A look at Intel's Moorestown smartphone chipset

Intel has taken the wraps off Moorestown, which is a version of its Atom chip for smartphones and mobile internet tablets.

According to the company, this new generation of Atom is far more power efficient than earlier versions, allowing Intel to get into one of the very few markets dominated by another chip design firm, ARM.

Intel has conceded that it does not offer the most power-efficient mobile processors, but is keen to suggest that Moorestown will provide more processing power than its rivals.

Intel showed multiple video-intensive applications running on a prototype smartphone as a demonstration of the processing power offered by Moorestown.

The application on the left is a 1080p, full-HD video trailer for the film Avatar. On the right, a split-screen videoconference is running simultaneously.

Shreekant 'Ticky' Thakkar is an Intel fellow, the chief platform architect for Intel's Ultra Mobile Group, and the main man behind Moorestown.

Thakkar said at Tuesday's demonstration that rival chipmaker ARM, which dominates the mobile chipset market, would "have to play catch-up" to match Moorestown's performance while keeping a handle on power.

This graph from Intel's Moorestown presentation shows a power consumption comparison between Moorestown and its predecessor, codenamed Menlow.

This image from Intel's presentation roughly shows the architecture of the Moorestown platform and some of the device specifications it will support.

Intel's Moorestown platform controller hub, the MP20, is outlined in this shot from the company's presentation.

The chipmaker has built a lot of functionality into Moorestown that would ordinarily be separate from a mobile phone's core chipset. Building in these features, including camera support and audio acceleration, reduces the overall power consumption of the device, according to Intel.