Intel Eyes Smartphone Chip Market 84
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."
Innovation in all market segments (Score:2, Insightful)
"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 [cnet.com]
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.
It's the other way around (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft definition is driven by Intel [gizmodo.com]. 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 [cnet.com]" 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.
Re:Can't wait to (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes that was my point, but another point is that 1080p playback does n't really mean anything as a CPU metric either because I seriously doubt it would be the CPU that would be doing the decoding. Most likely like the SoC arm based processors used on todays smartphones there would be dedicated hardware to assist with the video encoding/decoding.
Re:Can't wait to (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
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.
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. 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).
Re:Can't wait to (Score:4, Insightful)
[Can't wait to] watch those 1080p movies on my smart phone screen.
There are already phones which can play 780p (and record too). Why the sarcasm? Would you rather watch a lower quality movie?
I don't have a brick sized smartphone, I have a tiny flip-phone. The screen is the size of a postage stamp, and the speakerphone sounds like a broken cb radio, which is plenty good enough for phone use. I will never be able to tell the difference between 320x240 and mono sound vs 1080p and 5.1 surround. Even on a slightly larger brick sized smartphone, I don't think it would be a noticeable difference, other than the dramatic decrease in battery life and maybe waves of heat wafting off the CPU.
At this time, can the average smartphone battery survive a low res feature length movie, and how much does it cost at five cents per kilobyte? Then extrapolate to ten times the data transfered (equals ten times the profit) plus ten times the processing equals roughly a tenth the battery life?
The other problem is the past decade has been spent trying to convince mindless consumers that nirvana is buying the largest big screen TV with the most surround speakers, then even the stupidest most formulaic movie is great. They have had some success with this sales pitch. Now all the marketers have to do is convince them they were just kidding, and nirvana is using the worlds highest resolution tiny phone, then even the stupidest most formulaic movie is great. Good luck! They'll need it!