Intel Atom-Z: Powerful Processor for Smartphones

Intel’s plans for entering smartphone market is making sweet progress. Few days back, Intel announced Official Android port to x86, Atom and today they demonstrated the next generation Atom processor that would lay the building blocks of the future smartphones.

ARM currently controls a big piece of the mobile processing market, but Intel is attempting to make a comeback.

To give you an estimate of the power of the new processor, Intel demonstrated Quake 3 running lightning fast (100fps) on one of their custom smartphones powered by Atom-Z (Moorestone), a 45nm chip.

Without a doubt, such performance can also be used to offer flawless smooth HD video output, multitasking apps, and media-rich web browsing giving a desktop-equivalent experience.

Strong on Specs

Chip Power: They run from upto 2.0 GHz and have between 0.65 and 2.0 W TDP rating respectively that can dip down to 0.01 W when idle.

Multithreading, Caches, FSB: It features a 2-issue simultaneous multithreading, 16 stage in-order pipeline with 32 KB instruction L1 and 24 KB data L1 caches, integer and floating point execution units, x86 front end, a 512 KB L2 cache and data transferred at 533 MHz FSB (front-side bus).

Fabrication: The design is manufactured in 9M 45 nm high-k metal-gate CMOS and housed in a 441-ball µFCBGA package

Intel Atom Z vs. ARM Cortex

Intel claims that its latest Atom Z is a better option than popular ARM processors. As per the chip giant, Power consumption is 50x less than current Atom chips, and added advantage being for developers: ” No porting required”, all x86 apps would run as is.

Initially, the Atom Z will be seen in two variants: A 1.5GHz for smartphones, and a 1.9GHz model for Tablet devices, and both platforms run PowerVR 3D graphics acceleration.

Atom-Z Availability

Intel says devices will appear on the market in the 2ndhalf of 2010.

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