The new moniker "Atom" sets in marketing stone the Intel brand for small devices. I'll skip the banalities about Atom silicon being crucial for Intel's future and just pose a question: Can Intel spur innovation in ultrasmall devices the way it has in the PC and server industry?
I won't hazard any rash predictions but will make a few observations about the current landscape.
Intel Atom processor
(Credit: Intel Corp.)First, a little recent history. The ultramobile PC (UMPC) based on Intel's first-generation processor (the A110) for small devices has not exactly been the market sensation that the iPhone has. The Samsung Q1 and the Asus R2H are two examples of products that never really took off. As if to recognize this mistake (and confuse people in the process), Intel has stopped referring to this category of gadgets as UMPC and now calls it the Mobile Internet Device or MID.
This underscores the pitfalls and potential for Intel. The pitfalls: consumers will forever unfavorably compare the UMPC and MID to the more feature-rich notebook PC or, conversely, to the smaller, cheaper cell phone. The potential: a new category of computers spearheaded by a device with an iPhone-like following.
Enter the Atom-branded low-cost platform for ultraportable devices. Asus's popular Intel-based Eee PC is already demonstrating the potential here. So much so that a Sony vice president recently cited the Eee PC as a threat. (He depicted it as causing "a race to the bottom" because of its low price.) The XO laptop offered by the One Laptop Per Child organization is another example. (It uses an AMD Geode processor.) Both are priced around $300 and both are Internet-centric devices that offer the same wireless capabilities of more expensive laptops.
For smaller MID-like devices, such as the iPhone and Nokia N810, success is less certain. Many of the scores of pocket-sized gadgets on the market use processors based on the tried-and-true ARM design. Intel won't displace ARM anytime soon. But these devices are proprietary, which may leave Intel an opening. Because Intel's Atom processor is compatible with the Core 2 Duo instruction set, developers of small devices have a common platform to target.
"This is our smallest processor built with the world's smallest transistors," Intel Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Sean Maloney said in a statement. "This is...a fundamental new shift in design. We believe it will unleash new innovation across the industry."
This is probably true. But Intel has a long way to go in a crowded market that bears little if any resemblance to the PC industry, where the chipmaker competes relatively comfortably with only one other company (AMD). There's also a long wait for Intel's Moorestown, the next generation of small chips for small devices due in 2009 or 2010. The great expectations for Moorestown almost overshadow the current Atom technology. Moorestown will not only be more power efficient but more highly integrated: a system-on-chip (SOC) design combining the CPU, graphics, and memory controller onto a single chip.
Update: Atom brand segmentation:
One segment will be pocket-sized gadgets, dubbed MIDs. The maximum screen size for MIDs will be 7.5 inches diagonal. In order to get the "Centrino Atom" sticker, the MID must use the Poulsbo chipset, which includes integrated graphics. (Correction: wireless--both Wi-Fi and Wimax--are on a separate chip.) The Atom processor targeted at this market was previously code-named "Silverthorne."
The second segment will be ultra-low-cost notebooks and desktops. Intel calls the notebook segment Netbook. The desktop, Nettop. The Atom chip addressing this segment was previously known as "Diamondville."
Atom processors are expected to ship this spring.
Intel's upcoming low-cost Diamondville notebook processor will break from Intel's multicore strategy of the last few years and be primarily a single-core processor.
Small notebooks like the Eee PC will use Diamondville.
(Credit: Asus)In this respect Diamondville is not that different from Celeron, a long-standing design (introduced in 1998) that has been exclusively single-core until very recently. The reason for the single-core strategy is simple: With Diamondville, Intel has a "fanatical focus" on low power and low cost, according to Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research. A single core means fewer transistors and lower power consumption.
Diamondville is not Celeron, however. "It's a clean sheet of paper design," McCarron said. It is a tiny 45-nanometer processor that employs a simpler design (called an "in-order pipeline") than standard Intel processors, as spelled out in an ISSCC presentation (PDF) earlier this month. Diamondville also has lower-cost packaging than the Silverthorne processor, which Diamondville is derived from.
Because of this extreme emphasis on cost, Diamondville will appear in ultra-low-cost notebooks and to a lesser extent--at least initially--in desktops. Intel refers to the low-cost notebook design as "netbook" and estimates the pricing for these devices will go as low as $250. The initial thrust by PC suppliers such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell is expected to be in emerging markets. Performance is expected to be commensurate with the Pentium-M processor (a single-core chip first released in 2004).
There will be one exception to the single-core designs: a desktop version of Diamondville will be dual-core, according to a source close to Intel. This is backed up by a recent report in Taipei-based DigiTimes that refers to a Diamondville platform as "Shelton'08." That platform will come with two Diamondville processor models: a dual-core CPU, whose specifics are currently unknown, and the 230, a single-core CPU running at 1.6GHz with a 533MHz front-side bus and 512KB cache. The Shelton'08 for notebooks will include a single-core Diamondville, the N270.
On another front, Intel is expected to rebrand the Menlow platform in the very near future, according to sources familiar with Intel's strategy. The Menlow platform is comprised of the "Silverthorne" processor and the "Poulsbo" chipset from which Diamondville is derived, as mentioned above. Centrino is a possible candidate for a part of the brand name. This is a name that carries significant brand equity and may also be applied to the upcoming Montevina platform as "Centrino 2," according to reports earlier this month.
Two weeks after Intel signaled its future low-power intentions, ARM has unveiled its latest mobile chip design for smart phones and consumer devices that will arrive around 2010.
ARM CEO Warren East, left, and marketing executive John Goodacre discuss the launch of the Cortex A9 at the ARM Developers Conference.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)The Cortex A9 is an extension of the Cortex family of applications processor cores that ARM unveiled two years ago with the Cortex A8. It combines the multiprocessor support of older ARM cores with the Cortex design, ARM's highest-performance implementation to date. Several ARM partners, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Nvidia and NEC Electronics also announced plans to use the Cortex A9 in future chips for smart phones and consumer electronics devices.
ARM, based in Cambridge, England, doesn't actually make chips. It designs processor cores that companies like TI and Samsung use in smart phones made by Nokia and Apple, respectively. There's an ARM core in more than 90 percent of the mobile phones in the world, and in many cases there are several ARM designs inside your phone.
"The ARM world is growing a lot faster than the economy as a whole, and the semiconductor industry as a whole," said Warren East, ARM's CEO, in a press conference Wednesday at the ARM Developers Conference. Smart phones aren't nearly as prevalent as PCs, but they are growing much stronger than their larger cousins, and ARM is the predominant chip architecture used in those phones.
As a result, Intel wants a piece of this market as it evolves. At some point down the road, either smart phones are going to become more sophisticated, or minitablet PCs are going to become sleeker and offer better battery life. Both Intel and ARM are positioning themselves to be inside future mobile computers, and each brings different strengths to the table.
ARM's John Goodacre, program manager for multiprocessing, said mobile chip makers will be able to implement up to four processing cores with the Cortex A9. He doesn't anticipate that smart phones even around the end of the decade will need that much performance, considering that PC customers today are having trouble justifying four cores. But embedded devices like in-car processors and networking gear, where ARM customers also build chips, will be at those levels in 2010 or thereabouts.
In the most powerful configuration, Cortex A9 chips should be able to deliver up to 8,000 DMIPS (dhrystone million instructions per second) of performance with power consumption of around 250 milliwatts. DMIPS is an older measure of integer performance that's mainly used these days for embedded chips that don't run nearly the amount of code that PC and server chips have to handle, so it's difficult to judge exactly how much performance that is compared with a modern-day PC processor from Intel or AMD.
But 250 milliwatts of power consumption is far below what the most power-sensitive PC chips are capable of delivering these days, and devices with ARM chips are already at that level today. The ARM11 core, which is the basis for the Samsung applications processor used in the iPhone, has around that level of power consumption.
Intel hopes to get well below a watt with its Silverthorne processor, due out next year. And in 2010 it plans to ship a processor called Moorestown that will probably compete directly against the Cortex A9 for design wins in future smart phones or MIDs, Intel's vision of the future of mobile computing.
In fact, Digitimes reported Wednesday that Apple is considering replacing the ARM-based Samsung chip currently found in the iPhone with Moorestown once the product is ready. Intel has released little information about Moorestown, other than to say it wants to dramatically reduce the power consumption of its products by the time that arrives around 2010.
UPDATE: An ARM representative pointed out that the Cortex A8 was actually the first Cortex applications processor for products like smart phones. The first Cortex processor was the Cortex M3, designed for networking gear and other embedded devices.
Apparently the Newton doesn't fall very far from the Apple tree.
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has a project underway to develop a minitablet computer based on the OS X operating system it has developed for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The site is calling it "the return of the Newton," referring to the much-maligned but cult-favorite PDA that Apple sold in the mid-1990s.
Apple's design ethos has advanced a bit since the original Newton, but could the company have a successor in the works?
(Credit: Apple)The report describes a "slate" style device that's about 1.5 times bigger than an iPhone, with a high resolution display and the same touch-screen interface that's found on the iPhone. AppleInsider thinks we might catch a glimpse of this device at Macworld in January.
If true, this would appear to be Apple's take on Intel's MID (mobile Internet device) concept, rather than a PDA like the Newton. There's simply no market these days for the traditional PDA, as even basic mobile phones can do everything a PDA can do, just with more style. But there's not a huge market for UMPCs or MIDs at this stage of the game, either.
Apple's OS X and multitouch interface are definitely unique takes on the UMPC/MID concept. Many of the devices demonstrated by Intel and its partners last week at IDF required a stylus for navigation, reminiscent of PDAs. The wide-screen slate design reported by AppleInsider would allow for some interesting applications. This would also have a larger screen than either the iPhone and iPod Touch, and the size of the screen could make it easier to use the touch-screen keyboard in landscape mode, something that's on the wish list of many iPhone users.
Momentum is building around mobile devices designed for everyday folks, but I'd still be surprised if Apple were to launch its third multitouch device in 12 months sometime next year. Is there enough interest in handheld Apple gadgets right now to justify the iPhone, the iPod Touch and Newton 2.0?
The timing reported by AppleInsider--release in the first half of 2008--does coincide with the launch expectations for Silverthorne, a low-power Intel processor designed for just this type of device. Intel executives were tight-lipped last week about their chances of working with Apple on Silverthorne-based devices, probably not wanting to get sent to the principal's office for talking out of turn about Apple.
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