Under the hood of most netbooks lies a tiny Intel Atom chip. Intel’s low-power processor has fast become the silicon of choice for tiny computers — but not cellphone makers. Until last week’s Nokia-Intel partnership, most handset makers showed almost no interest in the world’s biggest maker of PC processors.
Meanwhile, Intel rival ARM, whose chips are packaged and sold through companies such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments, has gained nearly 90 percent of the cellphone processor market.
“Traditionally cellphones have been designed on the ARM processor and it is not easy to change it,” says Jack Gold, principal analyst with consulting firm J. Gold Associates. “And cellphone makers don’t want to. ARM-based chips have a significant advantage over the current generation Atom processors for quite a few reasons.”
Intel is being held back in the mobile sphere by its inability to offer power consumption on par with ARM’s chips, say analysts. Add to that the notion that Atom is untested for mobile phones and the fact that many proprietary mobile-phone operating systems are not compatible with Intel’s x86 architecture, and it makes breaking into the cellphone market an uphill climb.
It’s not for want of trying. Over the past few years, Intel has tried to crack open the mobile market with the XScale technology, before selling it to Marvell in 2006. Last month, Intel said it will buy Wind River Systems, a company that creates software for embedded applications in small consumer electronics and cars.
Now Intel is betting that the next version of the Atom family, which it plans to release in early 2010, will further its plans to get into phones. Also, Intel’s partnership with Nokia could result in a new chipset architecture targeted at mobile devices, the two companies say, although they have not provided any details.
Intel says it is isn’t concerned about its lack of a mobile foothold in the market today. It’s looking to the future. The current generation of Atom processor was never meant to go on cellphones, says Pankaj Kedia, a director in Intel’s ultra mobility group. Instead the company is counting on ‘Moorestown,’ the next generation of Atom processor to please cellphone manufacturers.
“Atom today is not suitable for cellphones,” acknowledges Kedia. “But Moorestown will deliver the same level of performance as today’s Atom but with a 50x reduction in idle power and a 3x reduction in power when you are playing 720p video.”
Intel needs to grab a slice of the cellphone market as its traditional turf — PCs — shrinks. Research firm Gartner expects PC sales for 2009 to reach 257 million units worldwide, while 269.1 million cellphones were sold in the first quarter of 2009 alone. Though smartphones, which require powerful processors, are still a small percentage of the overall phones market, it is a fast growing segment.
“There is no doubt that Intel wants to be in the cellphone business,” says Gold. “We are talking about a category where it can sell hundreds of millions of chips a year.”
Unlike PCs, where power management is important but not a deal-breaker, cellphones are all about the battery life. Though the latest smartphones offer advanced audio, video and picture capabilities, customers still expect long battery life from their phones. And unlike in the PC business where Intel has to contend with just one big rival in the form of AMD, a number of companies have sprung up offering repackaged ARM processors.
The current ARM Cortex-A8 is shipping in the new PalmPre (using Texas Instruments OMAP 3430), the new iPhone 3GS (using Samsung’s version). Qualcomm’s SnapDragon chip also based on the Cortex-A8 instruction set has been announced in Toshiba’s new smartphone.
Independent benchmarks on ARM vs. Atom power consumption are hard to come by. Both Intel and ARM use their own marketing spin to prove one is superior to the other, depending on whose brochure you are reading at the moment.
But analysts are clear that ARM right now ranks much well ahead of Intel Atom.
Consider these numbers for a moment (from ARM). For a 1000 mAH battery, the Intel Atom Z500 Atom processor running at 800 MHz offers 19 hours of sleep time and overall battery life of 7 hours. An ARM Cortex-A8 at 800 MHz offers weeks of sleep time and 6.9 days of average battery life — an order of magnitude greater..
“Of course Intel will argue that this is based on the current N270 Atom, not Moorestown,” says Will Strauss, principal analyst at market research firm Forward Concepts. “And ARM will respond with ‘by the time Moorestown rolls out, we’ll have clients shipping Cortex-A9 based processors, and they will be even more lower-power’,” says Strauss.
Details about the upcoming platform’s power consumption and management capabilities are scarce. Intel has said the Moorestown platform consumes up to 10 percent lower less idle power compared to current Atom based processors. But there’s not enough detail to satisfy analysts.
“We don’t have a sample of Moorestown,” says Strauss. “All we have are Intel’s statements that keep changing and are rather hazy around the details.”
Even if Intel can deliver a successful cellphone chip in Moorestown, finding a foothold in the cellphone market won’t be easy, says Strauss. “A lot of the cellphone OS and software is not ported on to x86,” he says. “Doing that will take time and commitment from handset manufacturers.”
Strauss estimates it could take up to two years to get handset makers get their OS operating systems compatible with Atom. Intel says handset manufacturers may never have to, since it is working on Moblin, a new operating system targeted at pocket-sized devices.
“We don’t think today’s phone operating systems are the right ones,” says Kedia. “They were written for voice phones, not for next generation smartphones and that’s our pitch with Moblin.”
It’s an extremely ambitious goal and for now the odds are not in Intel’s favor. “If they ship a chip for cellphones next year, it won’t be substantial,” says Strauss.
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Photo: Atom processor/Intel
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