Intel’s Atom first debuted as netbooks were just taking off, and the low-powered chip family is credited with helping the category grow. But the world’s largest chipmaker is far from the only player in the market for small, super-energy-efficient chips, and with booming interest in smartphones and tablet PCs these days, it’s no wonder that it’s coming out swinging against ARM — one of the powerhouses in the low-power chip design business.
The result is the next version of Atom, the Atom Z6xx series of chips, codenamed Moorestown. HardwareCentral takes a look at Moorestown’s unveiling and what it could mean for the space.
After a lot of previews, Intel formally took the wraps off the Atom Z6xx series family of processors, known better by their codename “Moorestown.” The Z6xx series is the next generation in the Atom processor line, targeted at smartphones and tablets.
Atom has up to now been primarily used in larger devices with bigger batteries such as netbooks, but with Moorestown, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) finally feels like it has the right product to target the smartphone and other small battery-powered device markets. The company first previewed smartphones running on Moorestown processors in January during CEO Paul Otellini’s CES keynote.
