Intel's wireless dreams

It's a massive improvement and one on which Intel is still improving, but according to Qualcomm it's simply not enough. “The baseline they've started from is 10s of watts — 25 or 30 watts for a laptop platform,” said Manjit Gill, director of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “They've got it down to 2 to 3 watts. It's an improvement, yes, but in the mobile space every milliwatt counts.”

Qualcomm's Snapdragon, which it is targeting at embedded consumer electronics, uses an ARM processor that runs at less than 500 milliwatts, and like Intel, it is researching ways of further cutting that power consumption to power the most energy-sensitive devices. Chandrasekher acknowledges that the Atom still has far to go if it is to match the power management levels of the traditional wireless devices, but he added that Intel isn't targeting traditional wireless devices. The devices Intel is targeting will be miniature computers with large 7-inch touch-screens and multimedia and Internet capabilities mimicking those of the PC. But Intel isn't stopping with those types of devices, Chandrasekher said. As Intel scales down the power consumption of Atom, it will scale down the mobile device chain. In two years, Intel already has moved the decimal point on X86's power consumption one digit to the left. Intel can do it again, Chandrasekher said.

“Menlow is just the first generation,” he said. “The next generation will take idle power down by a factor of 10. In the range of competitive solutions, we will be comparable to others in power consumption, but performance-wise we will far exceed them.”