Android will run better on our chips, says Intel
Sylvie Barak, EE Times -- EDN, January 18, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO—Intel Corp may have missed the smartphone boat the first time around, but the chip maker is determined not to let the opportunity set sail without it again, making its first big moves in ultra-mobility at last week's CES 2012.
Showing off a reference design smartphone and announcing partnerships with both Motorola Mobility Inc and Lenovo Ltd, Intel is determined to make its mark on mobile this coming year, starting with the Chinese market and then expanding out.
Spearheading Intel's efforts in the space is Mike Bell, a former Palm executive who also spent time at Apple working on the first iteration of the iPhone. Bell's official title is vice president and GM of Ultra Mobility, a role formed after the previous head of Intel's Ultra Mobility segment, Anand Chandrasekher left the firm last year.
Bell hopes to succeed where Chandrasekher failed by honing Intel's efforts with a singular focus on Google's Android operating system, a strategy he believes will catapult the chipmaker forward and even provide it with an edge on its previously untouchable competition—the ARM ecosystem.
Choosing Android as Intel's platform of choice for smartphones was a decision made owing to the sheer number of people in the ecosystem working on Android enablement, said Bell, noting that he believed Intel had the hardware to make Android "really shine."
Bell acknowledged that in the past Intel had focused on making chips more geared towards speed than power efficiency, but said this had been a choice rather than anything more fundamental.
Medfield, he said, would change all that, with the 32-nm SOC making huge strides in power efficiency, with Bell claiming it was as power efficient as any of its competition.
"We have chips that are just as power efficient as everyone else. At the same time, they're faster," he said adding that from a performance standpoint, Intel was really pushing the envelope.
"On standby time we're well within shouting distance of best in class, on some of the web benchmarks we smoke the competition, in some cases we're two, three, four times faster on some benchmarks. There's some we don't do as well on but honestly, with a Medfield based phone in your hand, the user experience is phenomenal. There's no downside, there's only upside," he said.
In order to succeed in smartphones this time around, Intel has seemingly gone all out in its effort to throw significant weight behind Android as a platform. Back in September the firm announced it had officially partnered with Google to create a highly optimized port of Android to its x86 chips, and Bell said Intel had also let loose its group of software engineers on the Android ecosystem to help developers make their apps run more seamlessly on Intel's platform.
"We've found people whose apps work fine, but in our testing we've found ways to make them faster or better, so we're helping to raise all the boats in the Android ecosystem by enabling those people to have a better product," he said.
Bell went on to note that Intel would be shipping out technology that would even allow applications developed for other hardware to run on Intel's x86 platform without modification.
"The user shouldn't have to care what the app was written for. For the most part, it will just run," he said, demoing a non-optimized, but smooth running version of Angry Birds to prove his point.
Intel; an Android "first class citizen"
The partnership with Google, said Bell, also makes Intel a "first class citizen" in the Android ecosystem, meaning that as new iterations of Android emerge, the corresponding Intel optimized versions will be released simultaneously.
"There shouldn't be a time lag between the availability of the various flavors of Android. We will be doing all the enablement work, so our partners can almost have a seamless experience getting their products to market," explained Bell.
To further help push its chips out into the mobile market, Intel is going an extra mile by building its own fully featured reference design smartphone to offer customers interested in becoming an Intel mobile partner. Partners can either adapt that reference design or use it as is, said Bell.
"It's almost doing it a disservice, calling it a reference design," Bell noted, saying the phone had fully passed Google's compliance tests and was undergoing carrier certification. "For all intents and purposes, you could sell this as a phone tomorrow," Bell noted.
The 10-mm phone does indeed boast every bell and whistle available on the market, from NFC to HDMI, to support for full 1080p video in a chassis just 10-mm thick. "This is a no excuses smartphone," said Bell, showing off the phone in a demo.
The reference design shown by Intel at CES sported an 8mp camera, but Bell said the chipset could support up to 16mp cameras, as well as a bevy of other features and a battery capable of all-day use. Similarly, the demo model was using Android Gingerbread, because it was slightly more optimized than Google's newer Ice Cream Sandwich at the moment.
"It's up to the vendor, up to our partners, to pick what parts go into their design. We'll help them with that. But we're not dictating what people have to ship," he said, noting that Intel had no interest in controlling the specs of the phones their chips were eventually used in. "We think people will largely adopt what we've done, but it's really up to them," he added.
At the end of the day, said Bell, Intel's foray into smartphones would be successful based on positive customer experience. "We believe that the user experience is really what it's all about," he said, positing that the only way Intel could really differentiate its product in the market was to deliver something better or different than its competition.
"Different is not just a spinny, 3D globe UI or some sort of tacky eye candy," he noted, "it's something that fundamentally makes the user experience better."
Intel, he said was investing heavily to help its partners come up with that differentiation, building on the already powerful Android ecosystem.
"The nice thing about Android is that the ecosystem already exists and it's an open platform, we have the full source code. There's no reason why we can't add capabilities to our flavor of it and maintain Google compatibility at the same time," he said.
Indeed, much of the work that went into Intel's failed MeeGo experiment is now purportedly being moved over to what's being called Tizen, the firm's latest open source effort.
"There's no reason we can't take the best pieces of that and integrate it in with our Android offerings," Bell added.
Despite the clear, streamlined vision, however, it will take more than a reference design and a partnership with Lenovo in China to make Intel a success in mobile.
Analysts at CES were quick to note it was still the early days for the chip giant in a market it has been attempting to penetrate for some 20 years. Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, many said, would be the true test of Intel's success in persuading partners it was a serious player, and with that show just over a month away, we may not have long to wait to see if Bell and his team can deliver on their vision.
Check out the full interview with Bell here.
This story was originally posted by EE Times.
