Intel is accelerating its roadmap to get a slice of the smartphone and tablet pie. By 2014, the company plans to be shipping 14 nm Atom processors.
A cutting edge manufacturing process has always been Intel’s biggest asset and it is this manufacturing process knowledge that ARM as well as ARM vendors will have to be watching most as Intel is making its way into the smartphone and tablet market.
At its annual investor meeting today, Intel said that it has revised its processor roadmap as it has found it to be inadequate given the competitive landscape. As a result, the company will be shipping the 22 nm Silvermont Atom SoC in 2013 and the 14 nm Airmont Atom SoC in 2014. To put this plan into perspective, we have to remember that the 32 nm Saltwell chip will be covering the 2011-2012 period,, which means that Intel will be shrinking its Atom chips every year until 2014.
The server/desktop/notebook roadmap seems to be deviating from the 2-year cadence that was established by Intel back in 2006. The first 22 nm processors called Ivy Bridge will be released in the 2011-2012 timeframe, while the first 14 nm chips are now moved to 2014 (while they were expected to debut in 2013). Typically, Intel has been introducing a new manufacturing process in uneven years. It is clear that Intel is aligning its ultra-mobile processors with all other processors lines and that Atom SoCs are moving to become a core business at Intel. According to the company, its architecture is designed to work in cloud servers on the high-end all the way down to handhelds.
It remains unclear when Intel will be delivering a competitive processor platform for smartphones, but the company highlighted that the upcoming 32 nm Medfield chip will be addressing one of the weaknesses of preceding Atom chips – power consumption. Medfield will be targeted at the lower end of the power consumption spectrum of competitive processors (which we assume would be ARM processors.)
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