Intel’s first LTE-capable Medfield smartphone chips are in the pipeline, along with multicore versions of the processor, with the first examples due before the end of 2012. Intel will be “shipping some LTE products later this year and ramping into 2013″ director of product marketing Sumeet Syal told TechCrunch, and in the meantime the company is working on fettling more Android apps to suit the x86 architecture.
That software hiccup could be a headache to Intel and its manufacturer partners, with devices like the freshly announced Motorola RAZR i unable to run certain software available through Google’s Play store. Google’s own Chrome browser, for instance, currently won’t work on the RAZR i, though Motorola has confirmed it should be functional by the time the midrange smartphone actually reaches the market.
“We’re not quoting any numbers” Syal says, “but the majority of all the apps we’ve tested work just fine.” The company’s team responsible for software has been working “constantly round the clock to make sure that all these apps work” and the number of compatible titles increases every day.
As for multicore, initially that will mean dualcore Medfield, with Intel not ready to talk about quadcore Atom processors for phones as yet. Intel, though, is in no great rush Syal insists, content with its hyper threading system that milks two threads out of a single core.
“You have to take a look at how many instructions per clock can the architecture handle — our belief is that others are throwing cores at the issue in terms of getting more performance. We make that determination based on our architecture so we felt very comfortable coming out with a single core dual-threaded for our first product, and as we’re able to get more and more performance in the right implementation of the architecture we believe putting in dual-core would be the right thing for our next generation product” Sumeet Syal, Intel
Timelines for the dualcore Medfield versions have not been revealed yet, and nor has Intel disclosed when the first Atom-based smartphones might arrive in the US.
Intel: LTE Medfield by end of 2012 plus dualcore incoming is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Both medics on the battlefield as well as army doctors can be said to be professional colleagues, although it is by no means a stretch of the imagination to figure out who has the more “exciting” operation theater to work in. Medics tend to be thrown into situations where wounded soldiers require urgent and immediate attention where a trained surgeon would come in handy, and said surgeon would be able to better do his job once he has gotten hold on the background of the injury and the subsequent medical details in order to dispense with the proper care. Apart from that, triaging multiple injuries in the field through the decision of who will ride the medevac first could be improved further if doctors at the field hospital have a better idea on what the wounded’s status is. This is why the US Army wants to develop a system which is capable of managing patient data from injury site to recovery, where it will include delivering live audio/video communication for medics in the field.
While Sprint might be late to the 4G LTE game (not that bad given that T-Mobile hasn’t rolled out their 4G LTE network yet), they have certainly wasted no time and in a recent report, the carrier has boasted that they have since managed to sell a total of 1 million 4G LTE devices. This was announced by Sprint’s CEO, Dan Hesse, who was speaking at a Goldman Sachs Communicopia Conference in New York. Some have speculated that Apple’s iPhone 5 might have helped Sprint hit that 1 million milestone but we have to admit that that’s a bit arrogant, especially given that the iPhone 5 has not yet been released.