Intel Positions Medfield Chips to Take On ARM

 

Intel has not had an easy time convincing people to use its processors in small mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Now the company with the chips that dominate the PC and server markets says it's finally got a part that is compact and energy efficient enough to change that story.

The chip giant is preparing to show off its new mobile System-on-a-Chip (SoC), codenamed Medfield, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Intel has "reference designs" of tablets and smartphones (like the one pictured at left) that sport its new Atom-branded SoC and run Google's popular Android mobile operating system.

Last week, the company gave Technology Review a sneak peek at the prototypes it hopes will convince the likes of Apple, Samsung, and HTC to use Medfield SoCs in next-generation mobile devices rather than the ARM-based chips that currently dominate the market.

Intel's new chips are "a significant technological step toward lower power consumption," according to the tech site, and Medfield is contained on a single piece of silicon, rather than several as earlier generations of Atom SoCs like Moorestown have been.

Those two accomplishments, plus the fact that Medfield appears to be optimized for a living, breathing consumer software platform like Android rather than a largely theoretical one like MeeGo, could at long last put Intel in a position to take market share away from ARM.

Intel has largely watched from the sidelines as mobile device makers have used processors based on the U.K. chip design firm ARM's microarchitecture to power their products in recent years. This despite the fact that Intel actually predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs, several years ago, and built a chip, Atom, for such gadgets.

But what Intel didn't foresee was that ARM-based processors drawing much lower power than the chip giant's x86-based parts—crucial to the battery life of small devices—would be favored by device makers. Designers of ARM chips also had the ability to optimize them for the software platforms that run smartphones and tablets, like Apple's iOS and Google's Android, while building processor platforms to take up just the right amount of circuit board real estate in such devices.

In a broader sense, it seems Intel couldn't recognize that makers of mobile devices and developers of mobile software were building a computing architecture that shared a lot with the older PC-based framework but differed significantly from it. The ARM architecture was more useful to mobile device makers because unlike Intel's architecture, it didn't come pre-loaded with extra circuitry designed to make it backwards-compatible with old Windows-based PC platforms.

In essence, Intel has taken a heck of a long time to realize that mobile devices aren't just little PCs, they're something else entirely. Is Medfield the long-awaited sign that the company finally does get it? As they say, we shall have to wait and see.