Tom's Talks Moorestown With The Father Of Centrino
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.
Creating Versus Consuming
TH: A few years back, the move from NetBurst architecture to Core was pretty radical in terms of power efficiency and giving Intel a new lease on mainstream success. Now we’re seeing a similar leap with the move to Moorestown. Do you see these two families coexisting harmoniously, or are the leaps of Moorestown so substantial that it might eat into the Core families’ markets?
TT: I actually built the first-generation Centrino platform, so I have some perspective on this. These are two different platforms, and for the foreseeable future, we see them continuing. Because what you have in both of these environments is a thermal image. The thermal image on a notebook allows you to have much higher capabilities. It’s a very different class of device. On the mobile device, at least starting out, they’re going to be more consumer devices, meaning they’re going to be more about consuming than creating. It’s also limited in thermal power. So what we’ll try to do here is to deliver the highest performance possible in the thermal envelope that allows us to deliver what we need. On a phone, that’s about 1.5 to 2 watts. That’s the platform’s complete thermal envelope. On a Centrino platform, I think the last generation was able to go all the way up to 35W. So you have very different capabilities that are going to appear in those two devices.
At some point in the future, when you have a high level of multi-threading capability and a lot of multi-threaded software available, you can see how quad-core might play out well on one platform with a single- or dual-core on the other. Hard to say what’s going to work out. So far, we still believe that single-thread performance is going to be very pertinent and important for both classes of devices. We want to make sure that we deliver the highest single-thread performance, and that means that you’re going to have disparity in what the two systems can deliver.
TH: I like that distinction you made of consuming versus creating and how those models differentiate what these platforms are built for. Am I right in interpreting your statement that way?
TT: Yes. At some point, the little device will pick up some creativity, as well. I mean, as you’ve seen, an iPhone is already able to do any number of creative things. We should be able to do more than that on this class of device. And as the capability increases, they will morph into full-blown computers, but they’ll still be limited by their thermal envelope.
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whitecrowro "Why are we all here today? What is the meaning of Moorestown?Reply
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). -
cmcghee358 It would be nice to see Intel take a jab at discrete desktop graphics. If anything just to provide more competition for the consumer.Reply -
liquidsnake718 It would be nice to see that Zune HD ver 2.0 or even 3.0 with an updated Moorestown and a better Nvidia chip than the ion or ion2, with capabilities of at least 2.0ghz and 2gb of ram all the size of the zune.... imagine with 48hours on music, and 5 hours of video, this will only get larger as time goes by.... hopefully in a year or a year and a half we can see some TRUE iphone competition now with the new windows mobile out! We just need more appsReply -
Onus It never occurred to me to want an iPhone, but I definitely see one of these in my future.Reply -
matt314 cmcghee358It would be nice to see Intel take a jab at discrete desktop graphics. If anything just to provide more competition for the consumer....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)Reply -
cknobman Maybe its just me but I read the entire thing and Mr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar came off as a arrogant ********.Reply -
Onus cknobmanMaybe its just me but I read the entire thing and Mr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar came off as a arrogant dickhead.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.Reply
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zodiacfml I read his comments carefully and found that those were carefully chosen words. Confidence is very much needed to get the support everyone while remaining factual.Reply
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.
cknobmanMaybe its just me but I read the entire thing and Mr. Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar came off as a arrogant dickhead. -
cjl zodiacfmlI read his comments carefully and found that those were carefully chosen words. Confidence is very much needed to get the support everyone while remaining factual.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.Reply -
eyemaster He knows his product, the targets to meet and what they have accomplished. I'm sure they experimented on competing devices too. The man knows that they have a great product in their hands right now that beats all the others. That makes him confident, not arrogant.Reply