to Intel if Intel can get their GPU performance up.

I think you are wrong. Intel not only needs to to provide an equivalent processor. They need to hit it out of the park in order to entice manufactures to adopt. What you have now is just "meh" processor with compatibility issues.

 

[MrX8503]

I think you are wrong. Intel not only needs to to provide an equivalent processor. They need to hit it out of the park in order to entice manufactures to adopt. What you have now is just "meh" processor with compatibility issues.

Intel doesn't have to beat ARM in its first iteration. Intel is within striking distance when people thought it was impossible. Give it a few years and Intel could possibly do to ARM what it did to AMD.

 

[Oyeve]

Looks impressive, but I think its going to have to same problem as nVidia's Tegra; ie. Who is Intel going to partner with?

Samsung is going to use their own Exynos SoCs.
HTC is pretty firmly in Qualcomm's camp.
Motorola has been pretty much TI exclusive.
Even Apple has invested heavily into designing their own SoCs.

And those are all of the major players in the smartphone game right now.

Intel can partner with whoever it wants to. They do have some clout.

 

[sontin]

Intel doesn't have to beat ARM in its first iteration. Intel is within striking distance when people thought it was impossible. Give it a few years and Intel could possibly do to ARM what it did to AMD.

Intel is even with a ARM design which is nearly two years old. Tegra 2 was the first A9 SoC on the market - August 2010! The first Tegra 2 smartphone was released in february 2011.

Medfield is on a smaller node but it's not faster or needs less power. Intel has a very long way to overtake ARM.

 

[podspi]

Don't forget Lenovo! They aren't a big player in the US (and I have no idea how important they are outside of the US in mobile), but they have brand recognition.

Plus, I'm more interested in these CPUs for tablets. The 22nm redesign + shrink (I guess tick-tock is going out the window for Atom) might be quite potent...

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Intel is even with a ARM design which is nearly two years old. Tegra 2 was the first A9 SoC on the market - August 2010! The first Tegra 2 smartphone was released in february 2011.

Medfield is on a smaller node but it's not faster or needs less power. Intel has a very long way to overtake ARM.

What benchmarks are you looking at where it only matches Tegra 2? In Sunspider Medfield smoked both Tegra 3 and Krait and also beat Krait in Browsermark despite being handicapped by Gingerbread in both of those tests. It also destroyed Exynos at everything but Flash and Exynos is far faster than Tegra 2.

The gpu isn't that great but that doesn't really matter since they can license whatever they need from PowerVR to be competitive on that front.

 

[MrX8503]

Intel is even with a ARM design which is nearly two years old. Tegra 2 was the first A9 SoC on the market - August 2010! The first Tegra 2 smartphone was released in february 2011.

Medfield is on a smaller node but it's not faster or needs less power. Intel has a very long way to overtake ARM.

What benchmarks are you looking at? Intel isn't far away according to Anand's review.

 

[sontin]

What benchmarks are you looking at? Intel isn't far away according to Anand's review.

Anandtech's benchmark suite is to small for a real conclusion. But i see software optimization as a huge advantage. Don't forget they used sunspider and browsermark for promoting Medfield a few months ago.

In Vellamo Medfield's 33% higher clock result in the 31% lead over the nexus.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Anandtech's benchmark suite is to small for a real conclusion. But i see software optimization as a huge advantage. Don't forget they used sunspider and browsermark for promoting Medfield a few months ago.

In Vellamo Medfield's 33% higher clock result in the 31% lead over the nexus.

Don't forget that the Nexus is dual core while Medfield is not.

 

[sontin]

Don't forget that the Nexus is dual core while Medfield is not.

But 2 logical "cores". And the speed improvement is much higher than with any other Intel CPU.

I don't see this as a problem in these benchmarks.

 

[preslove]

Apple only cares about the end result. If the end result is better performance while keeping battery life, Apple would make the switch. This happened when they went from PowerPC to Intel. If Apple could get a superior end result, they'll do whatever it takes to get there.

Uh... Apple employees quite a few chip engineers to work on their custom designed SOCs. They're not going to use off the shelf processors for the foreseeable future.

 

[preslove]

I think what might happen is smaller handset makers like Huawei, LG, etc. will start rebadging the intel reference designs as a way to more cheaply try to increase their presence in western markets.

YAY FOR HANDSET COMMODITIZATION!

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

I really, really like this phone... except for the manufacturer name and model. I mean seriously...?

But it ticks off all the right boxes for me. 4" 16:9 screen that, while not 720p, is a step-up from the 960x540 screens we're used to seeing 4" smartphones with. 1024x600 seems like a very good compromise. Also like the height, though I'd prefer if Intel would've made the bottom bezel smaller. If they did that, it'd be within striking distance of the iPhone when it comes to single-handed use.

Relative battery life is very good, but total only middle-of-the-pack because of the somewhat small 5.4Whr battery. 6Whr at least sounds fine.

The SoC itself shows a lot of promise. While it doesn't have two physical cores, it has a single-core with Hyper-Threading which would help a lot when you have multiple apps open and you want the phone to still be responsive. A very good architecture goes a long way, and the IPC on the Atom Z2460 seems to be one of the highest of current smartphone SoCs. The IGP isn't great, but I guess if Intel could get a PowerVR SGX543MP2 or its equivalent in there it'd be very competitive.

For me, this seems very near perfect. Just put a somewhat bigger battery in there, make the phone a bit less tall, up the CPU performance just a bit and put in a faster GPU and I'd buy it in a second. I wouldn't buy anything like the Galaxy Nexus; I personally think manufacturers are mad pushing 4.7" screens on us and making single-handed use for many people a mess. 4" seems so good if we could get a phone that has very little bezel.

Anyway, great job as now usual, Intel.

 

[MrX8503]

Anandtech's benchmark suite is to small for a real conclusion. But i see software optimization as a huge advantage. Don't forget they used sunspider and browsermark for promoting Medfield a few months ago.

In Vellamo Medfield's 33% higher clock result in the 31% lead over the nexus.

That's a pretty weak argument. Mobile devices don't have a robust benchmark suite and Anand states this time and time again. Medfield comes in at 2 or 3rd in all the CPU benchmarks. Not exactly "even" with Tegra 2 like you claim.

 

[lothar]

Anandtech's benchmark suite is to small for a real conclusion. But i see software optimization as a huge advantage. Don't forget they used sunspider and browsermark for promoting Medfield a few months ago.

In Vellamo Medfield's 33% higher clock result in the 31% lead over the nexus.

Your comparison begins with a false premise.
You can't compare different clock speeds on 2 vastly different SoC's and use that to draw conclusions about performance figures.

 

[theeedude]

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/26/how-well-does-intels-new-phone-work-as-a-phone/

Charlie said apps (games) natively compiled to ARM and ran with binary translation ran like crap.