Can intel win in market owned by Palm, TI? PC chip giant releases two XScale processors for wireless market, goes beyond ARM-based devices - News

Electronic News, Feb 11, 2002 by Tom Murphy

Intel will stake its claim on the wireless device market this week with two new XScale processors, but the big unknown is whether the PC microprocessor giant will be satisfied with less than total dominance in a market where it hasn't traditionally played a big role.

The two processors mark Intel's foray into the portable device market and they offer a significant step up in megahertz over ARM-based processors, including Intel's own StrongARM and other embedded processors now on the market.

The first release from Intel is the PXA-250 application processor, which is directed specifically at the PDA market. The PXA-210 processor is intended for the smart phone market and has fewer bells and whistles than the PXA-250. Intel will announce the sampling of the product, and Xscale-based products are expected to be on the market sometime next quarter.

Using an installed based of Pocket PC products from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer and others that use Intel's StrongARM processor, Intel already has a market that's 3 million units strong and growing like a weed, says Todd Kort, an analyst with Gartner Dataquest in San Jose. But in the near term, Kort believes the OMAP processor from Texas Instruments Inc. will grab the market volume based on its close relationship with Palm and Palm's customer base, which could range from 13 million units to 20 million units.

In the cell phone market, Texas Instruments is dominant, with Nokia and Ericsson among its OEM customer base.

"It appears that the opportunity is larger on the Palm side of the PDA market," Kort said. "But the only vendors making money right now in the PDA market are Microsoft, Compaq, HP and Intel."

The main issue right now in the PDA market is battery life, and Kort doesn't believe Intel's XScale processors and the entire feature-rich Pocket PC platform offer enough operating time to make them attractive to those used to their Palm-based PDAs and cell phones.

Meanwhile, Intel is promising that the power consumption of XScale products has been vastly improved over the company's StrongARM processors.

The company is going after the high-end of the PDA market with the PXA-250, according to David Rogers, communications manager for Intel. The processor will enter the market with many other ARM-based processors vying for the same sockets.

The PXA-250 will start sampling with a variety of peripheral functions on-chip. Most notable is the capability to interface directly with the 802.11 wireless protocol.

Intel believes that the 802.11 ports being installed in airports, cafes, universities, businesses and other public places will create a demand for portable devices that can access the networks.

The perception is that the PDA market is saturated, as unit volumes flattened in 2001, but Intel platform architect Laurie Pegrum says the company wouldn't enter a market without a significant upside in growth potential.

The PXA-250 has been tweaked up to clock speeds of 250MHz to 400MHz. "This is a significant leap in performance for this space," Rogers said. The StrongARM processor it replaces had a clock speed of 200MHz.

"At those clock speeds, Intel's XScale processors may be overkill in the short term," Kort said. "The OMAP processor will be good enough for the low end of the market."

Still, the capacity to upgrade the Pocket PC may give rise to its long-term potential. Kort says Palm relied on the low-performing Motorola DragonBall processor for too long, which stifled the Pilot's market-growth potential.

The high clock-rate frequencies might cause portable device developers to wince because they have a real concern for battery life and operating times. Most of the incumbent processors Intel will be trying to unseat will be operating in the 50MHz to 100MHz range.

But Intel has prepared to combat that perception with power-scaling. If the applications processor is running basic data applications such as an address book, the clock cycles can be scaled back. If the application calls for the host to execute an MPEG-4 video, the processor can be spiked up to 400MHz for the initial download. Once the video starts playing, Intel says the processor could be kicked down to save battery life.

Intel will offer both processors with an extensive set of tools, including device drivers, system debug software, compilers and a development environment. To start with, both processors will be able to run code that was written for ARM-based processors.

But Intel is hoping to meet applications developers halfway by providing baseline functions they can incorporate into their programs. This is intended to save the developers time in getting their applications to market.

Intel marketers insist that what they are selling is an architecture and not just silicon, partly to distinguish themselves from the XScale processors they sell into I/O and network infrastructure equipment. Intel calls them processors based on XScale technology. But both the processors being launched still use ARM-based instruction sets that have been around for years.