Intel getting closer to phones with LG GW990

This looks like an over-sized iPhone, and is a cross between a tablet and an iPhone. It has a SIM slot, but it has an Intel Moorestown low power Atom CPU and a 4.8 inch screen. So it can run variants of windows and Linux.

I think that Intel needs at least one more generation of even lower power CPUs to get into direct competition with ARM, but this is the closest I've seen so far.

Here is the LG GW990 hands-on from Engadget Mobile at CES

Intel licenses Atom to TSMC

Intel licenses low power Atom CPU design to TSMC. This is another step along the road of bringing the Intel x64 architecture down into low power embedded devices to compete with ARM.

Intel Atom Reviews

The Register has done a useful review of the current state of the Intel Atom CPU systems and motherboards. It is still an order of magnitude more power than a millicomputer, but its an order of magnitude smaller than most other Intel architecture systems, so its interesting to see the current state of the art.

Arm vs. Intel

An article in Infoworld confirms the things I've been talking about for the last year or so.

Arm are responding to the threat from Intel, and talking about low power enterprise servers.

Intel's Low Power Roadmap from CES - Menlow, Moorestown, PATA Z-P140

Some new information released from Intel emphasizes low power devices with their Menlow architecture for 2008, and Moorestown for 2009/10, and states that Solid State Disks based on Flash are the future. They have a high speed parallel ATA interface (PATA) to a module that is 12x18mm, i.e. around the size of a miniSD format, bigger than microSD. However it runs at 40MByte/s read and 30Mbyte/s write speed with an ATA command set, rather than microSDHC C4 at 13MByte/s or C6 at 20Mbyte/s. The Z-P140 runs at 1.1mW idle, and 300mW operating, and has a 2.5Million hour MTBF.

Menlow looks as if its heading down into the millicomputer territory (i.e. entire CPU and memory less than 1000mW), and moorestown is another 10x reduction in power consumption.

More on the Cortex A9

Another update from Ashlee Vance at The Register gives more details on the Cortex A9. They say its a four issue superscalar (the Cortex A8 is dual issue), 8 times the performance of the iPhone CPU, runs at 250mW and should be in devices in around 2010. The A8 was announced in 2005 and three years is a typical lead time for CPU architectures to get into production, so I expect A8 based devices sometime next year, perhaps even a faster iPhone...

There is also some discussion of Intel moving down into this space over the next few years. Excellent! Competition will drive the market to develop faster and I don't personally care what the instruction set is any more (I used to...)

The Future of Millicomputing

There is a gap between the performance and memory capacity of Millicomputers and mainstream CPUs, that gap is shrinking but how fast, and what are the next steps?

The base technology from ARM can be seen in their Cortex designs. These were disclosed in late 2005, but have yet to appear in actual products. The overall performance is around 3-4 times the performance of the current generation of ARM based devices.

Since Intel sold off their ARM based CPU business to Marvell, it leaves them clear to move their core 32bit x86 platform architecture down into the millicomputing space.

So in the next few years, I expect to see x86 and ARM based system on a chip architectures with overlapping performance and power consumption characteristics in the millicomputing space.

Intel's low power plays

There is an interesting "Power Plays" discussion of Intel's focus on low power at Ars Technica.

There is a lot of work going on to optimize current enterprise server designs to use less power, this is good, but its not the order of magnitude difference that a move to Millicomputing based designs would provide.

The most interesting new technology described is an interconnect that uses very low power and which scales its clock rate and power consumption according to the bandwidth demand. This brings variable capacity to the network layer, and I'd love to see some very low power Intel CPUs with this technology integrated.