According to Tony Sica, VP and director of marketing with Intel’s wireless communications and computing group, the highly integrated PXA800F offers numerous advantages over current designs aimed at the mobile phone mass market.
Chief among these are the lower power consumption – offering a claimed 300 hours standby and three hours talk time – and increased performance available from the unit. However, Sica was also keen to emphasize the benefits of the small die size, which offers considerable packaging benefits for handset manufacturers, enabling them to create much smaller, and potentially more attractive, devices.
Although Intel was not announcing licensees for its latest baby, indications from Sica suggest that the company considers Far-Eastern ODMs such as Compal, MiTac, High Tech Computer (HTC) and BenQ as potentially its most important customers. Number-three handset vendor Samsung Electronics was also touted as a likely licensee.
The PXA800F comes in two flavors. The first, built around a 104MHz XScale core, is designed for the lower end of the mid-market, while a companion 312MHz variant addresses the higher performance chunk of the market. Both come complete with enough on-chip memory to hold the GPRS radio stack, operating system and a Java virtual machine.
Sica said the performance headroom available in the faster chip will enable handset vendors to offer devices capable of running more than one performance-hungry application at a time, without interruption. This capability should greatly aid multimedia performance as well as lending a degree of future proofing to the device.
Also of interest to OEMs and ODMs (original device manufacturers) is the level of built-in peripherals support and power management. This covers integrated USB connectivity, a range of removable storage cards (MMC, SD and Memory Stick), LCD display support, and both Bluetooth and camera interfaces.
Intel believes this level of out-of-the-box support will greatly reduce time to market. The device is also compatible with the most common handset operating systems, including Palm OS, Symbian OS, Microsoft’s Windows Smartphone 2002 and MontaVista Linux.
The success or otherwise of the PXA800F could be crucial for Intel as its seeks growth avenues beyond its core PC and server business. While the company has enjoyed considerable success in the PDA market with its StrongARM and more recent XScale processors, becoming the virtual de facto standard among Microsoft powered PDAs, the mid-range handset market offers far greater opportunities in terms of volume.
Sica said Intel’s flash technology is currently in 210 million handsets worldwide and the company would clearly like to repeat that success with the PXA800F. While devices using PXA800F could be 12 months from launch, Sica said licensees can be expected to make announcements about their use of the technology at next week’s 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, France.
Intel’s chief rival for mass-market smart handset chips, Texas Instruments, will not begin to sample its own integrated device until next year.
Source: Computerwire
