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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."

8 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Really.... by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Really Intel could excel in the smartphone chip market where they can't in the netbook market because of MS and their speed/power restrictions on netbooks. The problem I see with the smartphone market is that x86 is terribly hard to make power-efficient enough and still be fast. Could Intel do it, sure, but unlike desktop CPUs they can't just increase the clock speed and get faster CPUs, they have to work at it.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  2. Can't wait to by msgmonkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    watch those 1080p movies on my smart phone screen.

    But on a more serious note, Intel will always be able to leverage their advanced fabrication processes to reduce power consumption. Most ARM chips I've seen use older (in terms of desktop CPU) process technology but the good architecture still gives you excellent power consumption.

    1. Re:Can't wait to by BikeHelmet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Wish there was an edit button. :)

      Found the link: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?s=&showtopic=48259&view=findpost&p=733993

      If interested, you can search the forums for more info, and look up the Palm Pre battery life.

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

      To be fair, the Atom runs at 6 Watts max, where average TDP can down to as little as 0.4W. The problem with Atom, as you say, is all of the other hardware to make it work. Its current chipset is incredibly power hungry, but they're working on that (integrating more and doing even deeper clock gating). Future Atoms will likely use even less power, with Intel already shipping chips with a max 2.4W threshold.

      Right, so if you're actually doing something, you don't get to use your computer as long.

      And yes, you are being unfair comparing a device which has a hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes of space and a WXSVGA screen to a handheld device with a couple of gigs of flash memory and a HVGA screen.

      The Pandora has dual-SDHC slots, so you could have 64GB of space. (More if bigger SDHC cards were actually made)

      Fine, an HDD is unfair, but SSD vs dual-SDHC is a valid comparison. The EEE PCs with SSDs had about 25MB/sec read/write speed. High end SDHC cards are slightly below that, and you can have two.

      Now that better SSDs are available(like the Vertex), it changes things - but the Vertex is also a whole other price range.

      Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).

      Nobody makes x86 programs that work on such tiny screens. I would cite the "highly specialized toolkits" as an advantage for ARM, in this case... you will need linux and those fancy toolkits. Maemo, Android, etc. all work very well on tiny screens.

      And by the time Intel has an x86 Atom chip that will work in a fanless tiny device like a Pandora, ARM will have quad-core A9's available, so your point regarding performance is moot...

      After all, there is no Atom that will fit in a device that small... yet. I have news for you though - my Phenom II in a cellphone (lol) beats your Atom in a cellphone. ;)

    3. Re:Can't wait to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Not exactly, I've seen their roadmap from before they decided that UMPCs were the future, and they had the XScale family moving up into the low end tablet/laptop space. At some point they changed their marketing from targeting smart phones to UMPCs, then sold off the XScale business. This was before the iPhone came out and gave the smartphone market the kick in the ass it needed.

  3. Intel vs. ARM by moon3 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would be interesting to see what will Intel pitch against ARM's current superior offering. ARM is cheap and already has Power-VR OpenGL accelerator and other stuff integrated, while being very power efficient. Bundled GPU and power efficiency is a deal breaker in the mobile arena. Intel doesn't have integrated GPU nor a track record of being very power efficient.

  4. Xscale? by areusche · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously what happened to Intel's Xscale processor? After they sold it to Marvell it went into the abyss of forgotten tech. That ARM processor had the entire Palm and Pocket PC market by the balls a couple of years ago since every device worth its weight was using it! They left that market and now want to reenter it? Last I checked every smartphone still uses ARM.

  5. Good luck with that by Taxman415a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The current atoms run about 2 watts, way too much for a smartphone even if they are able to cut that in half, and that's not even counting the power hog chipsets needed for the atom that require 5-12+ watts. By comparison the current cortex A8 packages with video etc that are able to do 1080p are able to make it under the 300 milliwatt line smartphone manufacturers are looking for.

    And even better, if you're talking about Intel's chips two generations out, then consider the Cortex A9 quad core chips that are claiming to be ready to go and at reasonable power consumption in the same time frame if not sooner than Intel's offering. That article is actually claiming dual core Cortex A9 phones within a year that use about the same power as current chips with much better performance.

    So as noted it looks like ARM is going to have a much easier time scaling up performance at the smartphone power draw level than Intel is going to have getting anywhere near it. And the Cortex A9 will probably spank the Atom. The race should benefit everyone though. Maybe we'll actually get some decent performing netbook, laptop, and desktop chips out of it that run on extremely low power.