I wake up this morning to a clearer understanding about where Moorestown fits but to an article that highlights that there’s a lot of marketing to be done by Intel. The new platform, demonstrated yesterday on a number of working devices, appears to be technically very capable and extends through a number of product sectors. It brings new levels of processing power and leads in making the Internet in your pocket more ‘real’ than with any other platform I’ve researched and yet there’s a surprising lack of interest. In fact, over the last 24 hours, there has been more interest in Intel’s deal with Wind River than with their move into the smartphone market. What happened?

E3, smartbooks, booth babes, an Apple conference, Palm Pre reviews and a lot of other news have a lot to do with it so perhaps the timing wasn’t exactly perfect. Perhaps Intel could have helped too. They’re calling it a MID platform and up to now, there really hasn’t been much penetration for the term and certainly no big-number consumer hit so attention levels could have been low when Intel mentioned that the platform is voice-call capable. They also failed to mention that the platform is 720p recording capable and that it could be used to make some amazing Moblin-based smartbooks. Intel is confident that they would be better than the ARM based ones too!

Maybe I can help, just a little, by trying to simplify the key points. What does Moorestown mean for consumers?

Moorestown is a computing platform, based on a more efficient version of the Atom CPU and big changes in the way that the other components in a traditional ‘computer’ are built. There will be versions that will run Windows XP or Windows 7 or other desktop platforms but that’s not really what Moorestown is intended for. Intel have built their own software to go on top of it and its a snug fit. It controls the ‘computer’ in a way that means it can continue working in a state where it’s effectively sleeping with one eye open and that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Here’s some examples:

Smartphone

Expect Moorestown-based devices to be as small as a smartphone and to be able to run, on a smartphone sized battery, for over 24 hours. Intel are telling us that devices will idle with 50x less power drain than today’s Intel Mobile Internet Devices. The worst MID I ever tested ticked-over for about 1 hour on the juice of a smartphone-sized battery. Intel says that this will increase to 50 hours. The best-case scenario, based on testing I’ve done on the current best-of-Intel is 3-times that figure. 3-days active standby.

Smartbook

Moorestown scales. It sleeps with one eye open but when it wakes up it’s capable of Internet browsing speeds, accuracy and richness that you will have never seen on an ARM-based device. I’m expecting high-end versions of Moorestown to bring sub 10-second average page loads to every web page on the Internet. The current best smartphones take twice as long as that and the next-gen may only shave 50% off that.

Mobile Creativity

I really wish Intel had highlighted HD video  recording as it’s an important benchmark figure these days. Smartphone manufacturers are building these facilities into their devices and HD video is a huge growth area on the Internet. Moorestown enables 720p video recording. Not only that but the software layer has been designed with that in mind too. GPS-enabled applications with social-networking capabilities are baked into the software making it easy to make compelling mobile applications.

No more 99c apps

Moblin, the name of the software that runs on Moorestown, is a standard-compliant software stack too so there’s a huge library of free software out there. Moblin has the potential to offer a very rich choice of software, for free and because it scales and can be connected to the internet all day, introduces new revenue generating models.

For me, those are the key features of Moorestown but it clearly brings advantages for existing MID, PMP, Navigation, and ultra mobile PC market segments too. Think about it you won’t have to turn Intel’s mobile devices off any more. That alone, is a huge change for a mobile ‘computer.’

Intel still has a journey ahead and there’s some good competition out there but I, for one, will be looking forward to putting the Moorestown Internet experience in my pocket

Here’s another one of those ‘we can beat Atom’ tests where the fine detail of the result is irrelevant. The important thing here is that, like the VIA Nano comparison test, significant, market-changing progress has been made.

I’ve been talking about ARM’s Cortex A8 for a while now and keeping an eye on it in terms of its suitability for Mobile Internet Devices. Its a powerful computing core and people like Ti are using it to build very small, power-efficient media and Internet-capable platforms. Apart from Pandora, we’ve seen it being promoted for use in OHA Android phones and even for netbooks.

But how fast is the Cortex A8? How fast would Firefox 3 run on a Cortex-based Android smartphone? And how accurate would it be? Intel keep pusing the ‘real internet’ and about how many errors you’ll find with smartphone browsers but when you’re running Firefox 3 on both platforms, the difference disappears. Intel also talking about speeds but when the processing power is the same on both hardware, that difference disappears too. ARM’s partners have already fought back against the Intel Atom machine a few times in the past (Nvidia here and here) but this video strikes right at the heart of Atom/Moblin. It shows Firefox 3 running at impressive speeds. Forget the normalised comparison at the end of the video, any browser that can average under 10 seconds per page as shown in this demo is going to be good enough for almost everyone. Its twice as fast as previous ARM-based devices and completely removes the 9-second disadvantage that I’ve talked about before. [see video below]

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Many of us have been anxiously waiting for news about the VIA Nano (formerly Isaiah) processor from VIA. Previous leaked info indicated a 2-4x improvement in processing power for a similar power drain over the older VIA C7 processors and with the Atom processors barely improving on the previous platform in terms of processing power, pro-mobile users were looking for something to fill the high-end gap.

Eeepcnews.de have been testing, (yes, they had one in their hands!) a 1.8Ghz version of the Nano CPU which isn’t the CPU we’d be looking for in UMPCs but the results give us some new data points. Firstly, here’s the model range. (test results after the image…)

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EeePCNews.de have a very interesting news article about a possible AMD CPU aimed at netbooks and UMPCs. Its a 64 bit, single core CPU running at 1Ghz with a TDP of 8W. Effectively half of a Turion X2 dual-core CPU.

Note that the CPU includes the memory controller (Northbridge) but no Southbridge or GPU. At 8W  TDP, it is an option for netbooks and possibly high-end ultra mobile PC like the AMD ultra mobile PC seen at Computex but unless an underclocked version appears at 5W or less, it’s probably not going to be cool or even small enough to squeeze inside an MID. For that job, only the Atom and ARM-based products fit the bill.

Source: EeePCNews