Intel is cooking up its own system on a chip, codenamed Medfield, and it promises to bring laptop power to smartphones in just two years’ time.
Fortune magazine went for a mosey around Intel’s labs recently, and got to grips with Moorestown, a low power CPU/GPU/memory two chip system designed for portable devices like UMPCs. While there, Intel let slip that a low power version, Medway, is in the pipeline, and it’s headed for phones, with sources claiming by 2011.
Intel’s Medway project is similar to what NVIDIA is trying to do with Tegra, squeezing a whole system on to a chip, and even if NVIDIA beats Intel to market, competition in the space is only a good thing for consumers. If Intel can get Medway running on phones, soon the only difference you’d have between a netbook and a smartphone would be screen size.
We can’t wait for the day when low cost, HD OLED screens are shoved in to everyday gadgets, and these systems are powering them. If Intel keeps on trucking, that time may be sooner than we think.
Let’s hope it’s not x86.