At Computex in June 2009 I had a press meeting with Anand Chandraseker and one thing he mentioned as the press challenged him about netbooks and smartbooks was the fact that Moorestown could make a good platform for smartbooks. If I remember correctly, the words he used were ‘a better smartbook than ARM-based products.’ (Analysis here)

ARM platforms are scaling well and in mid-2010 a multi-core ARM processor will be able to reach processing power levels that are close to what we’re seeing on Atom (with a single core.) The power envelope of a Moorestown-based tablet or smartphone won’t be significantly higher either so when you think about Moblin, its stability, its brand and potential for a lot of Intel-backed marketing, the code-sharing that’s happening with Nokia and its Maemo teams, its ‘appup’ store, its roadmap, and the support it’s getting from leading computer manufacturers you can see a lot of advantages over skinned WinCE, non-existent Chrome OS and re-hashed Android open-source models.

Proof that tablets and ‘smart’ devices are possible was given in the keynote speech and I’ve included the relevant 5-min segment below. You’ll also here a very interesting line in the first 20 seconds. Paul Otellini specifically mentions that Nokia is in partnership with Intel ‘around’ the Moorestown platform. That could be the software development work that’s going on (Nokia and Intel are sharing a lot of software across Moblin and Maemo) but it could be something else too!

Skip to the following segments for specific information on the key elements from the Ultra Mobile section of the keynote.

00:21 ‘We’ve announced partnerships around Moorestown with leaders like LG and Nokia’

02:00 Multipoint (3-way) video conference on Moorestown smartphone. (from Vidyo.com)

03:40 HD movie demo (720p)

04:30 Open Peak tablet demo. (Note e-reader application)

Next stop: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona.

One of the big surprises of CES was the LG GW990 smartphone and based on progress I’m seeing with Moblin, the AppUp Store and what we’re hearing from Intel, we should expect to see those devices feeding in in Q3 this year. Moorestown is not only limited to smartphones though. There’s huge potential for ‘smart’ connected devices based around the tablet and larger slider form factors. Intel were showing a number of designs at CES and you’ll see them all in the video below.

Paul Otellini

Apart from the usual TV display highlights from Intel (including an amazing 3D demo) Paul Otellini covered computing in the home, entertainment, security and energy efficiency but in the area of ultra mobile computing, Paul had a few surprises for us at the Intel keynote at CS this week.

Highlighting the quick progress (and priority!) of the Intel Application Developer Program, Paul announced ‘App Up’ (Press release) which is Intels version of the storefront for application purchases and downloads across Moblin (handhelds to Windows. What this means is that the complete architecture for the app store, including the financial services, is complete. Developers can now earn money and end users can now buy apps!

I spoke with Peter Biddle, Director of  the Intel Application Developer Program about a number of aspects of the program and it’s clear that this isn’t just a skin-deep effort. They’re thinking about everything from affiliate programs to tailored stores. Naturally I’ve installed the store on my netbook here and i’ll be giving it a test over the coming weeks. It will be insteresting to see the rate at which applications start flowing into the system! Note that Dell, Asus, Samsung and Acer are building storefronts which I can only assume will be pre-installed on netbooks soon. The end-user base is likely to grow very quickly.

Intel’s AppUp store is available here.

On the hardware side we got to see a couple of interesting products. The big news (which we found out about a few hours before the event) was the demonstration of the LG GW990 smarthone on the Intel Moorestown platform. Intel and LG announced that they were working on this early last year but to see a working demo and hear about a Q3 release is confidence-inspiring. We’ got a hands-on demo after the keynote and you can find details of that, including the specs, here.

Also mentioned was continuing partnerships with LG and Nokia in this area. Whether that means Nokia is going to build a moorestown-based phone is up for question but it certainly sounded like it.

Finally we saw that Intel are not ignoring the potential for Moorestown and Moblin to make a very good ‘smart’ device platform and the demonstration of ‘Open Peak’, a dockable tablet, was proof that Moorestown means a lot for consumers.

As part of my work with the Intel Insiders I was given an Insiders view of the LG smartphone. More details on MIDMoves

Gallery of GW990 at the LG booth

Specifications confirmed:

• Intel Moorestown platform with HD 720p encoding and 1080p decoding.
• 5mp cam (single led flash)
• 1850mah (single cell I assume) battery
• A-GPS
• Compass
• HSDPA/HSUPA
• Q3 availability

Note the marketing: Multi-Tasking.

I had a stroke of luck this morning as I was waiting for Sascha from Netbooknews to do a video of an LG netbook today, I wandered across the booth to look at the smartphones and there it was. The LG GW990 built on Intel’s Moorestown platform. Intel’s first ever phone. (Announced back in Feb) The display included some specifications so I’ve listed those below.

Gallery of GW990 at the LG booth

At the Intel keynote a few hours later, the GW990 appeared again along with a note from Paul Otellini that not only LG are partnering on Moorestown but Nokia are too. I’ll just say that again. Nokia are partnering with Intel with the Moorestown platform. This is significant.

Finally, after the keynote, we managed to get hands on with a live demo. Here’s the video which, according to Intel, was the worlds first public demo.

We were all impressed with the UI transitions and smoothness of the Mobiln 2.1 for handhelds but questions remain about the web experience (we assume it will continue with a Mozilla based browser) and general usage in terms of phone, connectivity and a million other aspects but this is a fantastic first outing for an Intel smartphone.

Specifications confirmed:

• Intel Moorestown platform with HD 720p encoding and 1080p decoding.
• 5mp cam (ingle led flash)
• 1850mah (single cell I assume) battery
• A-GPS
• Compass
• HSDPA/HSUPA
• Q3 availability

Unconfirmed:

• 1024×480 resolution

My guess right now is that we will see a lot more of this, and other Moorestown devices, at MWC in Feb.

Note the marketing: Multi-Tasking.

There’s one thing that always happens at bar camps; people talk. They talk with a passion and if you listen carefully you can always pick up a few little tasty morsels of information.

At the Mobile Dev Camp in Munich today it was no different. Apart from some excellent talks that I’ll write about over at MIDMoves (I had my MIDmoves hat on today) I picked up the following bits of info.

Moorestown /Moblin graphics performance (video below)

I saw a nice demo which made me think that yes, that GMA500 that annoys so many people on the Menlow platform, will be a whole lot better under Moblin and Moorestown and might even work in Menlow. The demo was a MSI Wind U115 playing a Quake III demo in the Moblin OS. 35 fps on an external monitor isn’t bad at all! Apparently the drivers are the latest (under NDA) and were back-ported to work with Menlow. The software engineer ensured me that Moorestown would be better. He also assured me that the core was PowerVR in a GMA500. That’s two software engineers that have confirmed that now. Seeing Moorestown graphic drivers working in Menlow kind of proves it too!

What clock for Moorestown?

More of an engineers hunch than something set in stone was the thought that Moorestown would run up to 1.2Ghz. Actually I see no reason why it can’t go higher over time as long as the devices thermal characteristics allow it. When you think about the processing range that Moorestown could cover you’re looking at something that starts at the current high-end of smartphones and goes up, in multi-threaded form, to at least twice the processing power.

Intel Atom Developer Program.

IADP will launch very early next year. That’s earlier than I thought but the earlier the better because the momentum for the Android and iPhone ecosystem is huge.

HTML5.

HTML5 is exciting. Flash is exciting too but both of these software technologies are going to put more load on your CPU. On mobile devices, that means trouble. Either the battery drains faster or the page loading slows down. You can turn Flash off but I hope you can turn HTML5 support off too otherwise the battery problem on mobile devices just gets worse.

No news on GPU for PineView.

I tried to squeeze out the details from a few people but no-one knew. Is it the GMA 3150 or the GMA500 as I predicted? The jury is still out on that one.

I took MIDMoves to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last week with a focus on the three M’s of MIDs, Moblin and Moorestown. IDF is the highlight of my mobile computing year and I was hoping to see Moorestown MIDs being demonstrated, the launch of Moblin 2.0 and a bunch of new products. As it happens, we got the expected Moblin 2.0 launch but didn’t see much in terms of hardware. We did get a few surprises though and as usual, in-depth information that helps us predict what is going to happen in 2010 and 2011. Here’s a summary of the Intel Developer Forum 2009 for a mobile computing perspective.

Read the full story

While we didn’t get full details about Moorestown at Intel’s Developer Forum this week, we did get a sneak peak, as Intel love to call it, into what Moorestown brings to the table by the chief architect himself, Shreekant (Ticky) Thakkar.

Most of it is summarized in a PDF issued to the press but there’s also a set of slides to check out too. See SPCS004 on this content page. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the session but I’ve been through the documents and have pulled out some key features below.

2x power reduction in use. In real terms we should see what I call ‘on-net’ active power drain (using the device) reduced to under 2W. With the smaller screen devices that will reduce further. This is about double what you’d see on an ARM-based device under similar usage sdcenarios but in terms of getting things done, should be much snappier.

50x idle power reduction. This brings, for the first time, a PC into always-on scenarios.

Hyperthreading capability. As we’ve experienced on Menlow, devices with hyperthreading feel faster.

Burst Performance Technology (BPT) – Monitoring thermals to allow short-term bursting of the CPU clock beyond the design limit. Basically, as other parts of the Moorestown platform are turned off, there is the potential to increase clock until certain temperatures are reached.

Bus Turbo mode – Allows the bus speed to be increased in line with CPU frequency scaling thus reducing memory latency and increasing bus bandwidth.

Active power management – Turns off certain parts of the system when not in use. E.g. turn of video decoders when web browsing. Power management is controlled by a ‘profile’ system that identifies certain usage modes and turns on and off ‘power islands’ as required. Here’s a thermal map of the system in a fully-on and controlled (‘gated’) state. This is something that may only be successfully achieved when using a Moblin-based OS.

Through this technique we should be looking at 2x power reduction overall but in certain usage modes the effect will be dramatic. Standby, video decoding and audio playback modes will be vastly more power efficient. Up to 50x in standby more for example.

Briertown. This embedded mixed-signal analogue control circuit integrates functions that were previously found on descreet chips. DC-DC power conversion, audio, LED control, battery charging circuits. This module also integrates with the ‘power-gating’ process mentioned above.

In addition to the information released this week, we should not forget what we’ve learnt before. We’re probably looking at a PowerVR SGX graphics core, hardware decoding video to 720p or even 1080p levels, hardware encoding of video and huge reductions in platform size (about 2x volume reductions expected in devices.)

CPU clock rates aren’t known at the moment (expect SKUs to be announced in early 2010) and pricing is also an unknown factor that could affect OEM choices but I think that’s enough information to be getting excited about for the time being.

Note: Moorestown could scale from smartphone to MID and UMPC scenarios, smartbooks and many other product categories. For a look past the technical specifications into what the Moorestown platform could mean for consumers, see this article.

One of the things I expected to find out at the Intel Developer Forum this year were details about Pinetrail and Moorestown graphics. GMA950 on the current netbook platform clearly needs a boost in the video codec department and if Moblin 2 is only going to support Moorestown and Pinetrail along with the current generation of netbooks, it makes sense that they have the same graphics core right? It fits perfectly with Intel’s ‘continuum’ of devices on the Atom platform. Unfortunately the information on the graphics was limited to notes about OpenGL 2.0 ES and a mention of a PowerVR core in a ‘Sodaville’ Atom-based media processor presentation (image right.)

During a session at IDF this week though, I had fairly concrete confirmation from people in-the-know that the graphics on the Moorestown platform would be a GMA500 (PowerVR SGX core) as you’ll find in the Menlow (Poulsbo chipset as seen on the Asus T91, Viliv X70 and other mobile and long battery-life-focused solutions.) I was a little surprised that it’s the GMA500 but have no reason to disbelieve the info I was given.

Dovetailing nicely with that information though is continuing speculation that Pineview, the CPU+GPU on the Pinetrail netbook platform is also going to use the GMA500. The original info comes from a June article by HKEPC but LinuxDevices seem fairly confident that it is in fact a GMA500 core in Pinetrail.

Its looking like we’re going to have a very closely-matched range of platforms come mid-2010 then.

• Pinetrail – Netbook platform. Atom 1.66Ghz + GMA500 GPU
• Menlow – MID platform. Atom ranging from 800Mhz-2.0Ghz + GMA 500 GPU (with PowerVR SGX core)
• Moorestown – Atom CPU (clockrate unknown) + GMA 500 GPU (With PowerVR SGX core)
• Sodaville – Atom  CPU + PowerVR SGX core.

Note: In each case the graphics may be clocked at different speeds ranging from 133 – 400Mhz. On current devices we see a 133Mhz graphics clock.

The exciting thing about this is that everything is aligned well to keep it simple for developers and there’s just one operating system that will sit on top of all these to provide optimised kernel, drivers, SDK and app-store. Moblin. From smartphones to netbooks through set-top boxes, PNDs, PMPs, Web tablets and more. One platform for developers that covers, in the 2010-2012 timeframe, an addressable market of over 400 million units, in just the mobile internet device and smartphone segment. Add a few hundred million on top of that for netbooks!

Intel’s ‘Continuum’ is starting to come together.

We’re finally getting a look at what the Moorestown MIDphones of the future should offer us. Chippy has a short demonstration of Wind River’s interface running on top of Mobilin. This is designed for MIDs as compared to the standard Moblin which has an interface based around more standard input devices (ie: mouse and keyboard on a netbook). The demo you are about to see below is running on the Inventec MediaPhone that jkk went hands on with at Computex 2009.

While some of the demo looks pretty good, such as the smooth application opening animation, it is also quite disheartening to see that they couldn’t even get the app pages to slide smoothly at this point. Hoping that it won’t end up shipping like this (it doubtfully will).

[MIDMoves]

Spotted in a technical session yesterday, this is a live demo of a working Moorestown MID with a capacative touchscreen running Moblin 2 and a UI developed by Wind River. The device is the Inventec ‘MediaPhone’ seen at Computex 2009. In the first part of the video you’ll see a public demo. We managed to get a private demo and you’ll see that in the second-half of the video.

It looks extremely smooth, well thought out and gives you an example of the sorts of user interfaces and features we’ll see when Moorestown and Moblin 2.1 hit in the middle of 2010.

Already in my calendar yesterday was a short-notice conference call from Intel. Apparently they have an announcement to make. This morning I woke to see the keywords Intel and Nokia streaming through twitter and google reader. The rumor is that Nokia will be using Intel inside.

I assume this is a Moorestown product win which means it sits alongside the LG announcement for a 2010 product launch If this is true, it’s a really significant step forward for Intel in the Ultra Mobile and smartphone market.

Questions to be asked:

• Is it going to be voice enabled?
• What operating system (Moblin, Maemo or Symbian)
• Are Nokia simply testing the market and technology (in which case i’d expect it to be in a next-gen Nokia tablet rather than a  phone)
• If it’s a tablet, does it mean that the OMAP3-based tablet is scrapped?

The rumor comes from Bloomberg. The press call is at 1130am EST. Expect news on UMPCPortal as at breaks.

Jkk has tons of video coverage of the now finished Computex 2009. Here he has an interesting 17 minute video of a Q&A with Intel’s General Manager of the Ultra Mobility Group, Anand Chandrasekher. Jkk also rounded up a list of all the people in attendance, as follows:

• Our very own Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine
• Joanna from LAPTOP
• Johannes from NewGadgets.de
• Frank from SomewhatFrank
• Charbax from TechVideoBlog.com
• JKK from jkkmobile.com (working the camera)

An interesting watch if you want to understand how Intel is handling the upcoming Moorestown platform and have a chance to see and hear from some prominent members of our blogging community.

I wrote an update on Moorestown last week over at MIDMoves.com but I want to expand on that here on UMPCPortal today because I really think that the new information we have now is extremely significant for the core audience here. Moorestown is the first computing platform that covers my definition of ultra mobile computing. From high-end smartphones, through targeted, Ultra Mobile ‘desktops’ , super-mobile laptops and the whole range of internet-connected opportunities that exist in the mobile internet space.

Read the full story

Jkk seems to be getting his hands on all of the cool stuff at Computex. Another short video showing a very solid looking Moorestown based MID. It seems to have a very sizable screen which covers much of the real estate on the front of the unit. It looks thin and well designed. Though the unit that jkk got to check out was just a prototype, I have to say that it is looking quite nice. I can’t wait for Moorestown devices to hit the market; we’ll be seeing great devices like this providing a wonderful FIE to users… as long as they nail the software, and I’m hoping that screen is capacitive!

I had a chance to meet Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, after the Ultra Mobility Event today and (apologies to the other bloggers in the room) managed to ask a whole bunch of questions. Some couldn’t really be answered in detail but here are the highlights.

Moorestown supports 720p encoding in hardware. We knew it had hardware encoding but we didn’t know the performance level. It looks like we could see some nice streaming video solutions.

MS Windows will be supported on a ‘version’ of Moorestown. You won’t see the same power efficiency under Windows when compared to Moblin 2.0

When Intel talk about ‘Platform’ efficiency, that are talking about the full product including radio’s and screen. If we take the ‘50x platform idle power reduction’ over Menlow (which idle’s at something like 5W in worst-case scenarios on MIDs like the Viliv S5) we’re looking at around 100mw which is very impressive. Previously Intel had announced a 10x reduction but 50x is the current figure.

There are three software vendors working on UI offerings for Moblin 2 on MIDs. Canonical. Wind River and Asianux

There is no detail on Moorestown timescale. Party line appears to be that they will have Moorestown ready by beginning of 2010. If seeing that it might be accelerated.

Menlow will still be refreshed even when Moorestown is released.

Intel says that Moorestown will provide a far better smartbook experience than ARM-based products

The power ‘envelope’ of Moorestown is 2W.

Intel don’t think ARM will be able to compete with Intel on performance or (internet) compatibility. They want to maintain their performance and compatibility lead.

In general I was very impressed with what I saw today. It’s still hard to believe that MIDs are now in the smartphone space. Unfortunately we didn’t get the chance to make a voice call and we didn’t have a lot of hands on but there are a few videos being processed so keep an eye on YouTube.

This just in from a meeting I had with Intel this evening.

At the Ultra Mobility Event at Computex tomorrow, we’re going to see live demonstrations of 2 or 3 Moorestown devices.

Clearly this is going to affect Menlow but it sounds like Intel have accelerated the Moorestown program. I don’t have any info as to whether Microsoft products will run on the platform so that will be one of my questions tomorrow.

More information over at the MIDMoves project blog that I’m working on this week.