Intel Unveils Moorestown and the Atom Z600, The Fastest Smartphone Platform?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 4, 2010 11:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Intel
- Atom
- Mobile
- SoCs
The Memory Controller: 32-bit LPDDR1
The Lincroft SoC (or Atom Z600) measures 13.8 mm x 13.8 mm x 1.0 mm. That’s smartphone SoC sized. In order to hit the small package size and in order to keep power consumption down, the single channel DDR2 memory controller from the netbook Atom is gone. What we have instead is a 32-bit wide LPDDR1 memory bus capable of supporting up to 1GB of memory. At 400MHz that’s about the amount of memory bandwidth we had on PCs 10 years ago.
Intel claims that the majority of workloads on smartphones are compute and not memory bandwidth bound so the reduction in memory bandwidth isn’t going to be an issue. Lincroft's caches are the same as Silverthorne before it (24/32KB L1 + 512KB L2).
Compared to smartphone SoCs today, Intel isn’t really outgunned:
| 2010 Application Processor Comparison | |||||
| Memory Interface | |||||
| Apple A4 | 32-bit LPDDR1/LPDDR2 (?) | ||||
| Intel Atom Z600 | 32-bit LPDDR1 | ||||
| TI OMAP 3430 | 32-bit LPDDR1 | ||||
| TI OMAP 4430 | 2 x 32-bit LPDDR2 | ||||
| NVIDIA Tegra 2 | 32-bit LPDDR2 | ||||
| Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 | 32-bit LPDDR1 | ||||
It’s only next year when products based on TI’s OMAP 4430 chip that we’ll see a real ramp in memory bandwidth. Intel will offer a version of Lincroft for tablets with a 32-bit DDR2-800 interface. It can support a maximum of 2GB of memory.
The Lincroft memory controller has less bandwidth than the netbook version, but it's more efficient as a result. Intel included a lot of optimizations, particularly for graphics to improve bandwidth utilization.
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DanNeely - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I think you're misunderstanding the slide. It's not saying 1024x600 to 1366x768, it's saying upto 1366x768 on interface A, upto 1024x600 on interface B.Mike1111 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Thanks for the clarification. Looks like I really misunderstood this sentence:"Lincroft only supports two display interfaces: 1024 x 600 over MIPI (lower power display interface) or 1366 x 768 over LVDS (for tablets/smartbooks/netbooks)."
uibo - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I wonder how many transistors are there in a Cortex A9 core? Just the core nothing else.For me it seems that ARM could just double or quadruple their core count against the Intel solution while still maintaining lower transistor count.
Also they could just increase the CPU clock speed, if there is a market for the more power-hungry Intel solution the there is one for the ARM also.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I would imagine even less smartphone software is written for multi-core now than was for desktop when dual-core CPUs started appearing in desktops. So going beyond 2 cores at this time is probably not a great move. Plus the dual core A9 isn't out to see power consumption yet, but even at 45nm I doubt it will be much below the current 65nm single-core chips if at all, so if Intel is already competitive then ARM doesn't exactly have the power budget to add cores.uibo - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
That actually makes sense. Nobody is going to write multi-threaded apps for a single thread CPU. I'd imagine that the number of apps, which experience is hindered by performance, is not that great at the moment. Games, browsers, UI, database for the info stored in your device - I'm not expecting these to scale perfectly across many cores but do expect a x0% performance increase.DanNeely - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
The real benefit for the 2nd core is probably multi-tasking. Your streaming music app can run in the background on the second core while your browser still has a full core to render web pages.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Mooresetown has to support a desktop OS. Intel is clearly moving towards wireless computing. They are bringing wireless video. With wireless video you can turn your phone into a desktop pc instantly by adding a wireless monitor and keyboard. What is the point of moving in that direction if you're moving towards a crippled OS? (Not that windows isnt crippled, if you consider obesity a form of cripple.)If it needs a pci bus, then emulate one!
Caddish - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Just registered to say keep up the good work. Since the SSD antology I have red all of your article like that one and they are awesomelegoman666 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Excellent article, very well written.jasperjones - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Anand,You mention twice in the article that Apple and Google dominate the smartphone market. This is utter nonsense. The numbers from IDC as well as the numbers from Canalys clearly show that Nokia is the worldwide leader in the smartphone market. RIM is number 2. Apple is in the third place, the first company that produces Android devices, HTC, has the number 4 spot.
I realize that Nokia's market share in the U.S. is smaller than its global market share. However, even if we restrict ourselves to the U.S. market, RIM smartphone sales are bigger than those of Apple. They are also bigger than the sales of all Android smartphones combined.