Intel’s second-gen Atom platform, Moorestown, positions the chip giant to have a killer smartphone and MID platform in 2010. The old Atom Z5xx drawbacks seem fixed. Why does Moorestown rock, and will it be enough to let Intel advance in this market?
Imagine you’re running a 3DMark graphics demo at perfectly fluid frame rates. Then imagine you’re watching 720p, 8,000 Kb/s video at a steady 30 FPS. And just for giggles, pile on a camera with a little videoconferencing app showing you streaming at the same 30 FPS. Now put all three apps on the same screen. Not earth shattering for one system to pull off, by any stretch, but not bad, right?
Now, imagine all three of those apps running with that level of performance on the smartphone in your pocket.
Impossible, you say. There isn’t a phone in the world right now that can play video at those rates, never mind having the other two tasks running concurrently with no performance impairment. Well, my friends, I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.
Today, Intel goes public with its Atom Z600 processor series. Perhaps netbook performance has left you uninspired. Perhaps Intel’s prior-gen ultramobile platform (meaning smartphones and mobile Internet devices, or MIDs) left such an indifferent impression on you that you’re now asking, “What? Intel had a phone chip?” Rest assured that the Z600 is a different beast altogether.
The company invited Tom’s Hardware to its Austin, Texas ultramobility development center for a pre-launch peek at the platform that has until now been called “Moorestown.” This wasn’t another fluffy press tour. Intel left no doubts that it is serious about this market segment, and was prepared to explain in extensive detail why Moorestown was a game-changer.
So buckle up and give your current phone one last gaze of admiration. You might not be as enamored with it by the time we’re done.
To paraphrase vice president Biden, this is a big f—ing deal. After attending this Moorestown briefing, I walked away fairly convinced that I’d just seen the future of mainstream computing. No, I’m not saying that I think 40% of the market will be toting around Moorestown-based devices next year. I mean that, if certain requisite elements are in place, I see no reason why the median form factor used for computing shouldn’t continue its march from the desktop to the pocket.
Look at these recent numbers from IDC. Desktops are done as a growth vector. Intel and AMD can continue their architectural arms race until the cows come home, but desktop PCs are going to become less and less of a market interest as their static sales become an ever-smaller piece of the computing pie.
In contrast, mobile PC sales are going to more than double in the U.S. over the next five years, and the growth rate worldwide is even higher. Mind you, this only extends down to nettop systems. IDC’s numbers don’t account for handhelds or tablets, which IDC is now “keenly focused on,” according to a recent press release.
Look at the 20-year trend. We’ve gone from a market comprised almost entirely of desktops to one now dominated by laptops. Mobile PCs started outselling their desktop counterparts back in mid-2005. Netbooks arrived in earnest during 2008, and now the diminutive form factor seems to be cannibalizing notebooks. Last year, NPD reported that “once they got home, 60 percent of buyers said they never even took their netbooks out of the house.” In July 2009, DisplaySearch released netbook sales numbers showing that notebook sales actually decreased, while netbooks grew 136.9% year-over-year.
If the mainstream computing market is really more about decreasing size than increasing speed or functionality, then it should have come as no surprise a month ago when Bloomberg Businessweek ran an article that said despite netbooks accounting for 26% of all PCs sold during the prior holiday season, “netbooks' popularity may already have peaked.” IDC numbers show netbook growth plummeting from prior-year levels. The article indicates that while several factors may be behind a 2010 fall-off in netbook interest, the arrival of Apple’s iPad and its imminent horde of competitors may be to blame as the industry looks for “the next big thing.”
Add it all up. While no one disputes that desktops will remain important for several applications, particularly at the high-end, the mainstream will continue to place its dollars into smaller form factors. The only reason people haven’t viewed smartphones as computing devices so far is because they haven’t been powerful enough to take over mainstream computing needs. With Moorestown, I believe we’ve reached a crossover point where that’s no longer the case, and if that’s the case, we’re now in a place where your next phone may also be your next PC.
Now, I may be totally wrong about my phone-as-mainstream-PCs thesis. Once I started asking questions in this vein, and about how phones might soon cannibalize desktop and laptop sales, only at much lower price points, Intel reps were quite prompt about trying to divert me from the notion. “That’s not how people use these devices,” commented one rep. I wanted to reply, “Maybe. Then again, they’ve never been able to use these devices in that way.”
Ironically, it was Intel’s opening commentary at the briefing that set me down this thought path. One presenter noted how tomorrow’s smartphones would allow buyers to “get a powerful computer that also happens to make phone calls.” With Moorestown, the company added, “this really hits you in the head.”
As usual, Intel assiduously avoided mentioning rival phone platforms by name, but reps did observe that today’s top three to five smartphones are “increasingly becoming handheld computers.” The company even did an informal study of these leading phones and paid close attention to the first 20 words or so of the marketing on their Web pages. In every case, not one product talked about making phone calls. Instead, the marketing lingo targeted four primary performance vectors that consumers now demand: compute, graphics, video, and Web.
Purists can sit around and debate which phone has better voice quality and reception, but Intel’s point came through loud and clear. Voice functionality is now a checkbox item. All it has to do is be good enough. The public doesn’t demand anything better anymore, at least from a phone. Of course, demands on carriers are a different matter entirely. AT&T, can you hear me now? One of the press managers in Intel’s group noted that her daughter logs in an average of 30 minutes of voice time on her phone per month—and 3,800 texts. That’s not even the future of “phone” usage. That’s now.
The next checkbox item is battery life. The reality is that we all charge our phones every night. Occasionally, some unforeseen adventure or bout of brain impairment might result in needing to stretch for three or four days, but it’s rare to need a phone’s standby battery time to last for more than 48 hours. This is why you never saw a handset based on Intel’s former ultramobile processor, the Atom Z5xx, code-named Silverthorne and part of the Menlow CPU/chipset/wireless platform. Despite having a 2.4W TDP, active battery life under Menlow was atrocious. Given reports of Menlow-based devices like the JooJoo tablet only lasting 2.5 hours under moderate use (compared to the iPad’s 10+ hours), no wonder Silverthorne has kept a microscopically low profile on store shelves.
But what if battery runtime were no longer a problem? What if Intel could check the 48-hour box and move on? OK, a little spoiler here: Intel did. Moorestown smashes the power problems faced by former Atom designs, and in a minute I’ll show you how. Fixing the power problem entailed a lot of rethinking and innovation on Intel’s part, and this leads me to a final thought (for now) on the long-term significance of Moorestown. Look at this:
In general, Intel (and the rest of the processor world with it) has been in the habit of innovating from the top down. The Nehalem launch was another in a long line of examples. New architectures and technologies are made for the top of the market, then they gradually filter down into cheaper and smaller implementations.
With Moorestown, though, I see a development reminiscent of the Pentium M. This is innovation from the bottom up, because there’s a lot more to Moorestown than just a power breakthrough. The Z6xx is also Intel’s first fully integrated System on Chip (SoC). The Clarkdale-based Core i5 and Core i3 cram processing and graphics into the same socketed package, but the Z6xx actually builds them into the same die, a feat Intel has never released before. Did Intel have the capability to do an SoC before now? Of course. But not until now, in this product segment, did it make sense to bring an SoC to market. Intel had to fix its power issues before any other steps made sense, including pushing an SoC up the processor chain into tablets (still virtually a dead segment until the iPad’s release), netbooks, nettops, and perhaps even notebooks.
We don’t know yet how much influence the Atom family will have on the entire spectrum of computing devices, but it’s clear that innovation is no longer only a top-down affair. Breakthroughs are going to be coming fast and furious from the bottom, and their impact on the middle 80% of the market may become much more significant than changes happening at the top.
Keep in mind that there are multiple families and architectures within the Atom processor family. In this article, we’re specifically focused on Moorestown and the Z-series, which is aimed at handhelds and tablets. There’s also the N-series for netbooks, the CE-series for TVs, D-series chips for entry-level desktops (D), an embedded series , and a future family “for gadgets” about which Intel wouldn’t even divulge a code-name. The ways in which these series differentiate are largely based on power profiles and performance expectations. We’re not to the point with Atom where one architecture, such as Core 2 or Core i3/5/7, applies to the entire stack. Perhaps it never will.
With Menlow, we had a platform architecture much like the classic PC design—a standalone CPU on top, with an integrated chipset below, similar to the old school northbridge and southbridge being combined into a single Platform Controller Hub (PCH). The Poulsbo chipset crammed in everything but the kitchen sink, and did it all on a relatively giant 130 nm fab process.
The architectural difference in jumping to Moorestown is massive. All that gets retained of the former chipset is the I/O complex. Memory, video, and graphics all migrate to the CPU—and not just in the package but on the actual die. Langwell uses a 65 nm process. Lincroft appears to match Silverthorne’s 45 nm process, but Intel is always careful to note that Lincroft uses a “45 nm SoC” process. It’s not the same process as before, or even a “retweaking” of it. Details here get vague.
While Intel maintains that the rest of the industry is still using 65 nm, Lincroft preserves Silverthorne’s 45 nm process. Recall that Intel’s 45 nm node was notable for its adoption of hafnium high-k dielectric technology, which got a lot of attention when it debuted in the Nehalem microarchitecture. Hafnium high-k, according to Intel, could reduce transistor-level gate leakage by over 100 times compared to the prior silicon dioxide dielectric process used with 65 nm technology. There’s more to Intel’s “LP SoC” process than hafnium, though, but engineers grew cryptic on this point. They stated that with Lincroft there was the “option of multiple transistors” as opposed to Silverthorne having “only one transistor end to end.” Then there were some furtive glances between the engineers and the press crew, and Intel would say no more on the matter. I suppose everyone is entitled to their hard-earned secret sauce.
The dimensional upshot of the Moorestown architecture is that we now have a 30% die reduction, a 40% package reduction, and a 50% motherboard reduction, reflecting significant consolidation across the platform. You’ll often see the Moorestown CPU package specified at 13.8 mm x 13.8 mm (Silverthorne was 25 mm2), but the actual die measures only 7.34 mm x 8.89 mm. One former Menlow reference design for handsets measured 75 x 148 mm. An equivalent Moorestown reference board I saw measured 69 x 130 mm, and that was with over one-third of the board surface sitting empty for an on-board battery.
Hardware without software makes for a very nifty doorstop. As mentioned earlier, Intel has developed a tight allegiance to the Linux-based MeeGo OS, formerly known as Moblin before Intel and Nokia partnered to develop and promote it more heavily. MeeGo gives Intel the ability to have one environment span across the embedded, handset, MID, and netbook/nettop segments with a unified software stack. Of course, these days you can’t touch a phone platform without first asking about app support and a foofy app store front end.
Well, Intel does have an app store for MeeGo: the awkwardly named AppUpCenter. When AppUp was announced last January at CES, Intel promised that netbook OEMs would be supporting it. However, Intel’s site is still in beta, and it remains to be seen how much third-party support materializes. According to Austrialia’s TechWorld, AppUp passed the 200-title mark last month, and that was with Intel motivating developers with some monetary incentives.
Am I going to declare MeeGo a sure success in the making? Only about as fast as I’ll expect an effective overhaul of American healthcare. In both cases, you’ve got a big player fighting uphill against a much larger, deeply entrenched, and competing infrastructure. I wish Intel all the best on this front, but my money is on Android being a bigger hit. I’m not sure that Nokia’s allegiance to MeeGo, which is now effectively Maemo 6, will be enough to propel into the top OS ranks.
As of today’s launch on May 4, 2010, it’s anybody’s guess what will happen with MeeGo. On one hand, just a week ago, we saw the LG GW990 phone officially vanish into pre-release hell. The GW990 had been the Moorestown poster child ever since CES in January. I should have suspected something amiss in the air when Intel only focused on the Aava Mobile and OpenPeak designs at the Moorestown briefing, almost totally ignoring the GW990. Could this be fallout from Intel’s bosom-buddying up with Nokia and the fact that Nokia released its first MeeGo port for the N900 to developers a month earlier?
Of course, some users won’t care. So long as devices sync properly with user data, whether local or cloud-based, and run the applications the user needs in a way that’s compelling and effective, that will be enough for plenty of buyers. I got to fiddle about with the Aava Mobile smartphone and OpenPeak tablets for a few minutes at Intel’s briefing, and my first impressions of MeeGo were very positive. Is it better than iPhone OS or Android? Am I going to marry it based on the hands-on equivalent of a MySpace posting? It’s way too early for answers. Let’s do some premarital cohabitation with a review unit or two and see where things lead.
How big of a deal is Moorestown to Intel? Two of the first factoids Intel dropped at its briefing were these: 1) Globally, there will be one billion more new “connected” users by 2015 than there are today. 2) By 2015, there will be 10 billion connected devices in use. How much of this will be PCs versus non-PCs? In June of 2008, Gartner declared that “the number of installed PCs worldwide has surpassed 1 billion units” and that “it will surpass 2 billion units by early 2014.” Even assuming that Intel’s projection is overly optimistic and that a large swath of these future “connected devices” will be things like gaming consoles, connected cars, or whatever, we’re still talking about multiple billions of connected handheld devices in use. Is this feasible? Considering that the International Telecommunications Unions’ 2009 annual report pegged global mobile phone usage at 4.6 billion units, yeah—I’d say billions of “PC-like” handhelds is totally feasible. Intel might just sell more ultramobile processors in the next five years than it has sold into the PC market over its entire history.
Looking back across the last couple of weeks, taking in the specifics of Moorestown, its evolution, and what information Intel has fed (and not fed) to the press, I believe that this launch is roughly equivalent to the arrival of Conroe and the Core 2 family. Conroe put a final stake through the heart of NetBurst and confirmed Intel’s commitment to abandoning frequency as the central measure and means of processor performance. It led Intel down a different path for desktops and notebooks and allowed Intel to keep up a pace of innovation that competitors have been unable to match.
I believe Moorestown, and especially the Lincroft SoC architecture, will do the same for Intel’s ultramobility pursuits. Silverthorne was simply a warm-up, a prelude. Are there still blemishes waiting to be discovered in shipping Moorestown devices? Almost certainly. It seems very unlikely that even Intel could go from a chip as maligned as the original Atom to a miraculous revolution in just one generation. I suspect if the platform were that good, I’d have a unit in my hand right this minute. It would rival the iPad, cure the sick, game the stock market, and draw the fairer sex like moths to a flame. Heck, I’d settle for any one of those things.
Who needs a sportscar when you have the hottest new superphone platform? Pankaj Kedia, Intel's top marketing mastermind for Moorestown, struts his wares for the womenfolk. They seem impressed.Who needs a sportscar when you have the hottest new superphone platform? Pankaj Kedia, Intel's top marketing mastermind for Moorestown, struts his wares for the womenfolk. They seem impressed.
No, the message of Moorestown is not that Intel is suddenly the best mobility platform on the planet. Even company reps admitted that the Moorestown scorecard is mixed. Compared to its rivals, Moorestown is allegedly on par for browsing and standby power, trailing on audio playback, and excelling on video—and excelling so much that direct comparisons are often impossible. Moorestown debunks the common belief that IA is too power-hungry to succeed in ultramobility. As of now, IA is ready to fuel the rocket in your pocket.
With power needs met and performance at least on par with the competition, Intel finds itself with a familiar challenge. If the company can scale Atom on ultramobiles in the same way it scaled Core 2, then the future of ultramobility and perhaps mainstream computing seems all but sure to remain in Intel’s corner. One engineer commented, “Intel sees the Internet as a primary means to the end...and the end itself.” If that’s true, if the race in mainstream hardware is really a race to enable the best browsing experiences possible, regardless of size, shape, or location, then Moorestown seems likely to bring that end within Intel’s reach.
