Intel has set its sights on the burgeoning tablet computing market with its latest Moorestown chips, which the company believes will help break rival Arm’s dominant position in the handheld device market.
The company on Wednesday announced a chip package based on the Atom Z6 series processors that will go into mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The Moorestown chips will include a low-power single-core Atom processors that run between 1.2GHz and 1.9GHz, and graphics processor cores capable of displaying high-definition video.
Intel, which is mostly known for its chips in PCs, previously sold handheld processors with its portfolio of Arm-based XScale processors, which it later sold to Marvell Technology in 2006. Intel is now pushing its x86 architecture, which are mostly found in PCs, into the handheld devices with Moorestown.
Tablet computers are mobile devices with touchscreen and screen-based keyboards that allows users to watch video, surf the Internet, play games and read e-books. Arm processors go into most smartphones today, and now have moved upstream to tablet computing.
Arm has an early edge in the tablet market, with many top computer makers opting to use the company’s processor designs to power tablets. Apple’s iPad is powered by an internally designed A4 chip based on an Arm processor, while Dell and Lenovo have shown tablets based on Arm designs.
Intel has set its eyes on tablets and smartphones as use of the Internet access grows and reaches billions of devices in the years to come, said Pankaj Kedia, director for Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group. Intel has made significant power reduction and performance improvements with Moorestown that should make the company competitive in the handheld market.