LG first to tap Intel's 'Moorestown' chip for smartphone
The Intel architecture is coming to smartphones.
LG Electronics and Intel are announcing a collaboration based on Intel's Moorestown silicon and the Linux Moblin v2.0 software platform at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. The future LG device--which is being described as a smartphone--is expected to be one of the first Moorestown designs to market.
Moorestown is the code name for the successor to Intel's current Atom processor.
"LG and Intel's common goal is to unleash rich Internet experiences across a range of mobile devices while delivering the functionality of today's high-end smartphones," the companies said in a statement.
The key to getting Intel chips that run all the most popular PC software into a phone is reducing the power consumption below the Atom chip used today in Netbooks, according to Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. "If you look at the power consumption projectory, they dropped Atom to two watts and they expect to drop that (with Moorestown) by a factor of 10," Kumar said.
"That would squarely be in the power envelope of a smartphone," Kumar said. Intel mobile processors found in mainstream laptops have a thermal envelope of between 25 and 35 watts.
But whether Moorestown can actually achieve the energy frugality of silicon from longtime cell phone silicon suppliers like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments remains to be seen. Toshiba recently disclosed that its using Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip in a future phone and Qualcomm supplied the main processor in the first phone using Google's Android OS.
Moorestown will also be used in MIDs or mobile Internet devices. And it seems, at times, that the terms smartphone and MID are used almost interchangeably. "The MID segment will drive growth at LG Electronics. We chose Intel's next-generation Moorestown platform and Moblin-based OS to pursue this segment because of the high performance and Internet compatibility this brings to our service provider customers," Jung Jun Lee, executive vice president of LG Electronics, said in a statement.
Neither company gave a date for availability of the LG device, but it is expected to appear soon after Moorestown is available. Intel is saying that Moorestown will be available in 2009 or 2010, though the second half of 2009 appears increasingly likely.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Please don't lose the strong credibility you already built- quote more credible sources in the field- Linley, Modoff, Griffin, etc.. (to name a few analysts).
The Cell PC
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- by kbdude February 16, 2009 10:38 AM PST
- As referenced in the article... if the Atom chip power numbers can be scaled down to compete with ARM based chips... then Intel really has something.
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(5 Comments)An Atom chip consuming ~ 1 watt of power.... and X86... is very compelling. I would have a full PC universe in my hands... and not simply a smartphone.
Seems like Intel is putting there hats into the handset CPU business. Moorestown is only 45nm. third generation Atom should be on 32nm..... 32nm allows reduced power consumption numbers & lower cost.....that is full convergence of the PC world into the cell phone.