Telecom Lead India: Intel has unveiled Silvermont, the revamped version of Atom mobile processors, to take on wireless chip leader Qualcomm.
The new mobile chip that enables 3x peak performance at 5x lower power enables Intel to increase its position in mobile chip market.
Strategy Analytics recently said Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel, Broadcom and ST-Ericsson captured top-five revenue share rankings in the cellular baseband processor market in H1 2012. Qualcomm led the cellular baseband market with 51 percent revenue share in the first half of 2012 on the strength of its position in CDMA, W-CDMA and LTE basebands.
Recently, ABI Research’s Competitive Assessment ranked Qualcomm first in LTE baseband product features and other attributes, followed by ST-Ericsson and Sequans Communications.
Intel on Monday said Silvermont will be the foundation for new products beginning to come to market later this year. The chip will be manufactured using the company’s 22nm Tri-Gate SoC manufacturing process.
Dadi Perlmutter, Intel executive vice president and chief product officer, said: “Early sampling of our 22nm SoCs, including Bay Trail and Avoton is garnering positive feedback from our customers. We will accelerate future generations of this low-power microarchitecture on a yearly cadence.”
Intel’s quad-core Bay Trail SoC will hit holiday 2013 tablets and will more than double the compute performance capability of Intel’s current-generation tablet offering.
Variants of the Bay Trail platform will also be used in market segments including entry laptop and desktop computers in innovative form factors.
Intel’s Merrifield will be shipped to customers by the end of this year. It will enable increased performance and battery life over current-generation products and brings support for context aware and personal services, ultra-fast connections for Web streaming, and increased data, device and privacy protection.
A report in Forbes said ARM Holdings has an enviable market position in mobile. ARM powers 90 percent of the smartphone processing market, has 31 percent market share in mobile computing.
ARM architecture is entrenched as the foundation for Qualcomm, Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Broadcom, for which it earns licensing royalties. Intel may have an inroad with new and highly-anticipated Windows phones. However, like Intel, ARM is compatible with the new Windows phones.
Baburajan K
