Intel Atom-powered Cell Phones by 2011?
Intel’s Atom processor is the beating heart at the center of nearly every netbook on the market today. Now Intel says its working on bringing the Atom to handheld devices.
According to the Register, Sean Maloney, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, said that the Intel’s purchase of Wind River last week was part of the company’s effort to drive a low-power, full-fat PC architecture into non-PC environments. The Reg quotes Maloney as saying that as well as devices like MIDs and smartphones, the company was targeting the full-one handset market, something that would be easier if it can offer potential partners a complete package of software, hardware and a development package.
"We're not into handsets yet, but we're just moving into that, that'll be the next few years," Maloney said, adding that we can see handset-sized devices much sooner.
While the idea of an Atom processor in a smartphone seems like a dream come true (imagine what your phone could do with that kind of power), one of the bigger things we’d be worried about is the drain on battery. That said, this whole thing is still a few years off, so they’ll have ample time to work on it.
Check out the full story on the Reg.

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MagicJack on a NetBook?
If thats so, we will probably say goodbye to hand helds like the PSP/Gameboy/Nintendo DS and all that ^_^ That is of course, unless those hand helds can carry better hardware/software to run high quality games.
It's just too powerfull! Even if you run 3D games on it's 4,5" screen with 640x480 pix screen or so, it will have more than twice the computing power of a PSP.
More likely is that they are developing an all in one chip for mobile devices, running the memory controller and GPU on the same chip/die as the CPU. Their '1Watt' device!
All the while Pixel Qi (I guess) is doing effort to get more Intel chips working like ARM chips (softwarematic) which go into a sort of sleep state (or state with very slow FSB, ramspeed, and CPU speed) when not in use (eg after the loading of an HTML, when the user is reading or writing the page)...
I'm already not for mids, and certainly not for atom powered mids!
Unless we're talking about a dual Iphone screen with touch keyboard that operates like a micro laptop.
Well why don't I get a netbook? Because most of all I want it to fit in my pocket and act as my mobile phone too.
i know battery life would not be a problem on a lower manufacturing process and some power saving features.
Then get yourself an iphone!
Guess what, an Iphone has a 400Mhz ARM cpu. You know what that means?
That the Atom is at least 3 times faster! (and 3 times less energy efficient too).
The PSP? a 333Mhz CPU capped at 266Mhz! And see what good quality it has!
Your CPU/GPU goes up considerably with the display resolution. On small 4 to 5" screens that go not over 800x400 pix, an 1Ghz cpu would probably even be overkill!