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Updated: Intel rewrites Atom road map
Rick Merritt
5/17/2011 12:03 PM EDT
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Intel will quicken the pace at which it rolls out new Atom core designs, drive down the target power of its notebook chips and expand the thermal range of its SoCs. The moves mark its latest effort to drive its x86 chips into smartphones and tablets and counter mounting competition from ARM-based chips.
"We decided our road map is inadequate, and we needed to change the center point," said chief executive Paul Otellini in an analyst meeting here, claiming the shift will be as significant as the debut of its Pentium and Centrino designs.
Specifically, Intel will roll out a 14nm Atom core called Airmont in 2014, the same time it debuts mainstream PC CPUs using the process technology. Intel's current Atom core is based on a 45nm process, lagging its PC chips by a generation.
Over the next three years, Intel will accelerate Atom designs, rolling out a 22nm core called Silvermont in 2013. It is already demonstrating a 32nm core in its Medfield processor geared for smartphones and tablets that could ship in 2012.
The acceleration of new Atom designs will create a "very compelling road map [that] doubles the pace of Moore's Law" progress for the architecture, Otellini said.
Separately, starting at the 22nm node Intel is shifting the focus of its notebook designs to a 15W power target down from 40W today. In addition, it will broaden the scope of its SoC designs to cover chips that range from less than a Watt to nearly 10W.
The changed focus will translate to "a complex set" a host of micro-architecture and circuit level shifts for Intel engineers, said Dadi Perlmutter, general manager of the Intel Architecture group. "It changes the way you do power management, how you handle parallelism in graphics and media and more," he said.
Meanwhile Otellini pledged Intel will have in the first half of 2012 a major smartphone design for Medfield, the 32nm version of Atom. The company is recovering from the loss of a key partner in Nokia, which recently decided to embrace Windows Phone 7, abandoning work on Medfield.
"We didn’t sit down and mope," said Otellini."We had been working with Nokia very closely almost exclusively, [so] we have freed up those people and turned that [design] into a reference design that we are shopping to a number of companies," he said.
Perlmutter showed the Medfield smartphone design and a seven-inch tablet design running the Gingerbread version of Google's Android. The company is porting to the x86 Google's Honeycomb, the tablet version of Android, and expects to have a 10-inch tablet reference design and developers kit ready before the end of the year.
Medfield will run at milliwatt power levels that are competitive with today's 40nm smartphone chips, Perlmutter said. The chip sports just a single core at a time when competitors are rolling out dual-core chips, but the Atom core will deliver better performance than the competition, he said.
Otellini said Intel now has 2,000 design wins for Atom, 21 percent of them conversions from other architectures, mainly ARM. Intel showed a handful of tablets and netbooks from companies including Fujitsu and Viewsonic using its Pine Trail and Oak Trail processors, part of a group of as many as 35 tablet design wins for Atom.
Otellini also renewed a long time Intel commitment to make the PC a more consumer-friendly device. He promised within the next 24 months, tablet-like ultrathin consumer PCs running multiple OSes and supporting all-day battery life.
"This is about reinventing the PC, making it more of a consumer electronics device," Otellini said.
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chanj
5/17/2011 4:58 PM EDT
Double the pace of Moore's Law caught my eyes. With the new tri-gates, the low power Atom is expected. 15W seems high for mobile phone. Yet, it will be good for laptop and tablet. Typical consumers may choose GUI over the processing power and/ or power consumption. Will the low power Atom get an edge over ARM in the tablet market?
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dirk.bruere
5/17/2011 5:25 PM EDT
Nokia - first Microsoft and now moving to Intel?
It sounds desperate and terminal. Like history in reverse.
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Frank Eory
5/17/2011 6:27 PM EDT
Seriously, 15 watts?
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abraxalito
5/17/2011 8:27 PM EDT
"We decided our road map is inadequate, and we needed to change the center point,"
Why no sackings of marketing bods? That's a huge fail.
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abraxalito
5/17/2011 8:30 PM EDT
"This is about reinventing the PC, making it more of a consumer electronics device,"
Totally clueless! The PC can never be a true consumer electronics device because its open. Tinkering with CPUs does precisely zero to address this.
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przem
5/17/2011 11:42 PM EDT
Really? Then my Droid phone is not a consumer device, as well as my internet router etc.
What in heavens did you mean by that?
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abraxalito
5/18/2011 5:08 AM EDT
I meant just what I said - a true consumer electronics device is not an open device. Notice you changed my words in deleting the word 'electronics' in the phrase 'consumer electronics'. Your router is open - what do you mean by that? How is your Droid phone open?
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resistion
5/17/2011 9:07 PM EDT
Is this Atom SoC multiple gate oxides? At 14 nm, that will be interesting..
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resistion
5/18/2011 10:31 AM EDT
Quintuple patterning for gates?
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RobDinsmore
5/17/2011 11:16 PM EDT
Finally. I was saying they should do this for years.
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Sudarshan NS
5/18/2011 1:07 AM EDT
Intels SoC are power hungry. Most of the time Intel's claim is wrong. Decide the SoC for a product carefully.
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PHW_#1
5/18/2011 2:02 AM EDT
Next 24 months? is it too slow and late? I will have my iPad4 or iphone 6 by that time. 4-5 generation behind on product definition..... This is really bad. At least 2 generation process technology lead as compared to the whole foundries' offering, it still can't beat others' product offering. Intel should really think seriously what's wrong on its own product roadmap or overall strategy.
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DJAus
5/18/2011 5:39 AM EDT
Will they ditch ACPI along with this?
An Intel invention (as I undertsand it) that has straight jacketed Windows.
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mogulman52
5/18/2011 9:53 AM EDT
I would not count Intel out. They have fought off competitive threats before and won. They have a ton of cash, some of the best engineering talent and great process technology. They feel severely threatened and they will be very focused on fixing this. It will be an exciting next few years.
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Himanshu_Gupta
5/18/2011 12:53 PM EDT
true, but it seems that Intel is desperately trying to gain its dominance in the new segments of tablets and smartphones from ARM.
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abraxalito
5/18/2011 6:57 PM EDT
All those things are important but still not enough. They're showing signs of succombing to 'groupthink'.
Exciting - yes for sure, this is rivetting stuff.
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Himanshu_Gupta
5/18/2011 12:51 PM EDT
It will be pretty exciting to have "tablet-like ultrathin consumer PCs running multiple OSes and supporting all-day battery life...in 24 months".
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wave.forest
5/18/2011 1:11 PM EDT
The march of Darth Vader.
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mike655mm
5/18/2011 3:08 PM EDT
Otellini & Intel have been proven right again & again these last few years when analysts have missed the mark. There are too many here who can't think beyond today's technology and don't really understand how big a game-changer 22nm & 14nm process technology is. Intel knows because they know how they started, see where we're at today, and know what's coming down the pipeline overe the next few years.
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abraxalito
5/18/2011 9:38 PM EDT
OK Mr Smartypants explain to us sluggards exactly how these process nodes change the game.
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rick.merritt
5/18/2011 8:59 PM EDT
Intel's process engineers may indeed save the company's bacon. But I have to say for the first time I came away from a major Intel event thinking their franchise was in serious trouble.
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abraxalito
5/18/2011 9:18 PM EDT
Spot on. See any parallels with this story?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq
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DJAus
5/18/2011 9:51 PM EDT
Nope.
It a played out in reverse, sort of.
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CLiHsing
5/19/2011 2:07 PM EDT
Intel's competitors are thrilled to see Intel stick with x86 for its smartphone processors. Competitors like NVidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung know that the x86 instruction set places Intel at a severe disadvantage in low power devices and in design complexity. On the other hand, they would be very scared if Intel were to adopt the ARM.
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pete.mackay
5/20/2011 5:49 PM EDT
It's a shame the consumer device market has grown so big as to negatively impact other important markets like industrial, aerospace, and medical devices. I agree it's important to focus on low power - don't know anyone who doesn't want that - but life-cycle management is more important in markets not driven by feature-fickle consumers. My clients want processor roadmaps to support their 4-7+ year products, and news reports like this make them nervous.
On the flip side, Intel leads the way in embedded virtualization technologies for complex systems, and the Cortex A15 is ARM's first real adaptation to that realm. The demand for those complex features will only go up as, for instance, more and more consumer devices drive high-speed network demand.
Just make sure you look at the bigger picture before considering Intel down for the count.
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elctrnx_lyf
5/21/2011 3:12 PM EDT
Pete - The market is dictated by the consumer products. Its no wonder the other segments have just need to follow the consumer trend.
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