Tom's Talks Moorestown With The Father Of Centrino

[Guest]

With its new Atom platform, Moorestown, Intel has made a lot of exciting claims and hinted at significant changes in our computing future. All good stuff, but we need more answers. To find them, we sat down with Intel’s godfather of ultra-mobility.

Tom's Talks Moorestown With The Father Of Centrino : Read more

 

[whitecrowro]

"Why are we all here today? What is the meaning of Moorestown?
Ticky Thakkar: Our vision was to.."
- pardon me, but all this naming sound like a Star Trek interview, on Tau Cygna (M class planet in Orion Nebula).

 

[cmcghee358]

It would be nice to see Intel take a jab at discrete desktop graphics. If anything just to provide more competition for the consumer.

 

[liquidsnake718]

It would be nice to see that Zune HD ver 2.0 or even 3.0 with an updated Moorestown and a better Nvidia chip than the ion or ion2, with capabilities of at least 2.0ghz and 2gb of ram all the size of the zune.... imagine with 48hours on music, and 5 hours of video, this will only get larger as time goes by.... hopefully in a year or a year and a half we can see some TRUE iphone competition now with the new windows mobile out! We just need more apps

 

[Onus]

It never occurred to me to want an iPhone, but I definitely see one of these in my future.

 

[matt314]

[citation][nom]cmcghee358[/nom]It would be nice to see Intel take a jab at discrete desktop graphics. If anything just to provide more competition for the consumer.[/citation]
...discrete desktop graphics is a pretty niche market. Without any experience in the field or specialized engineers, it would cost them alot of money in R&D, and they would not be able to beat ATI or nVidia (neither in performance nor sales)

 

[cknobman]

Maybe its just me but I read the entire thing and Mr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar came off as a arrogant ********.

 

[Onus]

[citation][nom]cknobman[/nom]Maybe its just me but I read the entire thing and Mr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar came off as a arrogant dickhead.[/citation]
Merely disagreeing with you doesn't merit a "thumbs-down," but I didn't get that impression. Confidence, maybe; his experience no doubt backs that up, but I didn't find him arrogant. I liked how he called BS on the FUD.

 

[zodiacfml]

I read his comments carefully and found that those were carefully chosen words. Confidence is very much needed to get the support everyone while remaining factual.

In summary, I expect their device to be better performing than anything else in the future at the expense of a huge and heavy battery to power the Atom and the Huge screen making use of excess performance.

[citation][nom]cknobman[/nom]Maybe its just me but I read the entire thing and Mr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar came off as a arrogant dickhead.[/citation]

 

[cjl]

[citation][nom]zodiacfml[/nom]I read his comments carefully and found that those were carefully chosen words. Confidence is very much needed to get the support everyone while remaining factual.In summary, I expect their device to be better performing than anything else in the future at the expense of a huge and heavy battery to power the Atom and the Huge screen making use of excess performance.[/citation]
Did you read the article? One of the points raised was that the battery life should be just fine, contrary to many people's assumptions.

 

[eyemaster]

He knows his product, the targets to meet and what they have accomplished. I'm sure they experimented on competing devices too. The man knows that they have a great product in their hands right now that beats all the others. That makes him confident, not arrogant.

 

[noob2222]

TT: We’ve added graphics capability that includes both vertex and floating point, as well as the rendering capabilities increasing. But you have to really look at system-level performance. The key thing there is whether we provide enough bandwidth capability to the graphics accelerator. Because if you don’t, most of these things will get choked right where you need the bandwidth. Balancing system throughput is key. Look at our memory subsystem and design internally. We put in a lot of energy in there to make sure we have a very effective bandwidth, not just for the CPU but also for the accelerator. Unfortunately, I can’t go into more details than that at this point.

Otherwise "our GPU will still suck, but the CPU will be faster making the GPU seem faster"
If they can make a phone with a sliding panel to enlarget the screen, that would be cool. Putting a laptop to your ear to make a call makes me laugh.

 

[Guest]

I'm interested in the newer Atom platform!
Too bad Windows is dependent on the PCIE bus. Perhaps it would be possible to have a windows patch that could re-rout the PCIE bus to whatever bus the mobile device has replaced it with!
That way you'd be able to run windows on this mobile device, and you could lower the power consumption of an Atom processor system even further!

 

[Guest]

[citation][nom]ProDigit80[/nom]Too bad Windows is dependent on the PCIE bus. Perhaps it would be possible to have a windows patch that could re-rout the PCIE bus to whatever bus the mobile device has replaced it with![/citation]
Or perhaps a null driver.

 

[JonnyDough]

Maybe connectivity’s not available or, if you’re traveling abroad, for example, that connectivity may be very expensive. Our view is that you want to do as much as possible on the handset and then use the cloud. Connectivity is going to be king for this class of mobile devices, but you don’t want to depend on it to do your work.

I'm surprised he didn't mention SECURITY, as this is usually a #1 issue with the idea of cloud computing.

 

[ta152h]

x86 isn't going anywhere on phones. It's too inefficient, and there is already an established base. They ran into the same thing with Larrabee when they tried to move x86 to GPUs.

They'll get shut down again.

 

[Guest]

Yeah, this is what Intel does best... If you can't use your dominance to win (or at least stifle) the competition, just spin a complete loss into a victory. ARM is 100% superior in this form factor, period. x86 still uses too much power, it's only advantage is that it can run Windows. Anybody who's kept up with various Linux OS for the past couple of years realizes that Windows compatibility just isn't much of an advantage anymore.

 

[amnotanoobie]

Would love to see what they could do with the Atom with the lessons they learned on this one.

With the netbook cannibalization, might it be that they have just made new customers that wouldn't have bought a full-blown notebook anyway?

 

[elel]

This sounds cool, but the release that I am really looking forward to is buldozer.

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom]x86 isn't going anywhere on phones. It's too inefficient, and there is already an established base. They ran into the same thing with Larrabee when they tried to move x86 to GPUs. They'll get shut down again.[/citation]

Nofrom what I can see. This CPU delivers more performance and at about the same power envelope as most UMDs out there. So whats the loss?

And besides, while Atom is based in x86 it is nothing like standard x86 CPUs.

 

[ordcestus]

[citation][nom]matt314[/nom]...discrete desktop graphics is a pretty niche market. Without any experience in the field or specialized engineers, it would cost them alot of money in R&D, and they would not be able to beat ATI or nVidia (neither in performance nor sales)[/citation]
They certainly won't try again anytime soon. of course the discrete graphics market has maybe 20 years left and then they'll be like sound cards where the motherboard has an integrated one thats great already

 

[ta152h]

[citation][nom]jimmysmitty[/nom]Nofrom what I can see. This CPU delivers more performance and at about the same power envelope as most UMDs out there. So whats the loss?And besides, while Atom is based in x86 it is nothing like standard x86 CPUs.[/citation]

It's actually got the same handicap as all modern x86 processors. It doesn't execute x86 instructions. It's got decoders that create RISC like instructions that can then be executed.

The downside is obvious and two-fold. One, you waste power, and space on these decoders. Power is really important in this space, and so is heat generation. The other is you lower performance, because you length the pipeline and do no real work (compared to a real RISC processor) with these stages, so you increase the branch mis-predict penalty.

x86 compatibility isn't important on a phone. It's not enough to overpower the inefficiencies of this terrible instruction set.

 

[TexasTrash]

The netbooks were selling too well, so Intel limited Atom sales 10.1 and smaller displays.
I love my Asus Atom netbook with 11.6" screen and 6-cell battery. For surfing and mail I used to pay $1100 for a crappy Dell computer which always broke after 18 months.
I also use a Acer Revo 3610 with dual Atoms and Windows 7 Media Center as a free DVR along with the HDHomeRun dual Ethernet Off-the-Air tuners. Its free and low power, and goes to sleep while not in use.

 

[lejay]

[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom]It's actually got the same handicap as all modern x86 processors. It doesn't execute x86 instructions. It's got decoders that create RISC like instructions that can then be executed.The downside is obvious and two-fold. One, you waste power, and space on these decoders. Power is really important in this space, and so is heat generation. The other is you lower performance, because you length the pipeline and do no real work (compared to a real RISC processor) with these stages, so you increase the branch mis-predict penalty. x86 compatibility isn't important on a phone. It's not enough to overpower the inefficiencies of this terrible instruction set.[/citation]

You can talk all you want, but if intel is reaching the right power envelope, then that's what they're doing...

 

[Guest]

You mentioned that netbook sales cannibalize higher price notebook sales, and I've heard it many places before. When you spend $1000 for a notebook, you're going to keep it a lot longer than a $300 netbook before upgrading.

My point is: this year's notebook sales cannibalize the next 2-4 year's notebook sales. That's not the case if you replace your netbook every 12-24 months. Intel sells 1 high priced chip every 4 years or 2-3 low priced chip during that same time frame.