The recently released ASUS smartphone zenfone 2 has hit a new price/perf benchmark point with an MSRP of $199 but mid-high range specs:
-4G LTE
-Quadcore x86 processor
-5.5 inch IPS 1080P screen with gorilla glass
-2GB of RAM
-16GB storage
-3000 mAh battery
The low price is in part because Intel has been desperately trying to get a foothold in the mobile market and likely playing contra-revenue games. Unlike past low-cost options like the oneplus phone, this phone has wide release being sold at online retailers like Amazon.
Is this setting a new standard in low-cost, high-performance phones, or is this a temporary ploy until Intel starts charging for their SoCs? Will this lead to a price war between Mediatek, Qualcomm, and Intel? All of which have already released phones this year for the North American marketplace supporting the 4G spectrum. How low-priced can these smartphones with laptop-like specs go?
Reviewed here: http://anandtech.com/show/9251/the-asus-zenfone-2-review
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:51PM
The answer is that those extra features are a lot less wasteful than you think. Sure the instruction decoder has to be a little bigger, but compared to the rest of the chip it's such a tiny savings that it's not worth the effort. Internally, Intel processors convert x86 to processor-specific microcode and the conversion can take a slow path for rarely used instructions.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:37PM
if you support fewer instructions it's more tractable to implement them directly in circuitry, rather than in microcode. Were that the case the chip could be a lot faster.
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