Intel aims to disrupt the smartphone market

Intel has used consumer gadget show CES as a platform to declare its arrival to the smartphone market, announcing a multi-year deal with handset maker Motorola Mobility and unveiling a Lenovo handset based on its new Atom processor platform. However, disrupting the current state of the market could prove to be a struggle for the firm, suggests one analyst.

The chipset manufacturer revealed that it has entered into an agreement with Motorola Mobility, which is the subject of a proposed takeover by Google. The two firms will work together on a range of smartphones and tablets over the coming years, and will begin shipping an Android smartphone based on the Atom chipset later this year.

Intel has been relatively anonymous in the smartphone market of late. Although it made strides in the early to mid-2000s, with its chipsets being used in various PDA devices and internet-enabled devices that predate the advent of the iPhone and the Android platform, today’s smartphones predominantly run on chipsets designed by Cambridge-based ARM. Intel recently admitted that its smartphone business accounted for less than one per cent of its revenue, however, according to the firm’s president and CEO Paul Otellini, the firm’s agreement with Motorola Mobility will put the company back on the map in the smartphone space.

“Our long-term relationship with Motorola Mobility will help accelerate Intel architecture into new mobile market segments,” he said. “We expect the combination of our companies to break new ground and bring the very best of computing capabilities to smartphones and tablets, which in turn will help to create powerful new experiences that connect and enrich people’s lives wherever they may be.”

However, Nick Dillon, analyst at Ovum, is sceptical about what impact Intel can really have in the smartphone market, given where the firm currently is with its market share and the reliance that the industry has come to have on ARM-based chipsets.

“Intel has come from a very different direction from ARM. ARM came to market with efficient low-power chips and scaled the processing power up, whereas Intel is coming from the PC end – with high power chips that are much more power-hungry – and with the Atom chip, Intel is trying to push it down to that low-power category, and low power consumption is a critical element in smartphones,” he said.

He added that the processing power advantage that Intel might have had given its PC roots has also largely been eroded by strides that ARM-based chips have made over the years.

“1.5GHz dual-core processors are already the norm, and quad core chips for smartphones are around the corner anyway, so any processing power advantage that Intel could have brought to the table has largely been removed already.”

“And then there’s the fact that Android handsets have been optimised around ARM-based chipsets, not only on a platform level, but also with apps. Power hungry apps have native code elements built in and are optimised for ARM chipsets, so they will have to be recoded to make the most of Intel. There’s quite a few challenges ahead of the company, even with the new deal that it has signed with Motorola.”

Intel also used CES to showcase a new Android smartphone, the Lenovo K800, based on the Atom chipset, which will be available in China in the second quarter and will run on China Unicom’s 21Mbs network. The handset uses the Z2460 Atom processor, support for HSPA+ with the Intel XMM 6260 Platform, and the Lenovo LeOS user interface for a localised experience in China.

Android development has mainly focused on the support of ARM-based processors

A swathe of devices such as tablets and netbooks based on the x86 architecture are set to run Android 4 (Ice cream sandwich) from 2012, after developers successfully ported the operating system to the processor architecture.

To date, Android development has mainly focused on the support of the ARM-based processors found in most tablets and smartphones today.But open source developers from the Android-x86.org group, released a port of Android 4.0.1 for low power AMD x86 processors this week, following Google’s release of the source code earlier this month.

The development brings commercial Android devices based on popular x86 chipsets a step closer. Intel, one of the biggest makers of x86 chips, signalled its support for Android 4 at the start of November, when it was revealed that the operating system featured optimisation for an x86 architecture. The first such device based on an Intel chip could be available by mid-2012.

Meanwhile, another ARM rival, MIPS, which is a processor architecture licenses by MIPS Technologies, is also looking to get some Android action. Again, MIPS Technologies is working on a port of Android 4.0 which could lead to commercial products towards the middle of next year.

Intel and MasterCard aim to enable Ultrabook Intel-based PC users to make online payments safer using NFC technology

Intel has teamed up with payment provider MasterCard in a drive to provide more options for a safer and simpler check-out process for online merchants and consumers using Ultrabook or netbook type devices and future generations of Intel-based PCs.

They are working together to optimise a variety of emerging payments technologies, including MasterCard’s NFC-based PayPass and Intel Identity Protection Technology (IPT).

Intel’s IPT enables consumers to use two-factor authentication and hardware-based display protection, which provides increased online security against malware. Additionally, when used with an Intel IPT-enabled reader, consumers will be able to pay for online purchases with a simple tap of their PayPass-enabled card, tag, or smart phone on an Ultrabook device.

“The collaboration with Intel will deliver enhanced security and faster checkout – with the convenience of a simple click or tap,” said Ed McLaughlin, chief emerging payments officer at MasterCard.

The firms explained that the technology will become increasingly relevant over the coming years, as online sales reached $176.2bn last year in the US alone, and is expected to grow at double-digit percentage rates annually for the next 5 years, according to Forrester Research.

Intel strikes agreement with Google to optimise Android for Atom chips

Chip manufacturer Intel is teaming up with Google to ensure that future releases of the Android operating system are optimised for Intel’s Atom processors.

Intel said that it wants to step up its efforts in the lucrative smartphone arena at the opening keynote of the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. President and CEO Paul Otellini, alongside Google’s senior vice president of mobile Andy Rubin, discussed the Intel’s recent efforts to accelerate its smartphone business and showcased a form factor reference design based on Intel Atom processor, and running the Android platform.

The joint effort is designed to speed time-to-market of Intel technology-based smartphones running on the Android platform.

“The unprecedented demand for computing from the client devices to the cloud is creating significant opportunity for the industry,” said Otellini.

“Our collaboration with Google will bring a powerful new capability to market that helps accelerate industry innovation, adoption and choice. I’m excited about the new experiences that will be created across a range of devices, and we’re just getting started.”

The announcement builds on previous agreements that the two have had to enable Intel architecture on Google products, such as Chrome OS, Google TV and the Android Software Development Kit (SDK).

Asus' UX21 will the first of the new breed of 'Ultrabook' laptops

In the spirit of making up niches within niches for new device form factors, Intel has unveiled plans for something dubbed the ‘Ultrabook’, which the company is banking on to make up ground lost to tablet devices such as the Apple iPad.

Sean Maloney, joint head of Intel Architecture, commenting on the announcement at the Computex trade show on Tuesday, said that Ultrabook laptops based on Intel’s current ‘Sandy Bridge’ Core chips would be less than 20mm thick, and cost less than $1,000. For comparison, Apple’s current ultra thin Macbook Air starts at $999.

Intel is confident that creating thin and light high performance notebooks at a low cost will be a success and Maloney said that it expects Ultrabooks to “make up 40 per cent of the market by the end of 2012.”

Next year’s Ultrabooks will be based on Intel’s ‘Ivy Bridge’ chips – a 22nm process chip that will employ its recently announced 3D transistor technology, which should enable even greater performance and battery life gains. The generation following that, codenamed ‘Haswell’, will have half the power requirements, Maloney said, which should mean twice the battery life while offering the same or greater performance.

The first Ultrabook expected to hit the market is the Asus UX21, which will be on sale later this year. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih joined Maloney on stage at Computex to announce the new platform. “At Asus, we are very much aligned with Intel’s vision of Ultrabook. Our customers are demanding an uncompromised computing experience in a lightweight, highly portable design that responds to their needs quickly.”

Intel and Asus had great success in the netbook space, which provided consumers and business users with low cost highly portable computers. Since then however consumer attention has been drawn to tablet devices such as the Apple iPad and Google Android powered equivalents, none of which are powered by Intel processors.

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Ubiquisys said its new Intel powered small cells will offer new levels of compute power for local caching

Ubiquisys, the femtocell vendor, has announced a partnership with chip manufacturer Intel to develop a new range of intelligent small cell base stations. The devices will feature Ubiquisys application software and will be powered by Intel architecture.

The small cells will be available in a variety of configurations and will be powered either by Intel Atom, Core, or Xeon processors depending on operator requirements. They will run WCDMA, LTE and wifi in the same box and according to Ubiquisys will bring new levels of compute power to the femtocell sector.

“What we’re talking about today is a completely new type of small cell”, Keith Day, VP Marketing of Ubiquisys told Telecoms.com. “The Intel powered cells have powerful computing capacity and abundant storage so they have the ability to do things that small cells simply haven’t been able to before.”

The cells are designed to cache local data enabling faster performance for end users. It will also help to significantly reduce the strain on operator networks, thus lowering their backhaul costs.

As an example Day described a scenario where a football stadium offered video highlights to all match attendees with the content stored locally on the small cells, rather than being pulled from the internet.

“If you imagine a deployment scenario of these hotspots under a single macro cell, what you have is a cloud of computing resources, which are bringing data and applications much closer to the point of use for mobile data users,” said Day.

“On this computing platform you could for example cache local data, such as a football stadium with an internet video feed, and rather than being taken from the web it would be cached locally. If you’re doing Twitter upload the cell can take care of all of that as well.

“Any localised data that otherwise would come from the internet onto the handset is transformed when you put a small cell in,” Day added. “It caches things locally so that’s it’s much closer to the user, and the distance from the small cell to the user’s handsets is also very, very small and the actual data rates are much, much higher – so the actual performance, per user, is much higher.”

Will Franks, CTO of Ubiquisys added, “What we’ve done here is to put significant compute power at the [network] edge – it’s not been done before.”

Ubiquisys said the Intel powered small cells would appear on the market in 2012.

According to a recent Informa Telecoms & Media survey, 61 per cent of responders said that they believed that small cells would be more important than macro cells for effective deployment of LTE networks.

The fourth annual LTE North America Conference takes place in Texas, US, November 8-9

The Tri Gate uses vertical fins in its transistors

Chip giant Intel on Wednesday claimed a “major technical breakthrough”, introducing high volume production of the world’s first 3D transistor design. The technology could deliver significant performance gains to mobile devices while avoiding an increase in power consumption. Expect to see the developments implemented in Intel’s Atom chipsets.

The developments will see the building blocks of microprocessors, transistors, enhanced from a two dimensional planar structure to a three dimensional one called the Tri Gate. Working at the microscopic scale of 22 nanometres, Intel has replaced the traditional flat two-dimensional planar gate with a thin 3D fin that rises up vertically from the silicon substrate, sporting a gate on each of the three sides of the fin, rather than just one on top.

The inspiration came from urban planners who use skyscrapers to build upwards to maximise space. The additional height allows more current to flow when the transistor is in the “on” state and as close to zero as possible when it is in the “off” state, with rapid switches between the two.

Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37 per cent performance increase on half the power of Intel’s 32nm planar transistors, making them ideal for use in small handheld devices. The development also pushes Moore’s Law into new realms.

Tri Gate will go into high-volume manufacturing in an Intel chip codenamed “Ivy Bridge” by the end of this year. An integration timeline for the Atom has not yet been announced.

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NSN will incorprate Motorola technologies

Mexico's MVS Communcaciones wants to rollout LTE in the country

In a telecoms market not noted for competition, Mexico’s MVS Communicaciones’ announcement of plans to invest $1bn in an LTE network as part of a consortium that includes Clearwire and Intel should, in theory, shake things up. The consortium would sell access to its network to a variety of local players, including its rivals, opening up a market that has been dominated by billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil.

But, according to Informa analyst Daniele Tricarico, things are unlikely to be that simple. While MVS’s proposals await approval from Mexico’s Finance Ministry and regulator Cofetel, rival telcos are demanding that the carrier be forced to sell off its spectrum holdings in the 2.5GHz band – on the grounds that it isn’t using them. According to Tricarico, MVS has already seen more than 10 per cent of its licences expire, with the remainder set to be gone by 2018 if it doesn’t move on them.

With MVS chief Joaquin Vargas arguing that the under-utilisation is caused by the government’s seeming inability to reach any decisions on its proposals, Tricarico says the situation is fraught with tension. Spectrum in the 2.5GHz band was originally designated for use in pay-TV services; MVS’s proposed use of the spectrum to provide WiMAX services requires regulatory approval – a state of affairs that will still apply now that the carrier has said it’s interested in LTE.

“It’s a complicated situation, a very Latin American situation,” says Tricarico. “America Movil has more than 70 per cent market share. Everyone knows they’re very well connected to both the government and regulator, they have massive influence in the country.” Under the circumstances, its difficult to escape MVS’s inference that there’s more to the delay than initially meets the eye. Tricarico points to recent controversy over interconnection fees as a case in point for a market in dire need of competition: “America Movil in particular and sometimes Telefónica are so dominant that they’re able to retain control over the market,” he says.

With Movil charging what are often described as the world’s highest interconnect fees, rivals have regularly complained that this allows the telco to retain a strangehold on the market, with customers unwilling to move to operators with fewer subscribers. Its a dominant position that even the government of Mexico has struggled to break: the company was recently fined $1bn by the country’s competition watchdog in a case that took four years. The operator has said it will appeal.

Regarding Mexico’s LTE future, Tricarico says it can only be hoped that the country avoids the unbalanced outcome of its 3G rollouts; spectrum constraints saw AM’s rivals struggling to get into the 3G game even as the government invited foreign players such as Deutsche Telkom and China Mobile to bid in an effort to increase competition. They declined, citing high interconnect fees and a lack of clarity on shared infrastructure. “They’re talking about LTE, but they’ve only recently auctioned 3G spectrum,” says Tricarico of Mexico, pointing out that, until recently, even Telefonica was unable to offer that service outside of restricted urban areas. “Even before LTE, the 3G market was very unbalanced, again in favour of America Movil. In the ideal world, you wouldn’t want to replicate that situation with LTE.”

Tricarico says that, in the context of a tense local market, the presence of big American suppliers like Intel and Clearwire makes the MVS consortium an interesting proposal. “These US players are siding with a Mexican company and bringing different expertise to develop infrastructure,” he says. “It’s not clear at what stage they are in terms of planning this, if they’re just in talks or if there’s something more defined. But the real issue is that, without some evolution from the regulator, none of this is going to happen.”

With the jury out on the regulations and competition front, Tricarico says that about the only sure thing the industry can learn from the situation is that is that “Clearwire is definitely going for LTE, which we probably knew already. A lot is happening and in a sense it’s looking like everyone is taking sides against America Movil.”

Whatever way you slice it, it’s clear that Mexico’s on the LTE road but, as MVS’s Vargas said recently, “There is a lack of clear telecommunications policy in the country. The government will have to define if it wants competition or to collect more money.”

Hyundai said it hopes the deal with Vodafone will increase its sales in Europe

Vodafone’s Global Enterprise division has struck a deal with Korean auto manufacturer Hyundai, which also owns the Kia motor brand, that will see the two firms collaborate on telematics services for the European market. Hyundai, which is leading the project, said it expects the deal to boost its “competitiveness in IT systems and reach out to a wider customer base in Europe.”

Hyundai Motor vice-chairman Lee Hyun-Soon said: “Through collaboration with the world-renowned mobile communications operator Vodafone, the Hyundai Motor Group looks forward to providing advanced automotive IT services to its European customers as part of its ongoing commitment to become increasingly competitive in this market.”

Vodafone is one of the leading carriers in the M2M space, with some five million M2M connections, according to Marc Sauter, the firm’s head of business development, M2M. While there is enormous potential in the M2M market, he said, there remain a number of challenges to be overcome.

“M2M applications are still complex to develop, run and operate,” Sauter said. “The market is very fragmented and therefore growth hasn’t happened at the rate which was possible, and which people have expected. We need to make it simpler and more affordable for businesses to develop smart services and connect devices to the internet.”

At Mobile World Congress this year, Vodafone announced a collaboration with Intel designed to go some way to meeting these goals.

Intel will pay Nvidia $1.5bn over the life of the deal

Silicon players Intel and Nvidia have agreed to end all outstanding legal disputes in a deal that will see Intel pay graphics specialist Nvidia $1.5bn as part of a six-year cross-licensing agreement. Intel will make the payments in five annual instalments, beginning January 18th. Intel gets a licence to Nvidia patents, while Nvidia gets limited access to Intel’s portfolio, wtih x86 not covered by the deal. Intel’s flash memory products are also excluded from the agreement.

“This agreement signals a new era for NVIDIA,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO.  “Our cross license with Intel reflects the substantial value of our visual and parallel computing technologies. It also underscores the importance of our inventions to the future of personal computing, as well as the expanding markets for mobile and cloud computing.”

“This agreement ends the legal dispute between the companies, preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product design,” said Doug Melamed, Intel senior vice president and general counsel. “It also enables the companies to focus their efforts on innovation and the development of new, innovative products.”