Recently, we can see Intel’s aggressiveness in the ASUS ZenFone event that took place back last month in Indonesia. Today, Intel again hosted its Intel Mobility event here to introduce a range of products that runs on their SoCs.
This event isn’t exactly introducing a range of devices that runs off Intel’s processors, but more of a session to tell us about Intel’s commitment to strengthen partnerships with OEMs, ODMs while introducing a new range of SoCs this year to power more mobile devices. Intel’s country manager Prakash Mallya says that devices that computes and connects runs best on Intel’s processors, because they are going to play a very different game than other SoC makers out there with very much efficient Intel powered chips while maintaining the devices at an affordable price tag.
Mobile devices come in various screen sizes and form factors, every one of them comes with a unique purpose and there will be one device that will fit a user’s everyday computing needs.
Intel’s main partners currently include ASUS, Dell, and Lenovo, which the company will continue to support these companies in making much more innovative products. Furthermore, Intel has also decided to seek for new partners especially in China, where we can find many ODMs and OEMs that make great hardware in incredible form factors, while able to produce them in a mass volume.
While Android devices are considerably affordable in the market, Windows devices continue to be positioned at the mainstream and premium price point, Intel intends to grow the Windows entry level market by introducing much more affordable chips to manufacturers, those devices will be at the price point of USD $99-$129.
This year, Intel will introduce the SoFIA 3G, SoFIA LTE, Cherry Trail and Broxton platform to smart devices, which has an all new architecture with better power efficiency and performance.
The SoFIA 3G platform has been shipped and is the first Intel Atom processor integrated with leading global 3G modem and 64-bit ready, which means devices equipped with this chipset will be able to roam the world without any issues and can be paired with 4GB RAM and above.
LTE capable chips has also been introduced last year and supports up to 300Mbps, we still haven’t see devices with this chip yet though.
Intel hasn’t forget to mention their belief that they believe their chips don’t need that much of cores to have better performance as opposed to ARM chipsets, the trick to this is to double up the DRAM in the SoC itself.
Of course, Intel has performed benchmarks of its Bay Trail Atom processor against last year’s flagship SoCs, we will certainly get to the bottom of this when we get our ASUS ZenFone for review.
Intel Malaysia’s Channel Platform Manager Clifford Tan showed us a demo on how well a Bay Trail Intel Atom tablet is able to perform photo editing with ease and some amazing performance, though it is still considerably slower than the company’s Core processors.
And yes, the tablet is able to accomplish its task without crashing and the poor cat goes missing.
Intel also claims that any tablet that runs on the Clover Trail processor will be able to play graphics demanding games smoothly, on the screen is a game called Civilization, which we realize its really smooth.
Clifford also showed off how Intel’s WiDi wireless display technology is able to mirror videos to the screen with very minimal lag, though we still find the lag pretty obvious and this could be due to a low quality router. Intel’s WiDi technology is also compatible with the Miracast standard.
The Samsung GALAXY Note 3 gets slightly higher scores than an Intel Atom based smartphone, but Clifford stresses that the price point between a flagship ARM and Intel Atom powered smartphone is a massive difference.
Throughout the event, we learnt and understand Intel’s focus on mobile devices this year as the trend of mobile computing has increased, we hope to see new Intel powered devices with an amazing price tag and performance that other SoC makers aren’t able to give. Till then, we will save our judgement over Intel’s performance benchmark tests against ARM chips until we receive our very own ASUS ZenFone review unit coming very soon. Stay tuned.