Intel unleashes revamped Atom, claims smartphone readiness

Chip giant Intel Corp. yesterday announced a new version of its Atom processor platform – the 45nm Z6xx – which the company claims consumes so little power that it will push the company into the smartphone and tablet game. Critics, however, say the move is too little, far too late.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel with its 80,000 employees worldwide has a long, prosperous and solid history of not only designing its own chips, but also making them, in-house, at any of its plethora of top of the range, super-efficient manufacturing facilities.
Indeed, even the general public is familiar with the term “Intel Inside” when referring to PCs, but thus far the firm has always come up short in terms of mobile handheld devices, with its chips simply being too power hungry for that all important all-day battery life.
Now, however, Intel thinks it may have cracked it, saying that its latest manufacturing capabilities can come up with chips that deliver >50x platform idle power reduction with high performance and a smaller size than the previous Atom generation.
For several years now, Intel executives have argued relentlessly that consumers will not be satisfied with the type of computing experience rival ARM can offer, and that people will demand more robust mobile computing experiences, requiring chips with more power and PC-friendly software, both of which are traditional Intel strengths.
ARM of course vociferously disagrees with this, and so far, the market seems to have sided with the smaller, more smartphone successful, British chip firm.
Intel believes its Z6xx platform will bring users what it describes as an “unlimited ‘PC-like’ experience with fast Internet, multi-tasking, full 1080p video, 3-D graphics, multi-point videoconferencing and voice in pocketable designs.”
The firm also boasts that the newly released Z6xx manufactured on Intel’s 45nm low-power process is highly integrated, has a whopping 140 million transistors and includes a controller hub (MP20) and a dedicated mixed signal IC. As one would expect, the chips also bring support for Wi-Fi, 3G/HSPA, and WiMAX.
In terms of power, Intel is boasting a 50-times reduction in idle power, a 20-times reduction in audio power, and up to a three-times reductions across browsing and video scenarios. “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,” according to the press release.
These power savings, says the firm, translate into about 10 days of standby, up to two days of audio playback and four to five hours of browsing and video battery life. Which is still nowhere close to, let’s say, the iPad running on ARM’s architecture. Even by the company’s own admission it seems Intel has only caught up and gained ground with ARM in terms of battery life.
But Intel’s strength is in its purported 1.5- to 3-times higher compute performance, 2- to 4-times richer graphics, 4-times higher JavaScript performance, and support for full HD 1080p high-profile video decoding and 720p HD video recording.
The new platform also allegedly 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. This sounds impressive, but Intel rival Qualcomm Inc. also has a 1.5GHz SoC in the pipeline, even if it is due out a little further down the line.
Intel is also under the impression that with this iteration of Atom, the firm will finally become a competitor in the ultra-mobile and tablet space, “scaling a range of operating systems and market segments,” after a full 15 years of unsuccessfully attempting to crack the telco nut.
The only problem with that, is that the Z6xx, or “Moorestown” as it was previously codenamed, is about three years late, and big Intel allies in the PC space like Hewlett-Packard Co. and LG Electronics Co. Ltd. seem to have already snubbed the chip in their upcoming tablet and smartphone offerings, choosing ARM instead owing to better levels of power consumption.
“Intel has delivered its first product that is opening the door for Intel Architecture [IA] in the smartphone market segment,” said Anand Chandrasekher, Intel SVP and GM of the Ultra Mobility Group.
“Through ‘Moorestown,’ Intel is scaling the benefits of IA while significantly reducing the power, cost and footprint to better address handheld market segments,” he said, adding the firm would push the boundaries of performance at low power “to show what’s possible as handheld devices become small, powerful mobile computers.”
David Kanter an analyst from RealWorldTech agrees with Chandrasekher that Moorestown is more of a first step.
“It’s highly likely that Intel will get a few design wins, but they won’t be really high volume,” he told RCR Wireless News.
“Intel is new to the space, so its first design wins will be with customers just testing the waters,” Kanter said. “If those designs do well, then with the subsequent generation Intel will have a crack at high volume in smart phones, but the first generation is about building trust, understanding the customer, etc.”
Kanter also told RCR Wireless News that despite Intel’s claims of an over 50-times reduction in idle power from its previous generation of Atom, the power gap with ARM had yet to close, though it had “narrowed significantly.”
“Realistically, Medfield (the next generation) is the one that will really close the power gap,” Kanter said, explaining that Medfield is a single chip, which will have further power advantages and also board level benefits, while Moorestown is still a two chip solution.
Other critics say Intel is simply reacting to a market, rather than shaping it, which is never a good position to be in. Moorestown, many say, has simply been stuck in development for far too long, especially bearing in mind that smartphone design is a process which takes anything from a year to 18 months. This means even now that Moorestown is out in the open, it might only be 2011 before designs based on it appear on shelves.
Currently the only real advantage Intel has is its market position brand name and x86 platform. This means the firm can offer a full choice of software from Microsoft Corp.’s Windows platform – which can’t run on ARM architecture – to Linux based offerings.
Intel recently managed to port Google Inc.’s Android operating system to Atom, and also offers its own Meego software, built in collaboration with Nokia off the back of Intel’s earlier Moblin open source software.
Launching a new product without any significant design wins, however, is really quite telling, and with this launch Intel failed to muster anything more than what it has already been parading around for months – an Aava mobile and OpenPeak design, which didn’t catch the industry’s attention back at the Consumer Electronics Show, and is unlikely to now.
Unless Intel manages to pull in any big design wins over the coming months, many will remain profoundly skeptical about how much the revamped Atom platform will really help the PC chip giant in the booming mobile handset space.