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Intel Eyes Smartphone Chip Market

Posted by kdawson on from the make-room-for-atom dept.

MojoKid writes "Intel has been rather successful at carving out a large percentage of the netbook market with their low power Atom processor. Moving forward, Intel's executives believe there's a good potential to increase Atom's traction in adjacent markets by targeting its low-cost, energy-efficient chips at various multifunctional consumer gadgets including smartphones and other portable devices that access the Internet. Code-named Moorestown, a new version of the chip will offer a 50x power reduction at idle and reportedly will deliver enough horsepower to handle 720p video recording and 1080p quality playback. It is with this upcoming chip that Intel will begin targeting the smartphone market In 2011. Intel also plans to introduce an even smaller, less power-hungry version of the chip known as Medfield, which will be built on a 32nm process with a full solution comprising a PCB area of about half the size of a credit card."

2 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can't wait to by supersat · · Score: 4, Informative

    Intel already had an ARM processor for smartphones -- the XScale PXA family. They decided to sell it off to Marvell a few years ago as part of their cost-cutting strategy. We'll see if that was a wise thing to do.

  2. Re:Can't wait to by BikeHelmet · · Score: 4, Informative

    good architecture

    Don't you mean ludicrously good architecture?

    I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.

    The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...

    CPU - about 20-40mw
    DSP - about 30-60mw
    SGX GPU - about 30-60mw

    (Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)

    The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.

    Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...

    If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!

    I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!