Intel Rewrites "Inadequate" Atom Roadmap

So often there is a gulf between grand plans and real world execution when it comes to Intel's mobile strategy. Amid high hopes for the firm's ability to make Atom truly mobile friendly with its new manufacturing processes, CEO Paul Otellini promised to rewrite the "inadequate" roadmap for the smartphone world. At the same time, he said first devices based on the Medfield version of Atom - the first truly targeted at handsets - would appear next year, indicating a delay after previous promises of 2011 launches.

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• However, Intel plans to accelerate the roll-out of new Atom core designs, particularly in a bid to drive down power consumption in notebook chips and smartphone systems-on-chip. "We decided our roadmap is inadequate, and we needed to change the center point," Otellii told an analyst meeting, claiming the shift would be as significant as the game changing introductions of the Pentium processor and the Centrino integrated Wi-Fi platform.
• In particular, in 2013 Intel will roll out its first Atom core using its new 22 nanometer, low power manufacturing process This will be called Silvermount and will follow a 32nm core for Medfield, due in 2012. In 2014, Intel will have pushed its process boundaries further, to 14nm, and an Atom core using this technology, Airmount, will debut that year. This shows Atom being brought into line with the mainstream PC processors in terms of new process adoption. Intel will also gain power and size advantages with its recently announced and ground breaking 3D transistor approach.
• The reworked program is not just a question of new manufacturing techniques, but will be a major challenge for Intel's skills base and culture. Dadi Perlmutter, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, said it will require a "complex set" of micro-architecture and circuit level shifts for Intel engineers. "It changes the way you do power management, how you handle parallelism in graphics and media and more," he said.
• Perlmutter also showed the analysts prototypes of a smartphone and a 7-inch Android tablet based on Medfield. It expects to have a 10-inch tablet reference design and developers kit, supporting Honeycomb, ready before the end of the year. He said Medfield will have similar power levels to current 40nm ARM-based cellphone chips and would deliver better performance with a single core than its dual-core rivals. He claimed 2,000 design wins for Atom, 21% of them conversions from other architectures, mainly ARM. These included 35 tablet deals, running either Android or MeeGo.
• However, the Medfield announcements indicated further delays in Intel's push to get Atom into phones and out of its strong, but declining, netbook niche. Otellini had said in February that Medfield would be in smartphones later this year, and last December, he had given "the second half of 2011" as the timeframe. Otellini quashed speculation that Intel might adopt ARM itself for low power designs, saying that, while Intel has an ARM licence, it does not intend to use this for handset chips.

"It's a little disappointing ... because I thought they would be farther along than they are now," Mike Feibus, analyst at TechKnowledge Strategies, told CNet. "Part of it may be that Intel has swung too far to the other side of the pendulum. In 2010, the company overpromised and took it on the chin. Now they may be a little overcautious as a result."