When it comes to providing silicon for the PC industry, no one can doubt the dominating position that Intel (News - Alert) Corp enjoys. However, when it came time to evolve its processors for the fast growing market of smartphones and tablets, the company failed to deliver any significant results. Under this backdrop, Qualcomm found it easy to capture the market, and today it happens to be the biggest supplier of chipsets for mobile devices and other gadgets.
In an effort to grab its share of the tricky market, Intel Corp has come up with the latest semiconductor architecture for its Atom chips. In its latest formulation, the chip has received an array of performance enhancing specs, which is expected to significantly boost up the operations of computer servers in lightweight personal computers, tablets, smatphones, microservers, car entertainment systems and other mobile gadgets. Armed with the rebuilt Atom chip, Intel expects to be able to challenge Qualcomm (News - Alert) in the smartphone and tablet chip market.
The new microarchitecture, code-named Silvermont, will be a key building block in upcoming Intel chips for a variety of mobile devices, Chief Product Officer Dadi Perlmutter said in a statement.
“We have not only reduced the power in a significant manner but it comes with significant performance,” Perlmutter commented.
To be precise, Silvermont has been designed to offer up to three times more computing performance than current chips and as much as five times lower power consumption.
Intel’s 22-nanometer Bay Trail tablet chips, scheduled for a release later this year, will be based on Silvermont architecture. The new architecture will more than double the performance of its current tablet chips, Intel said in the release.
The same architecture will provide the foundation for its upcoming Merrifield smartphone chips and Avoton chips for microservers, as well.
Although it is expected that Silvermont will help Intel overcome its performance dilemma with the processors for mobile devices, there are other areas that Intel has to address soon, if it really wants to catch up with the mobile race. The company is in sheer need of a breakthrough in the area of Long Term Evolution, or LTE, a high-speed wireless technology increasingly found in smartphones launched in the United States, including Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s (News - Alert) Galaxy line. Arch rival Qualcomm’s processors are already equipped with LTE, making the things quite competitive for the Santa Clara based computer giant.
Edited by Blaise McNamee