After Atom, Intel's low power roadmap focuses on three chipsets targeting smaller devices, including Mobile Internet Devices and smartphones.

CORP TALK: UMPC Portal has just released some interesting slides from a forward-looking (ie. it’s only on paper) investor presentation by the Ultra Mobility group showing the positioning of its Menlow, Moorestown and Medfield chipsets within its low power roadmap over the upcoming two years.

With an addressable market of more than 400 million, expect to see Intel consider a push into low power chips into the handheld market over the next few years.

One of the slides (right) shows a 2011 forecast for Medfield, which is based on a 32-nm process, in relation to Moorestown (45nm) and Menlow (45nm). Medfield will continue to retain Intel’s power reduction strategy first started with the Atom but targeted at smartphones. 

Another slide (left) shows why designing a chipset for the smartphone market is vital, considering it’s a total addressable market of more than 400 million.

As the Intel Atom chipset focuses on MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and productivity devices (like mini-notebooks), Menlow satisfies low power demands from devices like MIDs, Portable Media Players, Game Consoles and navigation devices.

Moorestown, which is targeted for 2010, will aim for high-end smartphones while Medfield seems to be gunning for mainstream smartphones by 2011. (Editor opinions: 2)

David Chieng, Editor, HWM Singapore

David (HWM Singapore): Despite so much forward planning from Intel (and other companies like VIA, ATI and NVIDIA, etc.) on innovating towards improving power efficiency in CPU and GPU technologies, the bottom line is that battery technology has hit the literal wall.

Technologists are working their way around the problem by designing much smaller and power efficient devices, leaving more room to house bigger batteries.

More effort needs to be spent on improving battery technology itself, rather than designing hardware which consume less with each successive generation. After all, from gulping power to slurping electricity, the next obvious step is to sip. After that, just how much lower can you go?

Vijay Anand, Editor, HardwareZone.com

Vijay (HardwareZone.com): 2011 is a very long time away before Intel can produce a comfortable platform solution that can fit within mainstream smartphones. But that’s only when the new platform is available.

Factoring the time required for a an actual products refresh with lot of testing, validation and clearance from regulatory boards, it will easily be a year more before anyone might be showing off an Intel-inside mainstream smartphone. By then, the competition would have moved a fair bit forward.

The XScale processor is the fifth generation in the ARM architecture. Intel sold the PXA family of its XScale series to Marvell in 2006.

As highlighted in our article, Intel is actually getting back into the ball game where it once had a decent foothold with its XScale processors (now a property of Marvell).

The reason for the previous departure is because XScale uses a different microarchitecutre which Intel wanted to streamline engineering resources and focus on the x86 architecture for all their processors in recognition of this ISA’s excellent hardware/software support and interoperability.

This late re-entry will certainly come at a cost since its competition would also have evolved to support the needs of the mobile phone industry. With Moorestown not yet in sight, we’ll have to wait quite a while to find out how if Intel’s faith in the x86 architecture alone can help them regain and carve themselves a market.