During Intel CEO Paul Otellini's CES keynote, we got a brief glimpse of the company's vision for an ultra-mobile future as engendered by the mobile internet device (MID). This week, the chipmaker will flesh out that vision with its first detailed technical paper on Silverthorne, a new low-power processor designed specifically for MIDs, at a technical conference here in San Francisco.
"This is a purpose-built, low-power, IA processor using our 45nm high-K metal gate technology," Intel CTO Justin Rattner said of Silverthorne during a pre-briefing last week. "It's designed for operation of below a watt and up to about 2 watts of power," he continued.
As opposed to simply "an ultra-mobile version of one Intel's mobile processors," Silverthorne, Rattner stressed, is an entirely new micro architecture. As such, it will be specifically targeted at the MIDs Otellini and other company execs have been hyping since last years' Intel Developer Forum.
Intel said it expects these processors to be available sometime in the second quarter of 2008.
During last week's briefing, Rattner also said the new processor will be Intel's smallest in 15 years, and will consume about one tenth the power of a normal laptop processor from Intel. From a competitive standpoint, though, the chipmaker will still face stiff competition in the low-power mobile processor arena.
As IDC's senior mobile analyst Chris Hazelton notes, Intel is still very new to the space. The market for cellphone chips is currently dominated by a design that ARM licenses to other chip manufacturers. Nokia makes extensive use of ARM architecture in its N-Series devices, as do Apple and Nintendo in devices like the iPhone and DS.
Via Technologies, another manufacturer of low-power chips, uses a x86 design developed by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices for its processors.
None of this seems to be dissuading Intel, however. Ultimately, the company may not be looking to compete for real estate in pre-existing devices with Silverthorne, but rather to offer it up as a solution for an entirely new subset of device. Hence the new MID acronym.
Indeed, Intel also probably wants to distance itself for the less than flattering connotations that UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) hold for many people and cozy up to the more "successful" or well received examples in the market.
In fact, if all of this business about ultra portability and Intel's continued use of the "internet in your pocket" catchphrase sounds familiar, it's because Steve Jobs used the exact same phrase to describe the iPhone during his 2007 Macworld keynote.
Indeed, the chipmaker's interest in ultra-mobility (which is nothing new) seems in large part tied to the success of devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch -- which, incidentally, Apple executives recently recharacterized as "the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform, running all kinds of mobile applications."
