Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

Just to further expand on the contra revenue / turnkey program, which was very obviously why Jolla, Nokia and others chose Intel for their tablets ...

Intel lost $4.2b in the mobile / tablet space in 2014. That is how gross the market distortion is and how determined they are to (anti)compete. They even managed to register negative revenue in Q4.

Even if the Jolla Tablet is great (which I doubt at launch) and glossing over Intel's many other unsavoury aspects, for this reason there's no way I'll be buying one.

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

- Intel's TurnKey
- Strong GPU
- Possibility to port Jolla Tablet OS to other Win8 Tablets
- Documentation (unlike RockChip, AMLogic, MediaTek)
- Less proprietary bits? (than Tegra chips)

All I know is, if it works... don't fix it.
Then again you never know, maybe it would've been better going with a Snapdragon 800 (or newer).

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

Only the first point is relevant. AFAIK the whole tablet project was opportunistic - plans weren't long-standing, they just jumped on it when they realised tablet hardware in general was quite cheap and Intel were offering even small players some sweet, sweet subsidies.

Re: Documentation, the devs at Jolla only appeared to find out or realise that it uses UEFI BIOS some time after the deal had been done and after the launch ... whilst I'd put that down to naiveté, they hinted in the blog post that they were having some difficulty discovering or finding documentation for how a lot of stuff works. I seriously doubt if Mediatek's rampant success of late is in spite of poor documentation for partners (for general public is another).

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

That is probably a big part of the reason. I do not think that is bad anyway.

Also, from a user/hacking point of view, it opens possibilities. The tablet is likely able to boot a desktop distribution from a pen drive/microsd in case of need. The screen is probably small for this use case, and a "Brazil" type contraption may be needed*, but it could still be useful, or fun to try.

If you think it would be nice, please vote for my question:


https://together.jolla.com/question/...crosdpendrive/

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

Of course it's opportunistic, but it might also be long-standing. New Atom's are actually quite good chips and during this year Atom's will have integrated LTE-modems, so I wouldn't be surprised if second handset is loaded with one. AFAIK such move would also enable worldwide support and distribution as Intel's LTE modems are "universal". Add in subsidies and there should be another opportunity to get good HW and support for decent price, which should help Jolla in competition - as we already know, Jolla phone has been criticized for being expensive for that HW.

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

The chipset is also a gigantic package and remains extremely power hungry in comparison to pretty much any of the ARM family. This requires a very large phone usually, and a huge battery. It also has extremely weak on chip image and video processing, amongst a host of other issues. There's also the fact that even with the huge subsidies and 'marketing' money, it remains hugely uncompetitive in price on mobile. I'd be shocked if there aren't issues with the modem or drivers / firmware for it too, as it'll be their first one.

If this is the 'reference platform' Saarnio mentioned with regard to supposed partnerships, it'll never see widespread adoption among any quality Chinese OEMs and would go down like a lead balloon. It'd also eliminate any synergy / time saving with the libhybris work that has gone into and continues to go into Mediatek (and other ARM) chipsets for Ubuntu Phone.

Also, with regard to their security first mantra ... is anyone ever going to believe that, having a device with an integrated Intel mobile modem?

Actually, UEFI is a major problem for an open device. It was designed from the ground up to shut out third party software / OSes / ROMs. Indeed, if you can recall, in the run up to its launch on desktop, there was a great deal of worry that it would be impossible to install non MS operating systems on systems shipped with it preinstalled. This was the intention, but they backed down due to the storm that erupted. For a mobile platform that wants to be open or have an unlocked bootloader, they're going to need to disable a lot of the UEFI features (and certainly much of the security), from what I understand. It was originally meant to only work with OSes that provided a secure, approved key. This is why Jolla are "making no promises" on this front for the tablet.

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

@mikelima @JurraHerra A friendly reminder - you're just feeding a troll that will take no logical arguments, so you might as well give up (you'll always get a "this is a huge problem; they are doomed; I hope I'm wrong, but I think that they doing all this on purpose, to be evil" kind of response).
Plus you are quoting his posts for those who came to the conclusion that it is better to ignore it.

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

Yes I get the idea, generally you want to try to starve dem trollies..

However I just got to know;

How does this make a device any more unsafe than using integrated Qualcomm modems, given the history of the company???

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

What the f*ck are you talking about? First and foremost, UEFI is actually about interoperability, and most definitely not about "shutting out third party software". Plenty of the stuff it does (e.g. searching for ESP partitions on all media instead of hardcoded, defining a portable bytecode for running firmware from extension cards, etc.) clearly shows they really didn't have security in mind, and instead they were trying to create something unified even between different ISAs (at that point, Itanium and x86; today, possibly ARM and x86).

"in the run up to its launch on desktop" most UEFI BIOSes there was certainly absolute NO worry about running other OSes, if only because most if not ALL UEFI BIOSes back then shipped with the CSM aka "old BIOS compatibility mode".

I don't understand which Jolla feature they would need to disable from UEFI. And the fact that Jolla doesn't want to disable any of the "security" features is Jolla's decision, as has been argued many times (by me -- a lot -- and others).

UEFI is actually good for interoperatibility, because at least it provides a (minimal) bootloader<->OS API, which guarantees that even a stupid hobbist like me can probably run a HelloWorld-like OS.

You are most probably confusing the concepts of UEFI and "Secure Boot", which was an idea that appeared relatively much more recently.

There was indeed a backslash more or less by the time, and that's because Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, mandated Win8-logo ARM devices to have a locked-down UEFI bootloader.

Guess what. A locked-down bootloader has nothing to do with UEFI or x86. ARM was there much earlier. The concept of a "locked bootloader" is something that is so common on ARM that we basically assume that every device one can buy will have a locked bootloader -- or even no bootloader at all. That is a concept that is still tremendously alien for me and the reason I see everyone who argues 'locking down a bootloader improves security' with slight disdain.

Microsoft actually WENT and released a Win8 ARM device with a locked bootloader -- the Surface RT 1 & 2. I pity everyone who actually bought one of those two stupidly crapped devices instead of the much better and hackable Surface Pro. To this day, the bootloader on the RT hasn't been brocken. Fortunately, Windows RT is all but dead these days.

Re: Why Intel Atom?
 

it does raise the interesting prospect of 14nm Intel Cherry Trail for Jolla 2:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8831/i...m-cherry-trail