Intel has announced its new microarchitecture, designed to aggressively attack the mobile market. Slugged the Intel XScale microarchitecture, the technology was demonstrated running at a 1GHz clock speed, while consuming only 1.5 watts of power.
"The XScale microarchitecture is tailored specifically to cater for the needs of the emerging mobile market," says Ron Smith, VP and GM, Intel wireless computing and communications group. "The technology is also ideal for Internet infrastructure products such as network and IO processors, where ultimate performance is critical for moving and processing large amounts of data quickly."
The XScale core contains dynamic voltage management, which allows voltage - and hence clock speed - to be changed on the fly. Smith demonstrated the same chip running from 200MHz at 0.7 volts (0.5 watts) up to the 1Ghz performance benchmark.
Developers for the chip will have access to the Intel integrated performance primitives - a set of pre-optimised blocks of code that will speed development for the processor, especially for multimedia applications. These primitives are expected to be tuned to all IA processors in the future, allowing code scaling across a variety of hardware platforms.
The code includes extensions from Intel`s previous mobile microarchitecture, termed StrongARM, and the XScale core will be compliant with version 5 of the ARM architecture. The architecture will be supported by various operating systems, including Windows CE, Symbian, and Embedded Linux from various vendors.
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