Intel Admits ARM’s Method Is the Best One

During this year’s IDF event in San Francisco, California, Intel has clearly displayed the company’s new focus on mobile and low power technologies and computing solutions. Seeing just how bad its low power attempts behave in the face of ARM competition, Intel is now taking the British IP designer as an example.

The company’s Chief Technological Officer, Mr. Justin Ratner had a conversation with journalists from TheInquirer.net and commented on the concept as follows:

"The other kind of heterogeneity we have seen on the ARM side is general purpose processors but smaller, slower ones and larger, more powerful ones and moving the workloads around when there is more stuff to do - that is another area of interest for Intel. Obviously operating systems must help there. Most operating systems tend to think all the cores are the same, but they are not in that case."

The company is now thinking of integrating low-power in-order (IO) computing cores like Atom inside powerful x86 out-of-order (OOO) desktop processors like Haswell or Broadwell, The Inquirer reports. We’re glad Intel is finally admitting that their solution is not really the best one available and we can only hope that the company will give up the huge prices of its new Clover Trail platform. In our opinion, you’re free to overprice your product as much as you like, but make sure it offers the best performance and features before you do. Haswell will be available in 10W implementations next year already.

As a 9W Atom is maybe ten times slower, we don’t really see Intel’s possible approach bringing impressive results anytime soon, but it’s good to see that, at least from ARM, some really tough competition is now available. On the other hand, AMD is also getting ready with some heterogeneous solutions that integrate ARM cores inside AMD’s Fusion APUs and the company is already working on this for quite some time now.

Intel Atom Low Power Processors
Image credits to gizmodo

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