Intel looks to reshape the chips for mobile devices

Looking into his crystal ball where trends are leading, Intel hopes to strengthen the capacity of System-on-chip to greatly improve the safety and functionality of mobile devices like Smartphones and tablets.

The company is looking to implement specialized graphics accelerators and hardware levels to protect mobile devices, said executives of the company. Intel is laying plans to integrate sensors and accelerators to measure temperature or air quality or speed, distance and location.

The advent of mobile devices has given rise to the movement-and environment-related applications which may not be useful on fixed devices such as PCs, said Dadi Perlmutter, vice President, Intel Architecture Group during an interview last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Integrated sensors and mobile accelerators will feed real-time data that could help users make decisions and organize schedules, Perlmutter said.

"[Users] would love to have a lot of context information. A context may be measuring speed or temperature measurement, "said Perlmutter.

Intel researchers are already developing an array of sensors to smartphones-type measuring air quality. A mobile toolkit delivers carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and ozone sensors to measure air quality and the objectives of that common people encounter toxic gas.

But adding sensors, security and hardware accelerators is a multi-year effort of integration and must be balanced with the power of assistive devices and software, Perlmutter said.

For smartphones and tablets, Intel currently offers integrated chip--also called System-on-chip--which include CPUs and cores for separate functions such as media encoding and decoding. For example, the chip Intel low power Trail Oak Tablet includes a separate CPU and an accelerator that allows devices for playback of 1080p high definition video. But the company wants those characteristics within the CPU chip, which shrinks as it could happen.

The key to cramming more features inside CPU is to add more transistors, which could make the more functional, said Shekhar Borkar, research fellow at Intel.

"It's all about integration," said Borkar, adding memory, cache, and floating point units--that once resided outside--have been integrated into the CPU over time.

Intel updates every two years a new manufacturing process and invests billions to improve its factories. The company later this year will begin to produce chips on the 22 nanometer manufacturing process, which are faster and more power-efficient chip made using the current 32-nm process

Intel has already said it would add 3 G and 4 G mobile radio for future chip, and last month completed the acquisition of wireless units of Infineon, from which you will get the radio technology. The company is also in the process of acquiring the security vendor McAfee, which will help melt the hardening of hardware and software to protect mobile devices from internal and external threats.

The company hopes that integrates multiple functions, helps take market share from arm, which currently dominates the smartphone and Tablet PC markets. In addition to Oak Trail, Intel Tablet chips this year expects to ship the chip Medfield for Smartphone.

In future CPUs will be unrecognisable compared to what they are, today, said Perlmutter, responsible for designing future Intel chips. He said that a CPU is not known as a "central processing unit", but as a "central unit" platform. He said that Intel made great progress with the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, which is the first time that the company has put a CPU and graphics processor in a single chips.

"Is sort of an expansion of integration [of] CPU and GPU. If all goes to one device, and new features, new opportunities to come, "said Perlmutter.

Mobile devices are now also targets for hackers and Intel is focused on bringing more security elements to ICS that enable you to not only authenticate users, but also to isolate and resolve attempts to steal information. If a device is largely determined by the software, it is easy to break the system as information transferred through memory, CPU or chipset could be easily accessible, Perlmutter said.

Smartphone personal information are stored and used for bank transactions and information must be protected, Perlmutter said. Integrated security hardware could store passwords or adding voice, fingerprints, eye pictures or images to identify users. Beyond user authentication, security chip could encode data transferred via wired or wireless networks.

In addition, the company is pouring money into research as attempts to chip mobile to refine and develop software for the best viewing experience. There is a growing demand for high-quality graphics on mobile devices with multiple users, games and movies in high definition.

The company bundles of graphics chips with its processors, which made the biggest seller in the world of graphics. But Intel has been criticized for lower quality compared to rivals Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, which offer better graphics capabilities in their chips for PC and mobile devices.

Intel has taken steps to improve the graphics chip with his Tablet PC Oak Trail, which includes an Accelerator for playing high-definition 1080p video. The company is looking to move features like the ability to protect the movie streaming from PC chips into mobile chip.

Intel is also creating software tools that allow for interactive graphics, such as 3D images that can react to human gestures, said Borkar. There are already some programming frameworks such as OpenCL and DirectX 11 that exploit CPU processing power and graphics processors, but Intel hopes to learn new programming models that achieve throughput computing and blur the lines between the CPU and graphics processor, Borkar said.

Intel last month announced that it would invest $ 100 million in U.S. universities over the next five years looking for drive around areas including graphics. It is launching a new research centre called the Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing bring more realistic and interactive 2D and 3D graphics experience for users on PCs and mobile devices. Intel is working with eight U.S. Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, the University of Washington, Harvard, University of California at Davis and the University of California at Irvine.

Borkar, Intel said research plans are not set in stone, and that it would be better to leave the options open on what kind of chip and programming models would emerge in the future.

"The hardest part with research is ... what you look like eight years from now?" Borkar, he said.