Intel Guns For X86 Smartphones, Tablets With Atom Z6

“Intel has delivered its first product that is opening the door for Intel Architecture in the smartphone market segment,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, in a statement. The Intel Architecture is also commonly known in the technology industry as the x86 architecture.

The new Atom Z6 processor, formerly codenamed Lincroft, is a low-power part that features 140 million transistors in a System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Intel, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has Atom Z6 chips with clock speeds of up to 1.5GHz for smartphones and parts clocking up to 1.9GHz ready to go for tablets and other devices.

The Z6, which was made available Tuesday, is built around Intel’s 45-nanometer Atom processor core with the SoC package, also including memory and display controllers, graphics and video processing. The full Moorestown platform includes an Atom Z6 processor, along with the MP20 Platform Controller Hub, formerly codenamed Langwell, and a dedicated Mixed Signal IC (MSIC), formerly codenamed Briertown.

The new hardware draws considerably less juice than the preceding Atom-based platform, according to Intel -- a key factor in whether smartphone and tablet makers will adopt Moorestown for future handheld mobile devices, many of which use ARM-based chips to achieve longer battery life.

“Collectively, these new chips deliver significantly lower power including a greater than 50x reduction in idle power, greater than 20x reduction in audio power, and 2-3x reductions across browsing and video scenarios -- all at the platform level when compared to Intel’s previous-generation product,” the company said in a statement.

Intel achieved such large reductions in power draw through the introduction of power management capabilities that tweak the idle and active power states depending on usage patterns, as well as incorporating two new ultra-low-power states that can bring the Atom Z6 chip’s draw down to as low as 100 microwatts. Intel Burst Performance and Bus Turbo Mode are also baked in to provide an extra kick to processing power and high-bandwidth performance respectively.

Intel described its “highly integrated” Moorestown platform as delivering an “unlimited PC-like experience with fast Internet, multi-tasking, full 1080p video, 3-D graphics, multi-point videoconferencing and voice in pocketable designs.”