Intel says it will be MID king

RESPONDING TO ARM's efforts to muscle its way into the world of mobile computing, Pankaj Kedia, Intel's MID(dle) man, recently spoke to the INQ about the firm's plans to stand its ground, with Moorestown the key weapon in its arsenal.
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Kedia, who spends much of his time working with companies to promote Intel's silicon, was particularly excited about Chipzilla's recent partnership with LG Electronics to release a Moorestown based mobile internet device (MID) running Moblin 2.0.

"Moorestown will give you the opportunity not only to experience the Internet in its full glory but will also have voice capability" said Kedia, adding "I call it the ‘Next Smartphone', the smart smartphone". According to Kedia, Intel's smartphone will have it all; Internet, gaming, personal navigation, multimedia, the full Monty.

Kedia was a bit secretive when it came to divulging the specs of Intel's new platform, but after the INQ threatened him with a Chinese burn, he conceded to say Moorestown guzzled only a tenth of the power Menlow does, attributing this to re-architecturing and repartitioning as well as Langwell's board-level power management.

"We have a lot of intelligence and innovation in Lincroft and in Langwell" he said adding Langwell was capable of controlling the system - including display, storage, etc - in a way which also allowed it to switch things off if they weren't being used.

Moorestown is slated for launch by 2010 but Kedia would not be drawn into telling us when LG's MID might be hitting shelves, simply repeating that it would be "by 2010" and that the firms had been working on the device for over a year already.

The INQ then asked Kedia if Intel was really ready to go head to head with ARM.
"We are not targeting the phone space as the mainstream phone space" he answered, emphasising Intel's primary focus was to deliver computing, performance and "rich Internet based services" to the next generation of smartphone. "We happen to deliver voice because users want it, but the focus is on the smarts" claims Kedia.

When we pointed out he hadn't actually answered our question, Kedia decided to hedge his bets, simply stating "it remains to be seen whether firms like Arm can deliver Internet and computing as well in these kinds of spaces".

Of course, it wasn't long before Kedia decided to pull the magic "compatibility" word out of his Intel hat, telling the INQ the firm was committed to bringing its x86 software compatibility to the MID space. This, he claimed, would allow users to "run the Internet in its entirety, all the websites, all the video codecs, all of the plugins, all of the image formats" on a pocketable device.

"ARM, in general, is not compatible at the architectural level and is not compatible at the implementation level" said Kedia who went a step further to add "Arm 9 to Arm 11 is not instruction set compatible. That's a fact!"

We put it to Kedia that even if ARM didn't pose too much of a threat to Intel, the MID market hardly seemed poised to take off in a big way, so what was all the fuss about?
Kedia answered the Internet was still something of a tethered experience and was still in the very early stages of getting unleashed.

"It took 15 years to go from zero to 100 million cell phones" he said, adding that from 1998 until today, the mobile market had leapt from 100 million devices to 1.3 billion devices globally. Kedia reckoned MID adoption would happen much faster, saying "It will happen in three to four years, not 15 years. We are in year one, year two".

What about pricing? we asked. Would MIDs, the PC in your pants, be super expensive, super-smart phonebooks or would they be cheaper than cheap dumb-books? Kedia's answer: "Different target user, different product".

Well, that narrows it down a bit, doesn't it?

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BY Sylvie Barak
Source：the INQUIRER

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