Tom's Talks Moorestown With The Father Of Centrino

Features
By William Van Winkle
published

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.

Meet Intel’s Master Of Ultramobility

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.

William Van Winkle
26 Comments Comment from the forums
  • whitecrowro
    "Why are we all here today? What is the meaning of Moorestown?
    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).
    Reply
  • 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 apps
    Reply
  • 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
  • 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.

    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.
    Reply
  • 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