Mobile Phones : PXA800F
As we mentioned earlier this week, Intel have broken in to the Cellphone market and they appear to have a very strong product - the PXA800F. In figures projected by the Gartner Group, it shows that the adoption of 2.5/3G Mobile phones will be 200 Million units by 2006. This is a important segment of the market. Within the market there is a need for colour, data, and java capabilities on a cellphone - this is something which is being seen in Europe and Japan - and a demand for more speed and power - this is where Intel feel they fit in.
The Intel PXA800F chip is designed with 3 subsystems but converging these and creating a final solution. The three subsystems which they have are; computing, communication, and flash. Intel have a key set of building blocks within the PXA800F at the heart of the product is the Intel xScale micro architecture, this is a scalable CPU which offers a comparable high performance to the low power usage. Also within the building blocks are the tools and software applications (using the software applications and optimising the code for the PXA800F will see a performance increase of around 2X), the flash, silicon, and the micro packaging. One of the important parts of the PXA800F is the Communication technology within it which works on the MSA.
The creation of the solution is only part of the 3 main 'segments' of the Internet on a chip. Another important part which was covered by Intel was the integration of the unit.
Intel have a technology which is called stacking - this is where you mount a die on top of another one, the legs are of course longer but this means that you have a smaller overall foot print - this can make a unit smaller, more cost effective, as well as more disirable. The Intel reference implementation of stacking is the logic and flash at 1.4mm high.
We saw the peformancee of the PXA800F chip, it was done against a 'competitors' phone - both running Microsoft SmartPhone 2002. We heard the playing of a audio file, then we saw a game being played at the same time, on the other phone we saw judering and the sound cutting out - we saw the same when Ice Age was played. The phone which was based on the Intel PXA800F on which we saw the video playback was be good, the audio playback and gaming was also good - it could was capable of handling multi tasking. Intel also demonstrated an application called AMark running on both phones - this is like 3DMARK for your mobile. We saw 60fps on the PXA800F based phone, yet only 25 FPS on the Nokia 7650 phone. The PXA800F offers 3 times the memory bandwidth compared to competitors products.
