New Atom chips evolve into smartphone CPUs

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith in San Francisco

Posted on 23 Sep 2009 at 23:55

Next-generation Intel Atom processors will bring several design changes intended to make them more suitable for use in handheld devices.

The changes were detailed today at IDF in San Francisco, after the company yesterday revealed its plans for Atom-powered smartphones in 2010.

The current Atom platform, codenamed Menlow, uses a conventional CPU and chipset arrangement. But Moorestown, due for release next year, will ditch the north bridge, integrating CPU functions, graphics, video acceleration and the memory controller into a single 45nm processor known as Lincroft.

Audio, USB and storage interfaces will be handled by a 65nm south bridge chip dubbed Langwell, with interfaces for additional communications controllers such as wireless internet, GPS and 3G.

The change may sound academic, but the integration of so many components onto just a few chips opens the door to much smaller Atom devices.

“We’ve dramatically reduced the size of the device,” announced Intel mobility fellow Shreekant “Ticky” Thakkar at IDF in San Francisco.

“It’s now possible to build a four-inch Atom device within the thermal envelope.”

Cutting the power

Another simplification is the dropping of the PCI-E bus, which Thakkar explained has become “inappropriate” for its Atom strategy. In its place comes support for the MIPI display interface and low-power DDR, both established technologies in the handheld market.

Battery life has also been a major focus. Moorestown is designed as a system of logical “power islands”, and when a particular feature isn’t in use it’s automatically shut down, to be dynamically reawoken when needed. Processor and bus speed are kept low when the device is idle but are ramped up when a heavy workload is encountered.

Intel claims that these measures enables Moorestown devices to remain “always on, always connected” while consuming less than one fiftieth of the idle power of a Menlow device.

Mass market in 2011

Despite these major developments, Thakkar stopped short of predicting that Moorestown would dominate mobile communications in 2010, claiming only that the technology was ready for the “high-end smartphone” market.

He revealed that Intel does not expect to compete in the “mainstream” mobile market until the release of 2011, when it will release a 32nm successor to Moorestown codenamed Medfield.