Lenovo IdeaTabs Shown Off with Krait, Tegra 3, and Atom
by Jarred Walton on January 10, 2012 3:35 AM ESTTablets can be found everywhere at CES, and not just with the manufacturers—it’s hard to swing a mouse by the cord without hitting someone starting at their tablet. Like all the major OEMs, Lenovo is ready to throw its hat into the tablet ring, and they had numerous new tablets on display. The IdeaTab S2110 was one of the more interesting tablets on hand, sporting a new dual-core Qualcomm 1.5GHz 8x60a/8960 “Krait” processor, the follow up to Qualcomm’s successful Scorpion architecture. (Recall that unlike many ARM licensees, Qualcomm licenses the instruction set with the right to make their own architecture; Scorpion was roughly their equivalent to the Cortex-A8, and Krait is their riff on the Cortex-A15.)
We didn’t have a chance to run any benchmarks, but the S2110 was shown running Ice Cream Sandwich. Other than the SoC, the S2110 is very similar to the original ASUS Eee Pad Transformer; it’s a tablet with a keyboard dock that includes additional battery power. Build quality was more in line with the original Transformer as opposed to the new Eee Prime Transformer, and Lenovo quotes battery life of up to 24 hours with the keyboard dock.
Another tablet being shown is the IdeaTab K2010, also running ICS but this time with a Tegra 3 SoC. There’s no keyboard dock this time, but the K2010 does offer full size USB, HDMI, and SD card slots. It also has four speakers located around the display bezel. Not to be outdone by the other SoCs, Intel also has a showing at Lenovo with the K2110, once more running ICS. The interesting thing is that this is the first time we’ve seen ICS running on an x86 platform, with the Atom Z2460 filling the processor role. Other tablets on display used a variety of SoCs and came in screen sizes ranging from 5” to 10”, but the above three were arguably the most interesting of the bunch.
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aNYthing24 - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
I'm sorry, but the Krait architecture is more similar to the Cortex-A15, not the A9.lonathe - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
just to add:the commonly circulated figures are:
Cortex-A9：2.5MIPS/MHz
Krait：3.3MIPS/MHz
Cortex-A15：3.5MIPS/MHz
However considering that snapdragon doesn't seem to have target clocks of >2GHz until 2013, it looks like the cortex guys win again.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Sorry, you'll have to forgive me for being a bit sleepy when I wrote this. I've corrected the error and been sufficiently flogged for my inability to get the architecture names right. :-)aNYthing24 - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
The advantage Krait has over the A15 is the time it'll be out.french toast - Sunday, January 15, 2012 - link
Thanks Jarred! thats what i love about this site, feedback and not too arrogant not to admit mistakes and change. good stuff.LONATHE; you miss the point, clockspeed has got nothing to do with architecture which is what he was comparing.
Also the dmips numbers are not accurate numbers as they are only in cache, when it misses cache it comes down to other parts of the architecture.
By all accounts performance should be very competitive between Krait/A15, with the Krait able to be smaller and more power efficient.
Also the clock speed advantage you suggest doesn't make sense anyway as Qualcomm will have quad core Kraits out this year at 2ghz and 2.5ghx early 2013...cortex a15's will only come in duel core (with a couple of low power companion cores) on any road map.
Krait will be as/nearly as fast, more power effiecent, smaller, come in quadcore config and has time to market advantage.
french toast - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
You are contradicting your own site..the Krait is comparable to cortex a-15s not A9s.Thats what Anand said anyway.
Aries1470 - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Yeah, at last, something to excite me in this form factor. An x86 SoC.1st thing to come to mind, DUAL BOOT.
Yeah, for most people, they will just look over it, but I have been using the "humble" Atom 330 1.6 GHz, with 4GiB of mem, it is more than adequate.
Can't wait to see if it will be done by Lenovo, or some others that will 'hack' the system to make it dual boot. Full Win 7/ 8 and ICS on the one system. I guess when it goes to Win they battery will suffer alot.
Still, exciting products.