Intel takes on ARM with Atom chips for smartphones

Intel's new Atom Z6xx series is capable of running games such as Quake 3

Intel has begun a greater push into the mobile device market with new versions of its Atom processor that cut energy consumption sufficiently to fit inside a smartphone or web tablet, while offering greater performance than ARM-based chips, according to the firm.

Announced today, the Intel Atom Z6xx series forms part of Intel's Moorestown platform, and offers a claimed 50-fold reduction in power consumption compared with the previous generation of Atom chips.

Intel said that this is low enough for them to power a mobile handset and offer a battery life comparable to current smartphones.

However, the chipmaker also claimed that its new platform offers a greater level of performance than ARM-based designs for running applications, browsing the web, and video and graphics. Intel also touted compatibility with its other x86 chips as a major advantage for software developers.

Rod O'Shea, director of Intel's embedded group for EMEA, commented that smartphones are just "computers that happen to make phone calls", and that the technology shown today "hits the sweet spot for this environment".

Devices based on the platform are set to ship in the second half of 2010, according to Intel, but the firm declined to name any vendor aiming to market an Atom-based smartphone within this timeframe.

However, Intel did demonstrate to the press a reference handset design running Moblin, alongside a larger 7in tablet system from OpenPeak.

The phone, bearing an Aavamobile badge, was shown running the Quake 3 game in one demonstration, and multi-tasking with a movie playing alongside a running 3D benchmark, and a live video feed open in adjacent windows in another.

Previously codenamed Lincroft, the Atom Z6xx series divides into separate chips aimed at smartphones and tablets. The smartphone chips have clock speeds up to 1.5GHz and use low-power LPDDR memory, while those targeting tablet dev ices run at up to 1.9GHz and support standard DDR2.

Both have built-in PowerVR 3D graphics acceleration, plus hardware acceleration for video encoding and decoding. In fact, Intel claimed that Moorestown is the only smartphone platform capable of handling high-definition 1080p video.

Design features helping to save power include new ultra-low power idle states, Operating System Power Management (OSPM), and a technology called Intel Burst Performance, which is similar to the Turbo mode on Intel's Core chips.

OSPM uses an operating system-level utility to monitor which functional blocks of the processor are not being used, and powers these off completely.

Meanwhile, power consumption while idle is reduced to about 100 microwatts in the new SOi3 power state. More importantly, the Atom can come out of this in just a few milliseconds, according to Intel, so that it can 'wake up' to deal with an incoming call, for example.