Comment Articles

Portable chips from Intel?

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 17 May 2001 17:21 BST

This is all propaganda -- politics, if you like. Its aim is to persuade Intel's customers that Intel is, still, the world's foremost silicon designer, the most advanced producer of processors, and a visionary -- a leader, in short, which you would do well to follow.

In fact, the processor isn't an Intel design. It's called "Intel's Xbase architecture" -- but what that actually consists of, is an ARM (StrongArm) based chip, designed by ARM and modified by DEC.

The silicon on which this would all be integrated, isn't within Intel's capabilities, and won't be for more than two years. Intel hasn't even offered a likely date by which it might be able to produce such a design.

And by the time they can build it, a phone that runs for a month on a single charge will only be remarkable if it includes a PDA -- such things will be standard.

What is the point, then, of announcing the chip at the developer conference in Amsterdam this week? That's easy! -- Intel is currently locked into a battle for the confidence of the market, which is being seduced by rivals. Its rival AMD has more powerful designs; and its rival Crusoe has more economical designs; both can run standard PC software.

Intel has never been able to design low-power processors. When the ARM was first designed as a Reduced Instruction Set Computer, with the promise that it would use very little power compared to its processing capacity, Intel poured scorn on the idea. "People want the fastest machines they can get," I was told, back in those forgotten days.

As a result, today, there isn't a single PDA in the world which uses Intel chips. There are almost no embedded systems that use PC-based software, because they'd have to use Intel chips; anything that runs PC software has traditionally been built by Intel, and Intel chips use far too much power to be left alone with an innocent battery.

Today, there is almost nobody in the mobile phone business who isn't looking at the ARM core for the basis of advanced data capability -- internet access, database management, and so on.

Indeed, a combined phone and PDA would be a strange camel of a beast. A camel, according to office legend, is a horse designed by committee; and an integrated phone and PDA may never be worth designing or building at that level.

My own expectation is that the data unit will, typically, be separate from the display unit, and both will be modules that talk, over wireless, to the GSM comms unit or to any other Internet access point within range.

But faced with sales promotions from Transmeta and AMD in the PC arena, and from ARM almost everywhere else, Intel has to do something. A mobile phone or "wearable computer" using minuscule amounts of electricity would trump all the other hands being shown at the table, if Intel could do it today.

But it can't.

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