When it boils down to it, no manufacturer really needs to worry about being able to have the best speed –they all have the capacity to shrink down desktop hardware technology. The real problem is being able to design a chip that is able to minimize the power usage.
Right now, the mobile phone industry is pretty happy with the QSD8250 1GHz CPU, since there are very few other 1GHz processors around, nobody really bothers to compare how long the battery of the smart phones will last. Intel is going to change just that. According to reports, the hardware manufacturer has announced that their latest Z-series Atom CPU is able to keep a device running for a full ten days on standby.
We are undoubtedly impressed. After all, they demonstrated the chip on a phone by running a live game of Quake III on the device. Sure the graphics are much smaller, but all the details are rendered in full 3D and the device never as much had a hiccup in terms of performance. You could probably hook up a keyboard and mouse on the mobile phone and play a quick game over local WAN without worrying about the device hampering your frag count.
Of course, Google is already taking first dibs on the new technology. The company has made no move to conceal the fact that the new Android handsets that are coming out might be using the new Atom CPU. Many are betting that the Motorola Shadow/Milestone 2 will be the first device to make use of the processor (which is also rumored to be running much faster than 1GHz), thought there have also been some rumors that HTC might have a new Android device of their own as well.
The new hardware is expected to become available soon, which means that we should be expecting the first handsets to utilize this chip to come out by the second half of 2010.
Tags: Apple, ARM, Google, Google-Nexus-One, Intel