David Flynn20 August 2008, 9:00 AM
Intel is working on slotting a third-gen Atom processor into the Apple iPhone.
For Intel, the question of putting an x86 chip inside Apple’s iPhone is less about “if” than “when” – and that “when” could be two years away.
The chipmaking colossus put the subject on the table at the 2007 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco by showcasing a
prototype Mobile internet device looking like a stretch limo version of the iPhone. “I love the iPhone" admitted Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group. “Apple is a bastion of innovation in their own right, and we are an innovator in our own right. Hopefully sometime in the future our paths may meet”.
That ‘sometime’ now looks likely to be around 2010. Speaking with apcmag.com in San Francisco before the 2008 IDF kicks off tomorrow, Intel veep Stephen Smith said that Atom processor still had a ways to go before it would be ready for a device like the iPhone.
While designed from the ground up for small size and low power consumption, even the tiniest and most parsimonious members of today’s first-generation Atom family – the Z-series chips previously codenamed Silverthorne, with a power scale from 65 milliwatts to 2 watts – are built for mobile internet devices with screens from 4.5 to 6 inches. Those are very different beasts to Apple’s iPhone, with its slimmer factor, telephony-centred role and 3.5 inch display.
Two things needed to happen before the Atom would be suitable for the iPhone, Smith said. The first was drastically reduced power consumption, which had to move “from milliwatts to microwatts”.
This dovetails into stage two – the transition of Atom from being a stand-alone processor to an SoC (system-on-chip) package which integrates a 45nm processor core (or perhaps multiple cores), graphics processor and memory controller on a single piece of silicon.
That superchip design is slated for the second-gen Atom platform due in 2009 and codenamed Moorestown, although Smith allowed that the pieces might not all fall perfectly into place until the shift from Moorestown’s 45nm microarchitecture to the 32nm third-gen Atom platform in 2010. “That’s when we’ll really be in a leadership position”, Smith said.
David Flynn is attending IDF Fall 2008 in San Francisco as a guest of Intel.