Intel's Moorestown heads to smartphones

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Intel has detailed its next mobile platform Moorestown, while looking ahead to when Medfield takes the chip firm into mainstream smartphone territory.

Set to arrive in 2010, Moorestown is Intel’s follow up to Menlow, its current mobile platform.

Intel chief platform architect Shreekant “Ticky” Thakkar said Moorestown would help push Intel into the "high-end" smartphone market, as it was designed specifically for that space.

That said, Intel doesn’t expect its mobile device platform to arrive on mainstream smartphones until successor Medfield hits the scene in 2011, Thakkar told attendees today at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco.

New features

Thakkar outlined some of the improvements Intel has included in Moorestown. It also includes burst mode, which is similar to the Turbo Mode demonstrated earlier today with the new Core i7 mobile processor for notebooks. This means performance can be increased when needed, such as when a user goes to look at a webpage, from zero to over 1Ghz in just a few microseconds.

By shutting down after the work is done, Moorestown can also reduce energy consumption. "This is like having the cake and eating it as well. This is a very, very cool capability,” he said.

Power management is a key feature, with new handset specific-technology being used to keep energy use down, such as turning off pieces not being used. “If you're browsing, you don’t need video decode block to be on, it can be shut down… to keep power low,” he said.

The Moorestown platform will also cut down on device size. “[This] allows us to build a four inch class of device and stay within the thermal envelope,” he added.

Like its predecessor, Moorestown features Hyper-Threading, which will boost performance while maintaining power efficiency, he said. “If you take something like [Google browser] Chrome, you see a direct improvement in performance because it’s a multi-threaded browser using this type of technology,” he added.

But it’s not just about the hardware. “Without the software, the hardware is just a bunch of bits,” said Thakkar. He noted the Atom open source mobile operating system Moblin was key to making devices work, especially when it comes power management.

Click here for more news from the Intel Developer Forum 2009.

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