Seems like Intel’s taking its mobile business quite seriously. There have been reports that the company plans on bringing a new chip to ISSCC 2012 in San Francisco this week that blends a dual-core Atom processor and a WiFi transceiver on the same silicon. Details are scarce, but the 32nm SoC codenamed Rosepoint is expected to bring serious reductions in power, cost and size to Inter powered smartphones, tablets and laptops. Something that’s causing more excitement is that the WiFi built into Rosepoint is a digital RF chip which will be a lot more cheaper and easier to scale down.
Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Wired that the digital WiFi chip, unlike the analog ones, should scale with Moore’s law and has ‘state of the art power efficiency’.
According to Wired, the chip won’t be a 100% ready until at least 2015, and at present, it supports only a 2.4GHz WiFi. Although, it has been reported that versions with cellular data and built in radio antennas are in the works. Intel claims that one difficulty with getting the WiFi transceiver and the dual core Atom processor on the same die is stopping any interference, as both operate on similar frequencies. Intel’s been anticipated to show its research on Monday at ISSCC 2012. Only then will it be knows whether ARM, Qualcomm, Nvidia and TI have to worry or not.
