With its new Atom platform, Moorestown, Intel has made a lot of exciting claims and hinted at significant changes in our computing future. All good stuff, but we need more answers. To find them, we sat down with Intel’s godfather of ultra-mobility.
Last month, we took a deep dive into Intel’s new Moorestown platform for ultramobile devices, the Atom Z6xx processor (Linfield), and Intel Platform Controller Hub MP20 (Langwell). We described some of the performance you could expect to see on Moorestown devices. Now, you can see it in action courtesy of a Computex video shown here.
While it’s fun to sit around and poke jabs like, “Yeah, but can it play...?” the point is that Moorestown has thrown down the performance gauntlet for the rest of the ultraportable industry. Before Centrino, we had low-power notebooks and wireless networking. But with Centrino, suddenly there was a unified vision that propelled that market segment forward at a much faster rate—fortunately for buyers. While Intel hasn’t made a big branding push in handsets and tablets (yet), the technical underpinnings of such a branded platform are now in place. The functionality of these devices is about to take a significant leap.
Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar arrived at Intel in 1993 as “the P6 Multiprocessor architect.” He’s known within Intel as the “father of Centrino” and perhaps the leading authority on Moorestown. Officially, he’s an Intel Fellow and director of UMG (Ultra Mobile Group) Platform Architecture for the Intel Architecture Group. If any one person in the world should be able to address deep-dive questions on Moorestown and the future of handheld computing, it should be Ticky. Intel granted us an hour with the master of ultramobility to learn what could be learned...
Tom's Hardware: Let’s start existentially. Why are we all here today? What is the meaning of Moorestown?
Ticky Thakkar: Our vision was to figure out how to put a computer into a smartphone, if you want to call it that—and we did. We have basically squeezed the computer into a smartphone. Now, why did we do that? We have a dream of having awesome computing capability inside the phone that delivers the real Internet just the same as on your PC. You should also have PC-like capability in that small form factor. We want to leverage the software capabilities the PC has and the performance you can get out of it, as well, like being able to download a real Web page in under six to eight seconds. That’s what users really expect. Being able to view the same Flash content as a PC so you’re not going to a different Web site to get an alternate version. We want to deliver an uncompromised experience in this kind of device.

Ticky Thakkar: Our vision was to.."
- pardon me, but all this naming sound like a Star Trek interview, on Tau Cygna (M class planet in Orion Nebula).
...discrete desktop graphics is a pretty niche market. Without any experience in the field or specialized engineers, it would cost them alot of money in R&D, and they would not be able to beat ATI or nVidia (neither in performance nor sales)
Merely disagreeing with you doesn't merit a "thumbs-down," but I didn't get that impression. Confidence, maybe; his experience no doubt backs that up, but I didn't find him arrogant. I liked how he called BS on the FUD.
In summary, I expect their device to be better performing than anything else in the future at the expense of a huge and heavy battery to power the Atom and the Huge screen making use of excess performance.
Did you read the article? One of the points raised was that the battery life should be just fine, contrary to many people's assumptions.
Otherwise "our GPU will still suck, but the CPU will be faster making the GPU seem faster"
If they can make a phone with a sliding panel to enlarget the screen, that would be cool. Putting a laptop to your ear to make a call makes me laugh.
Too bad Windows is dependent on the PCIE bus. Perhaps it would be possible to have a windows patch that could re-rout the PCIE bus to whatever bus the mobile device has replaced it with!
That way you'd be able to run windows on this mobile device, and you could lower the power consumption of an Atom processor system even further!
Or perhaps a null driver.
I'm surprised he didn't mention SECURITY, as this is usually a #1 issue with the idea of cloud computing.
They'll get shut down again.
With the netbook cannibalization, might it be that they have just made new customers that wouldn't have bought a full-blown notebook anyway?
Nofrom what I can see. This CPU delivers more performance and at about the same power envelope as most UMDs out there. So whats the loss?
And besides, while Atom is based in x86 it is nothing like standard x86 CPUs.
They certainly won't try again anytime soon. of course the discrete graphics market has maybe 20 years left and then they'll be like sound cards where the motherboard has an integrated one thats great already