Intel Shows Moorestown Atom Phone Chips – But No Products

Intel has shown off the next generation of its Atom processor range, known as Moorestown and designed for smartphones, but has not announced any partners with plans to build the chips into phones.

Atom processors have done well in netbooks, but have not been adopted in smartphones, where chip designs based on ARM – such as the Cortex-A8 and Snapdragon – are inside all the leading designs. The Moorestown version of Atom is supposed to change all that. Announced in early 2009, and previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, it uses a chipset design more appropriate for handheld devices, with more functions bundled onto the processor.

However, despite promising Atom-based phones in the second half of 2010, Intel had no partners to announce at the launch of the new Atom. Indeed, one possible partner, LG, chose this week to make a point of saying its prototype Moorestown phone, the LGW990, shown at CES, will not become a production device.

Best of both worlds?

“We can have low power and high performance, without giving up the Intel architecture,” said Pankaj Kedia, director of the mobile Internet device (MID) ecosystem at Intel, at a London Atom preview on Tuesday. The new generation of Atom requires about one-fiftieth the standby power of the previous one, putting it “into the zone” for handheld devices, said Kedia.

Phones that currently run around 600MHz could move to 1.5GHz and perform much faster and greater processing tasks under the Intel vision, said Kedia.

Moorestown moves the Z (mobile device) version of Atom towards a system on a chip, with the main processor unit – known as Lincroft – expanded to include graphics, video encoding and decoding, fast display handling and memory access through DDR1. The companion chip, the MP20 – known as Langwell – handles image processing, I/O including HDMI and solid state disk control.

The system includes power gating, explained Intel fellow Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar. This allows most of the transistors to switch off when not in use, contributing to very low idle power requirements. Alongside the two Intel processors are support chips, from companies such as Freescale, contributing to a low overall power use in prototype systems. At the system level, Moorestown devices could have a ten day standby time, more than eight hours of talk time, two days continuous playback of music files, or five hours of browsing, said Thakkar.

Intel showed a prototype from Finnish company Aava, called Virta, which has previously been on show. This runs Moblin or Android, and includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a 5 megapixel camera.

Pressed by eWEEK Europe and other journalists on the comparison with ARM processors, which currently dominate smartphones, Kedia conceded that the power-performance scale the company was using was its own, but insisted Moorestown was “in the zone” for smartphone devices: “This gets us into the smartphone game”.

By comparison, ARM has “no performance,” said Thakkar. “They will now have to play catch-up.