Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobility Group said the company is now on its second ‘lifecycle phase’ and has moved on to not just being a supplier of microprocessors, but rather becoming more and more of a platform company.
The Fall edition of this year’s IDF held at the Taipei International Convention Center, also offered a peak at what the Santa Clara-California-based firm has to offer in the domain of the digital home, mobility and the digital enterprise, however, it was more than clear that it’s on the mobility market segment it has set its eyes into.
Shmuel (Mooly) Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, in his keynote presentation highlighted the growing trend towards mobility by showing industry figures indicating the rapid uptake of notebooks since 2001 and the shift away from mobile phones to more feature-packed portable notebooks.
He said that this strong mobile PC growth is being driven primarily by consumer demand and lifestyle choices. Cognizant of this, Intel, Eden said will continue to focus on the ecosystem to support the mobile market segment growth.
This development, he explains, comes right on the heels of improvements being made in areas such as performance per watt, improved processing power and longer battery life. He added that developments are already underway towards the creation of an all-day eight hour run time battery power, a much-coveted feature for users of today’s laptop computers, and likewise has been tagged as the primary moving factor that will help accelerate the sales of more portables towards the later end of this decade, according to the IDC figures.
Moreover, he said, the first quarter of next year will kick off the proliferation of dual-core CPUs for mobile devices, and by Q3’06 50% of the product shipping with be dual-core, moving up to 75% of volume by the start of 2007.
The Intel executive then presented some of the Intel’s upcoming microprocessor product family notably Yonah, the code-named successor to the Dothan (second generation Pentium M processor) which will offer two times the performance per watt compared to Dothan. Yonah will appear as part of the Napa mobile platform and will soon be available in the market in the first quarter of next year.
Next then comes Merom, the fourth generation chip, which will be pin compatible with Yonah and will only require a software update in order to work. Merom is expected to and offer a further 100% increase in performance per watt on top of Yonah’s.
Furthermore, Eden presented several other advancements that are going into the Napa platform, all of which are geared towards better application performance, improved seamless connectivity as well as multi-tasking responsiveness.
He said that Yonah itself is a completely new micro-architecture and has been built based on user demand. However, one noteworthy feature of this next-generation new microprocessor family is its ability to pick and choose the best elements of previous generations and improve on them by adding a more advanced power efficiency, a completely redesigned scalable and sharable caching system, and improved pre-fetch and memory disambiguation, among others.
Meanwhile, in conjunction with its efforts to accelerate WiMAX wireless broadband deployment in Southeast Asia via the Asian Broadband Campaign, by providing broadband wireless consulting and expertise along with silicon and technical services, Intel Corp. signed a collaborative agreement with the Taiwan government, through the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) to accelerate the deployment of WiMAX technologies in Taiwan.
As part of their collaboration, the MOEA will liaise with related government sectors to set direction for spectrum allocation and provide assistance as well as resources to realize WiMAX field trials. The MOEA will also enable the Taiwan ecosystem to supply cost efficient WiMAX-based solutions to the global market.
"Taiwan’s robust broadband infrastructure and well-established industry ecosystem are a good foundation for WiMAX deployment," said Maloney during the signing of the agreement. "Intel has worked closely with governments and companies around the world to drive broadband wireless technologies and interoperability globally. Our collaboration with the MOEA again demonstrates that WiMAX is real and widely accepted."
