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
Putting Power in Perspective: Estimated Battery Life of a Moorestown Phone
I wanted to get Moorestown hardware in time for the launch but unfortunately nothing is quite ready yet, so we’ll have to rely on Intel’s data.
As I just mentioned, Intel expects a Moorestown phone to idle at 21 - 23mW. Paired with a 1500mAh battery that’s 10 days of standby time. Intel claims that Snapdragon phones idle at 25mW. If that’s true then Moorestown is competitive.
Audio playback is expected to consume around 120mW of power (for the entire platform, not just the silicon). Intel estimates that’ll get you around 48 hours of continuous music playback. Intel was quick to add that this is better audio playback battery life than anyone else on the market today, although both TI and NVIDIA are promising better battery life than that with their next-generation SoCs (OMAP 4430 and Tegra 2).
| Moorestown Battery Life (Figures by Intel) | |||||
| Total Phone Power Consumption | |||||
| Idle | 21 - 23 mW | ||||
| Audio Playback | 120 mW | ||||
| 1080p Video Playback | 1.1W+ | ||||
| Web Browsing (WiFi) | 1.1W | ||||
| 2G Phone Call | 550 mW | ||||
| 3G Phone Call | 1.2W | ||||
Intel’s video playback estimates are lower than the competition, Moorestown is expected to only provide 5 hours of continuous HD video playback compared to 10 hours on an iPhone 3GS. That comes from 1.1W+ platform power consumption during video playback.
Intel estimates that Moorestown based devices will last about 5 hours when browsing the web on WiFi. Talk times are expected in the 4 - 5 hour range over 3G, and 8 - 10 hours on 2G.
If these numbers hold true in shipping Moorestown devices, I’d expect to see anywhere from iPhone to iPhone 3GS levels of battery life. Audio decoding seems good, while other aspects like video playback aren’t so great. Web browsing power consumption really varies based on the test. I measured power consumption on my iPhone 3GS and saw 1.1 - 1.3W while loading the AnandTech front page. That would imply Moorestown platform battery life could be competitive.
As soon as I can get my hands on some actual hardware I plan on verifying all of this data myself. Intel claims that the top 5 handset manufacturers see power consumption in the 750mW - 1.5W range, so Moorestown should find itself right in the middle of all of them.
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Mike1111 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
IMHO Anand meant app-centric smartphones, David Pogue calls them app phones.jasperjones - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
i don't see how recent symbian devices are not "app centric." you have the publicly available sdk, the ovi store, etc.BrooksT - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
So your argument is that symbian is a bigger player in the app phone market than Apple because their *latest* phones support apps?The "smartphone" / "app phone" semantic difference is annoying, but if we look at, say, number of applications available or downloaded, Symbian and RIM are distant third and fourth places. Likewise with app usage, even just internet browsing.
If you want to talk about smartphones as they existed in 2006, then yes, both Symbian and RIM are much bigger than Apple or Android.
jasperjones - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
To clarify: I said "recent" because the first Symbian smartphones came out almost 10 years ago--of course, those weren't app-centric.My original comment on Anand's article still stands. I'm talking about IDC's and Canalys' reports on 2010:Q1 smartphone sales which became available just days ago. Of course, most of the smartphones sold by Nokia and RIM in the first quarter allow for installation of apps such as Facebook, Ovi Maps, etc., etc.
WaltFrench - Sunday, May 9, 2010 - link
“…Apple and Google dominate the smartphone market. This is utter nonsense.”All you have to do is to look at the developer space. How many app developers are creating apps for the unreleased RIM OS 6? … for the Symbian OS^3, due out in “select” markets sometime in Q3?
If older apps work OK in these new OS incarnations, and if Blackberry and Nokia users are heavy app downloaders (or for some reason will become heavy users), then the current sales-share leaders are relevant, but still not dominant, in the future of app phones.
nafhan - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
I'm curious about the PCI bus requirement for Windows 7 that would prevent it from running on Moorestown devices. Does it have something to do with storage, maybe? I'm having trouble finding specifics online as well. If someone could enlighten me, it would be appreciated.DanNeely - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
This is almost certainly a factor of windows being a monolithic kernel and MS not having any way to say "this PC doesn't do PCI". This is something that MS will have to deal with in the medium term future anyway. PCI slots are going away from some high end mobos; it's only a matter of time before they disappear from mainstream boards and stop being used to attach misc controllers like PATA (slowly going away entirely) or FireWire (FW3200 will need PCIe bandwidth). At that point intel will want to take it out of their chipsets as a cost saving feature, and oems will not be happy if they have to install a PCIe to PCI bridge to maintain windows compatibility.Drizzt321 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Maybe HP/Palm should get with Intel and optimize WebOS for this. Much of the WebOS stack is just Linux, Webkit, plus other F/OSS stuff like gstreamer and the like so I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't as big an effort as, say, Symbian or anything like that.This could be a big break for Intel and HP/Palm, since HP/Palm needs something big to help it move on to the next WebOS device, and the OS could certainly see some benefits to more CPU power. I've heard the overclocking patches raising the CPU to 800MHz can really help things.
sleepeeg3 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Please stop designing faster phones.Phone A lasts 24 hours standby
Phone B lasts 6 hours standby
After 6 hours, Phone B's battery is dead. How much use do you get out of a phone with a dead battery? 0.
999GHz x 0 is still... 0!
This push toward faster phones, without even considering battery life, is nuts. Phones are impractical tools for just about everything, but calling, messaging and photographs. None of these are CPU intensive. Dependability is more important than how fast the dial screen opens.
Moorestown may include better power architecture, but it throws this away by jacking up the processor speed.
Lets get back to practicality and make phones functional again. This push toward cutesy 1000mAH/1GHz+ phones that die in a few hours is moronic.
Is it too much to ask for phones that last a week?
metafor - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - link
There are plenty of phones that last a week...They even cost significantly less than GHz smartphones and usually don't come with a 2-year contract.
But they don't have giant 4.2" AMOLED screens (which btw, is ~50% of the power consumption) either.