Borrowing a phrase that Apple CEO Steve Jobs used when introducing the iPhone last year, Intel wants to put the "internet in your pocket."
For Apple, that meant a top-down, years-long project to create the ultimate consumer fetish object, a project that was wrapped in secrecy and under the explicit control of Jobs at all times. Intel is taking a decidedly different approach: Create a new, ultra-low-power processor, wrap some specifications for a new PC platform around it, and promote the hell out of it so that manufacturers will be inspired to create devices based on Intel's technology.
This week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel revealed more technical details about its new low-power processor, codenamed Silverthorne, which consumes between 0.6 to 2 watts of power (compared with 35 watts from Intel's Core 2 Duo, a popular desktop and laptop CPU). Intel also promises that the processors will "deliver 1-2 GHz of performance in a device that fits in your hand or pocket." When it's released in the second half of the year, Silverthorne will be the smallest processor the company has created in more than 15 years, according to Intel CTO Justin Rattner.
"Our thesis is that the internet is the killer app," says Pankaj Kedia, director of Ecosystem Programs in Intel's Mobile Internet Device (MID) group. "But today, there is no mobile device that you can say runs the same internet that you and I are used to on the PC. Our MID strategy, at its essence, is to make that real internet … available on mobile devices."
Intel's push into the ultramobile space fits rather nicely into the company's other mobile initiatives, such as its promotion of WiMax. Indeed, if chipmakers can be said to have annual themes, Intel has definitely selected ultramobility as its theme for 2008, going so far as to borrow Jobs' "internet in your pocket" catchphrase in its recent press materials and briefings. (Wired Magazine also used the phrase "put the net in your pocket" on the cover of the November 1999 issue.) Most recently, Intel CEO Paul Otellini demonstrated the company's vision of an always-connected future during his 2008 CES keynote, where a prototype MID was shown translating languages on the fly, reading menus in a foreign country and giving location-based directions.
The key part of Intel's plans with Silverthorne, as Kedia describes them, is to spur on the creation of these new ultraportable internet-ready devices. Rather than compete for market share among existing devices, the diminutive processor (and the "Menlow" platform it will become a part of) is meant to engender a new breed of devices with new capabilities. While the devices will ultimately vary in size and shape -- taking the form of tablets, smartphones, navigation units and ultramobile laptops -- the unifying theme around MIDs will be full internet access regardless of the device's primary function.
Still, Intel faces an uphill battle on several fronts. For one thing, Intel competitor ARM dominates the market for processors used in smartphones (the class of device that currently most resembles MIDs). ARM processors are used in the iPhone and in the Nintendo DS.
Complicating matters further, Intel's use of the MID acronym is not exactly calculated to whip up enthusiasm among consumers, who have already resoundingly rejected Intel's earlier ultramobile platform, the ultramobile PC (UMPC). The MID-like devices that already exist, such as Nokia's N810 internet tablet, are mostly high-price luxury items.
Intel hopes to combat consumer apathy with low prices. Unlike UMPCs, MIDs are supposed to be relatively inexpensive. Analysts confirm that Intel is more than capable of churning out the Silverthorne processors cheaply while still selling them at a sizable profit.
"Ultimately, what it boils down to is that Intel is looking at these devices as an extension of the PC market into an even lower-end segment," Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron says.
The success of Asus' popular $400 Eee PC has made it clear that people will buy such devices if the price is right, McCarron says.
"When prices come down, unit sales go up," McCarron says. "All indications are that this trend is going to continue to develop," McCarron says … if the prices are right.
But others, like Yankee Group's Josh Martin, are skeptical about Intel's ability to succeed where so many others have failed -- even if it's using a new processor and a new acronym.
"The challenge for these devices is that at the end of the day they're still too small to be productive, too big to be ultraportable," Martin says of MIDs. "Ultimately, the smartphone inevitably overtakes that market," he says, because people would rather have an all-purpose device that does everything adequately than fill out their gadget portfolios with more specialized devices to meet specific needs.
"I just don't see a lot of demand in that market," Martin says.
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