Intel Updates World on Mobile Roadmap for 2014

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Herman Eul
Intel Atom processor gets a 64-bit refresh under the LTE advanced communications platform. The chipmaker has outlined its mobile plans for 2014 at the Mobile World Congress in Catalonia this week. The first release of the Atom comes in 1H 2014, codenamed Merrifield – a dual-core SoC based on the Silvermont architecture. Second half of the year, this is updated to quad-core Moorfield optimized for graphics and displays. Both t
hese SoC’s are fabbed on 22nm architecture and Intel is soon getting into 14nm Broadwell in the latter period of 2014.

The dual-core Merrifield has a max clock of 2.13GHz (base clock speeds not quoted) and a shared 1MB L2 cache. At 2.3GHz, Moorefield has 4 cores and has double Merrifield’s cache size. Merrifield updates from the Clover Trail+ architecture by introducing better graphics through IMG’s PowerVR Series 6 (Rogue) GPU and the improved performance offered by Silvermont cores.

Intel’s mobile roadmap for 2014 mentions no 32-bit chips, all its demos for the 64-bit architecture have been done on recompiled Android kernels. There has been no official word on 64-bit Android, this is however expected in the June Google I/O conference. Currently the Merrifield supports Android 4.4.2.

Strategic partnerships have been formed with Asus, Lenovo and Foxconn to develop mobile devices that run on the newly minted Atom chips.
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