IDF San Francisco |Does Intel want to be the 'i' in iPhone? A very familiar-looking concept 'mobile Internet device' built around the all-in-one Moorestown superchip sure makes things seem that way.
After famously winning Apple's computer business, Intel appears to have its sights set on providing the powerplant for the iPhone and its descendants.
 No stretch of the imagination: Intel's latest concept UMPC looks like an elongated iPhone |
During this morning's session on mobile Internet devices, Intel's senior veep for ultra mobility Anand Chandrasekher produced a prototype device which looked like a stretch limo version of the iPhone which he spruiked as "mostly all screen, you can read it very nicely; it's very slim, very thin."
 Hey Steve, lookie here: of Intel and Apple, UMPCs and iPhones, Anand Chandrasekher says "Hopefully sometime in the future our paths may meet” |
"I love the iPhone" admitted Chandrasekher. "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".
 It's in the cards: Menlow packs everything from the processor to wireless into a mini-motherboard |
The slim silver non-iPhone was based on the Moorestown platform, which is the successor to the Menlow UMPC platform (built around the Silverthorne CPU) due in mid-2008. While Chandrasekher played coy with specific details on Moorestown, he said the goal was a 10x reduction in power usage by the time the system shipped in 2009-2010. A slide on Moorestown indicated it would be a ‘system on a chip' which included a 45nm core, graphics and memory controller on a single die - all of which would meet his promise that Moorestown would halve the size and power consumption of mobile Internet devices.
Multicore is also part of the MID's future, says Chandrasekher. "The Internet is not going any less complex" he said, harking back to Intel's mantra of the Internet - and especially social networking, which he claimed is responsible for 25% of traffic on the Internet today - being the driver for ultra-mobile devices.
"The Internet is only getting more complex, more dynamic. And as it moves to a handheld environment it will demand more performance. We're not short on performance today, we are actually delivering what is needed over the next several years. It's a matter of balancing power, cost and performance. When all of those hit the sweet zone, of course we'll offer multi-core."
In addition to heavily spruiking the benefits of Intel's IA silicon architecture over the ARM chips that dominate the mobile market (including the iPhone, which runs a Samsung ARM processor), this morning's presentation noticeably relegated Microsoft to a single token PowerPoint slide whereas key executives from Canonical and Adobe both got a walk-on spot to spin their ultra-mobile wares.
 Off the AIR: an ASUS handheld running a beta of Adobe's AIR-based Adobe Media Player, which can run offline or offline |
Live demonstrations featured a Compal device unit with WiMAX running Canonical's Ubuntu for Mobile Internet Devices distro, and an Asus UMPC running a beta of Adobe Media Player, which uses Adobe's AIR offline run-time environment to play music and video offered through online ‘channels'.
David Flynn is attending IDF San Francisco 2007 as a guest of Intel Australia