Intel on Tuesday announced its long-awaited Atom chip for smartphones and tablets. The Atom Z6 processor series (pdf) will “open the door” for Intel chips in the smartphone market, said Pankaj Kedia, director in the Ultra Mobility Group.
The Moorestown platform has a heavy emphasis on video, with an integrated and power-optimized Intel GMA 600 Graphics system. The Atom Z6 CPU family (formerly code-named “Lincroft”) uses a high-K 45nm process.
Intel has not named handset manufacturers who might deploy the new silicon, but it did show off an Aava Mobile reference device (below) powered by the new Intel hardware. The Atom Z6 supports Android and Moblin/Meego, but not Microsoft Windows. It remains unclear whether Intel plans to add Windows support in the future or whether it will work on Windows, even without the company’s blessing.
Intel’s Atom has been used primarily in Netbooks, where it has been adopted widely. But it consumes too much power for handhelds. As a result, ARM-based CPUs, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, are inside most smartphones, such as the Google HTC Nexus One phone and HTC’s upcoming EVO 4G phone.
Intel hopes to change all that with the Atom Z6. The new Lincroft chip (part of a platform Intel calls “Moorestown“), supports up to 1.5 GHz for high-end smartphones and up to 1.9 GHz for tablets and other handheld designs.
Moorestown sips power. Standby time using a “BlackBerry-style” battery is 10 days. Active battery time, when Web browsing or watching video, is about five hours, said Kedia, who claimed battery life is competitive with high-end “premium” smartphones.
Intel says it’s faster than ARM competitors. “When you look at Web page type of performance, for example Java-script-rich Web sites. We’re getting less than two seconds. The best phones out there–nine or ten seconds,” he said. “Performance matters if you’re going to use the Web in its entirety,” said Kedia.
The new Atom technology will support a version of the Linux operating system jointly backed by Intel and Nokia called MeeGo, Intel’s Moblin (which MeeGo is based on), and Google’s Android operating system. “Software is a very important piece (of the technology),” according to Kedia.
The CPU has 512KB of L2 cache, 24KB of data and 32KB of instruction cache on L1, with 140 million transistors packed into the System on Chip (SoC).
The Moorestown platform has an integrated and power-optimized Intel GMA 600 Graphics system with a core frequency of up to 400 MHz. It supports OpenGL ES2.0, 2.1, and Open VG 1.1. Hardware-accelerated HD video encoding (MPEG-4 part 2, H.264) and decoding (MPEG-4 part 2, H.264, WMV, and VC1) are featured with the maximum display resolution of 1,366 by 768 pixels.
The Atom Z6 family of chips is available today. It includes support for Wi-Fi, 3G/HSPA, and WiMAX, and supports a range of software platforms, including Android, Moblin 2.1, and MeeGo 1.0. Intel also claims to be “working with leading industry players to support middleware and applications, like Adobe’s Flash and AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and more.
Moorestown will allow Intel’s Atom CPU to exist in larger smart phones (4 – 5” size), while its successor in 2010/2011 will use Intel’s 32nm process to finally get into something iPhone-sized, says AnandTech.
