News Intel launches Atom smartphone chips

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/05/06/intel-launches-z6xx-smartphone-chips/1

 

If they put all of those chips in ONE die... it was great, as far as I know, this "Atom" needs 4 chips to operate...

 

SoC - System on Chip. It's all on one die and just needs a PCB/mobo for connectors, power circuitry, RAM etc.

 

This sounds great...with the mobile market clearly no longer exclusive to just phone use and everyone demanding so much more from smart devices, this has come at a great time. Should be very interesting.

 

"We’re up to four chips at this point, but you need at least one more. While modern day smartphone SoCs ship with on-package memory, Intel doesn’t yet support that. "

It's here http://www.anandtech.com/show/3696/...600-series-the-fastest-smartphone-processor/3

(sorry for the link BT)

 

They're not going to move power management and IO directly onto the same die any time soon, as the power is best kept away and to move all the IO, the footprint of the chip would get bigger and bigger for all the connections (pins/lga)

IMO.

 

Too big. And likely to be fairly power-hungry, despite what they say (although I live in constant hope).

Also, what exactly is the GPU core going to be? I hope they're smart and are using something from Imagination Tech, or they'll find they've shot a rather large hole in their foot.

 

I'd never say no to a faster chip for mobiles but I doubt that Intel's going to deliver.

 

fail attempt by Intel technically, but will be a win due to their marketing department.


it will be more power hungry than ARM's IP's, it will be less flexible, it will make battery life shorter and it will be slower than standard Atom (thus can't run desktop grade x86 programs)

so, what's the point?

 

Nokia, please do NOT put this in your next N9XX series, no matter how hard Intel begs you.

 

Yeah Nokia lets not put a better chip inside your smartphone please, I'm beggin you!

Intel doesn't need to beg for anything, that will be AMD you're thinking of!

 

Well, Intel might say, well since we collaborated for the MeeGo project, why not consider our chips?

The N900 was fat enough with OMAP3430 - and with Intel's 5 chip solution, the mind is boggled.

 

It'll be interesting to see the actual power draw and performance levels when they actually go on sale.

 

I take back my words. I went to read Anand's thoughtful editorial (as per normal) and now I'm salivating over how hard the N9XX series would ROCK if Intel's published figures are true.

Sub 2 seconds SunSpider benchmark? Thats roughly just 4 times slower than my Q6600! It even whoops Atom's ass!

Medfield will pwn even harder.

 

I'm very interested as to when this will hit the mainstream market! Hopefully sometime soon =D

 

the 1ghz snapdragon processor is more than enough for a smartphone, its the quality of the programming on software that counts.

 

If everyone thought like you, we'd be stuck with Intel 8080s even now.

 

Seems to be the reduction in power consumption is just going to be nullified by the number of supporting chips needed. While the likes of ARM are building everything into a single chip and calling it a true SoC, Intel throws everything off and calls that a SoC. Perhaps System-off-Chip?

Well anyway, if it indeed lives up to rumored numbers then it will be impressive to say the least.

I won't get an Intel-based smartphone if they existed though. I think there's enough Intel all over the place and we're still kind of stuff in x86 land. Bring back MIPS and here's to hoping ARM designs keep getting better.

 

I won't say that Intel is bad. Intel brings with it its heavyweight class ability, which will hopefully force ARM to innovate even harder, bringing better and better products faster. Also, if Intel learns from the mobile space, desktop computing would benefit - sub 1W standby for the Core i7 platform?

 

While Intel quoted some impressive power usage numbers while performing a number of common smartphone tasks including 3G calls, they didn't quote power usage numbers for the Javascript benchmark, or for running Quake III. Expectations are that this Atom chip collection will be an absolute powerhog, on-par with a netbook.

So it requires five chips including one memory chip, and you can't actually use its whole feature set unless you want to run out of juice in half an hour. Brilliant.