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."

wrong info

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel talked at the press release about 50% reduction, not 50 times...

Re:Can't wait to

[e4g4]

I do believe that was the GP's point - but really - the ability to playback 1080p is more of a performance metric than an actual handy thing to have in a phone (unless, of course, you're plugging it into a TV)

Re:Can't wait to

[supersat]

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.

Re:Can't wait to

[BikeHelmet]

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 [beagleboard.org], upcoming Pandora Handheld [openpandora.org], and Palm Pre [slashdot.org]) 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!

Re:Can't wait to

[msgmonkey]

Well as far as I remember they got XScale when thet aquired DEC so it probably was n't a division that was taken very seriously. Whilst they did make some improvements other manufacturers started producing ARM based chips that were as good as if not better so they got rid of it. I suspect the problem for Intel was that they did n't own the ARM architecture so for them it was better to sell off what they had since they would always be competing with other ARM licensees.

Re:Xscale?

[NP-Incomplete]

Intel had to license ARM technology from ARM, Ltd. This was not a viable long-term business strategy.

Re:Xscale?

[hattig]

It's in the SheevaPlug device from Marvell - that's a 1.2GHz ARMv5 device (1.2GHz StrongARM / XScale effectively).

Re:Can't wait to

[Paul Jakma]

IIRC, Intel got the rights to all of Digital Semiconductor's design portfolio, bar AXP, as part of the DEC v Intel lawsuit settlement [berkeley.edu] in about 1997. This included things like the 21x4x tulip NICs, the 21x5x PCI-PCI bridges, the SA-110 StrongARM.

Re:wrong info

[caladine]

TFA has it here [hothardware.com] and here [hothardware.com] as a 50x reduction.