Intel engineers have finally cracked the secret of what makes the Apple iPad 2 a successful product, despite the fact that it is not actually have the fastest hardware in the tablet world.
Techradar was shown a single core Intel Atom tablet from 2010 that delivers the same sort of user experience as the iPad 2 with some under-the-hood tweaks that promises to make Intel-based tablets even better.
An Intel Team managed to come up with a recipe that puts responsiveness and smoothness at the top of the agenda rather than raw performance numbers.
Intel has found out that a good user experience requires a display refresh rate of at least 60Hz rather than the universally accepted 30Hz.
Doing so however requires some significant memory bandwidth requirements. This issue is made even more acute by the fact that Microsoft's OS has a pixel depth of 7, which means that each pixel on a screen is rewritten seven times while it drops down to 4 for iOS.
The other trick that they have found is that the iPad has a reaction time of around 15ms while in Windows OSes this normally hovers around 200ms because the OS waits to see whether there's a second click comes.
Intel engineers have managed to trick the OS and getting access to Direct input libraries which in turn dramatically reduces the reaction time.
Crucially, Matt Dunford, World-wide Benchmarking Manager states "there were some things in the OS that were limiting Atom from achieving its potential."
What could it mean? Well Intel will almost certainly implement those changes in Meego, its own operating system to improve user experience. Secondly, it will also actively encourage its partners to adopt these techniques to improved performance on Wintel tablets.
Techradar was shown a single core Intel Atom tablet from 2010 that delivers the same sort of user experience as the iPad 2 with some under-the-hood tweaks that promises to make Intel-based tablets even better.
Intel has found out that a good user experience requires a display refresh rate of at least 60Hz rather than the universally accepted 30Hz.
Doing so however requires some significant memory bandwidth requirements. This issue is made even more acute by the fact that Microsoft's OS has a pixel depth of 7, which means that each pixel on a screen is rewritten seven times while it drops down to 4 for iOS.
The other trick that they have found is that the iPad has a reaction time of around 15ms while in Windows OSes this normally hovers around 200ms because the OS waits to see whether there's a second click comes.
Intel engineers have managed to trick the OS and getting access to Direct input libraries which in turn dramatically reduces the reaction time.
Crucially, Matt Dunford, World-wide Benchmarking Manager states "there were some things in the OS that were limiting Atom from achieving its potential."
What could it mean? Well Intel will almost certainly implement those changes in Meego, its own operating system to improve user experience. Secondly, it will also actively encourage its partners to adopt these techniques to improved performance on Wintel tablets.
