Intel’s Atom goes 3G

Intel may be firmly in the WiMAX camp, but it’s displaying no partisanship when it comes to its new embedded processor strategy. As Intel moves from laptops to new categories of handheld computing and Web-surfing gadgets called mobile Internet devices (MIDs), the first products may just be powered by 3G, not WiMAX.

This week at a developers’ conference in Taipei, Intel unveiled its Moorestown platform, a low-power compact architecture designed and built around its new Atom processor. More significantly Intel announced collaborations with wireless module makers Ericsson and Option to integrate Moorestown with their high-speed packet access (HSPA) radio chips.

Intel has taken two related yet distinct approaches to the wireless market (See Telephony’s June feature Intel’s Wireless Dreams). Its WiMAX strategy is an extension of its WiFi strategy. It’s developed a radio baseband called Echo Peak, which comes as an option in its new Centrino laptop architecture. Intel has already landed commitments from half a dozen PC makers to embed the new WiMAX chips, and the first of those products launched on the Sprint Xohm network earlier this month.

However, in its second approach, led by Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, the vendor has chosen to remain radio neutral. Intel is looking to extend its dominance in the computer processor market to the handheld computing and eventually smartphone spaces. As phones and mobile devices become more powerful, they basically become miniature versions of the PCs where Intel’s core competence lies, said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group, in a previous interview. If Intel is hoping to become the processor of choice for all of the world’s connected devices, it has to open itself to all of the world’s connectivity technologies, hence its new collaboration with 3G module makers.

The Moorestown platform is the successor to Menlow, an Atom-powered architecture designed for ultra-compact PCs and Web-only netbooks, a product category that has just started to penetrate the market. Intel has had to scale its mobile architecture gradually down to smaller and more compact devices, mainly due to Atom’s still high power consumption. Unlike most other ultra-mobile computing platforms, Intel isn’t taking a mobile processing platform such as ARM and boosting its capabilities. Instead Atom is taking Intel’s juggernaut X86 PC processor architecture and scaling it down. PC platforms are very power-hungry, leading Intel’s critics to claim it will be impossible for Atom to ever achieve the power efficiencies of made-for-mobile platforms such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Texas Instruments’ OMAP. Chandrasekher, however, said that Intel is further along than Qualcomm and TI give it credit for. The Moorestown platform already drastically reduces power, and when the first commercial Moorestown modules ship in the 2009 and 2010 timeframe, idle power will be 10 times lower than current Atom-powered devices, Chandrasekher said.