Intel shifts Atom focus from netbooks to smartphones, tablets with Moorestown

Suzanne Deffree, Managing editor, news -- EDN: Information, News, & Business Strategy for Electronics Design Engineers, May 5, 2010

Intel Corp formally announced its latest Atom chipset Tuesday, a 45-nm platform known as "Moorestown" that the company claimed offers significant power savings that translate into 10 days of standby, up to two days of audio playback, and four to five hours of browsing and video battery life in mobile devices.

Moving from its heavy focus on netbooks for its previous generation Atom Menlow, Intel has initially positioned Moorestown at the smartphone and tablets markets.

"Intel has delivered its first product that is opening the door for Intel Architecture [IA] in the smartphone market segment," said Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Ultra Mobility Group, in a statement. "Through Moorestown, Intel is scaling the benefits of IA while significantly reducing the power, cost, and footprint to better address handheld market segments. As a result of our efforts, the Intel Atom processor is pushing the boundaries of higher performance at significantly lower power to show what's possible as handheld devices become small, powerful mobile computers."

While confident in Intel's Moorestown technology, analysts this morning noted the increasing level of competition in the smartphone and tablet markets. "We continue to believe Intel may need to launch its 32-nm Medfield offering before seeing significant traction in this highly competitive arena, but recognize Intel is making solid progress on both power reduction and performance across video and graphics," Tim Luke, a Barclays Capital semiconductor industry analyst, said in a report today.

"Intel is not outlining a timeline for its next generation 32-nm offering of Medfield; however, we would expect a 2011 timeline for this key initiative," he continued. "We believe an even lower power SOC on 32-nm may help Intel in breaking into a market where it competes with Qualcomm's integrated baseband/app processor and SnapDragon offerings, as well as TI's OMAP offerings along with the internal solutions such as Apple's A4. Intel management has noted that Nvidia appears more active in the tablet arena than in smartphones currently."

According to Luke, Intel expects to ship tablets using Moorestown in the second half of 2010, with smartphones following with multiple vendors in first half of 2011. Intel did not disclosed the Moorestown ASP (average selling price); the analyst estimates ASP to be in the $20 to $35 range.

Intel did not announce design wins for Moorestown, however, the MPU maker in 2009 formed a broad mobile alliance with Nokia. That alliance was expanded in February to see Intel and Nokia merge their Moblin and Maemo software platforms to create a unified Linux-based platform known as Meego that will run on multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices. Both smartphones and tablets were among the devices the two companies noted in the agreement announcement. Intel noted in its statement Tuesday that the Moorestown chips support the Meego operating systems, as well as other operating systems including Moblin and Android.

The Moorestown platform includes the Intel Atom processor Z6xx series family (formerly "Lincroft" SOC), the Intel platform controller hub MP20 (formerly "Langwell"), and a dedicated mixed-signal IC (formerly "Briertown").

The platform has been repartitioned to include the Z6xx, which combines the 45-nm Atom processor core with 3-D graphics, video encode and decode, as well as memory and display controllers into a single SOC design, Intel said. It also includes the MP20 platform controller hub to support a range of system-level functions and I/O blocks.

According to Intel, when combined the chips deliver a more than 50x reduction in idle power, a more than 20x reduction in audio power, and 2-3x reductions across browsing and video scenarios as compared to Intel's Menlow.

Intel said that the platform also offers 1.5-3x higher compute performance, 2-4x richer graphics, greater than 4x higher JavaScript performance, and support for full HD 1080p high-profile video decoding and 720p HD video recording..

Building on the C6 state in the original Intel Atom processor design, the SOC incorporates new ultra-low-power states (S0i1 and S0i3), which take the SOC to 100 micro-watts, Intel said. At the platform level, Intel said it implemented a new, fine grain OS power management approach that manages the idle and active power states across all aspects of the system based on usage scenarios. Additionally, Intel used a high-K 45-nm LP SOC process to support a multiple transistor design with a range of high-voltage I/Os, the company said.

The new platform supports a range of scalable frequencies, up to 1.5 GHz for high-end smartphones and up to 1.9 GHz for tablets and other handheld designs. The chips also bring support for Wi-Fi, 3G/HSPA, and WiMAX.

For more on Moorestown, see:

x86 processors: Continued innovation is a welcome contradiction

Intel's N470, AMD's 890GX, and Nvidia's Ion 2: Something borrowed, an interface breakthrough, and something old

CPU power management, systems architecture and market share: a not-so-subtle interaction