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Intel Eyes Smartphone Chip Market
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."
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.
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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.
Intel talked at the press release about 50% reduction, not 50 times...
"It's a loser mentality to not develop one segment because you're worried about the other," he said. "I think we have several years ahead of us where we can innovate the heck out of any of these categories without getting defensive about the other one. You just need to unleash innovation in all of the segments and see what happens." - Sean Maloney
It's interesting to see Intel expanding out of their traditional markets and unleashing innovation in every direction. Since they're also staying pretty open about interfaces, people are going to do some pretty amazing stuff with their new products.
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In other words, you own one?
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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.
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.
The Microsoft definition is driven by Intel. It's dumb of both of them, as it defines "premium netbook" as one that doesn't have either of their products in it but which has a bigger screen, more memory, more storage or a faster processor. It's a "loser mentality" that tries to protect the notebook market that's already in "race to the bottom" mode.
Since neither of them can prevent other manufacturers from innovating outside of this specification, that just make it easier for an up-an-coming manufacturer to create a new market without them, and enjoy the benefit of not having to compete with them in that market.
So of course after that happens the restrictions will go away and it will be a free-for-all again.
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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.