Will Medfield be the chip Intel needs to take on ARM?
The modern smartphone market is dominated by chips based on the instruction set, and often designs, developed by British company ARM Ltd. In the early days of the smartphone, ARM's own ARM architecture had competition from the SuperH and MIPS architecture, but these long ago fell by the wayside: any Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone is ARM-powered.
ARM Ltd doesn't make processors itself; it just sells licenses to its designs and instruction set. The ARM processors used in modern smartphones come from a range of vendors, including Samsung, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm, with some manufacturers using ARM's own designs—notably the Cortex A8, A9, and, soon, A15.
Whether using an ARM Ltd design or not, a common feature of all these procesors is their extremely low power usage: idling at a few tens of milliwatts, drawing no more than about one watt at full power. ARM came to dominate the smartphone market through a combination of low power, (relatively) high performance, and small, highly integrated packages. The challenge for Intel was to produce a chip that could match the ARM processors on all three counts.
This was originally written by a Qt developer as an open source project. Oh, I almost forgot free software is not for Microsoft boosters. Apple's Objective C is hideous compared to using Java on Android or C++ with Qt. In spite of that Apple has some