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Intel's Silverthorne (Ultra-Mobile Processor) Previewed

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Apr 12, 2001
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At this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference, Intel is giving additional details regarding its upcoming Silverthorne ultra-mobile processor (via News.com and AppleInsider).

According to the reports, Silverthorne will include dual in-order pipelines in order to keep power consumption at a minimal .5-2 Watts. Most modern chips use out of order pipelines for performance benefits, but at the cost of power. Nevertheless, AppleInsider says that the chip is expected to be as powerful as early Pentium M processors. Additionally, the processor will use the Core 2 Duo instruction set and will support hyperthreading.

Apple has been rumored to be adopting Silverthorne for their next generation iPhone. Silverthorne is expected to ship in the first half of 2008.

Article Link
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/04/intels-silverthorne-ultra-mobile-processor-previewed/
I wonder what would be able to be accomplished with a more powerful iPhone.
 
So the question is, will adopting the Silverthorne processor offset the increased power consumption by 3G, allowing the present battery life to persist or even increase for the 2nd gen iPhone?
 
Hmm...faster processors might be able to decode HD?

Does this mean HD iPhone next Tuesday? :D
 
2A Batterie said:
For one, it would get me to whip out the Visa. Does anyone have an idea of when an updated iPhone will be released? Is this announcement an indicator?
Click to expand...
FCC documentation would be an indicator. I don't expect to see HD on the iPhone even with Silverthorne.

Does anyone else remember the hyperthreading rumors for Penryn? Anyone?
 
Muzzway said:
I wonder what would be able to be accomplished with a more powerful iPhone.
Click to expand...

Basically, a more robust experience/functionality.
Think more laptop less smart phone.

Why can't I shake this hunch that the iPhone is headed more towards a small, tablet-ish size/device than maintaining current 'smart phone' dimensions?
 
iphone 2 on it's way . . . sometime in June at WWDC?

now all it needs is 3G, ichat, GPS . . . watching the iphone evolve is like watching paint dry while on ecstasy - still is excruciatingly drawn out but so fun and exciting all at the same time!!!
 
thats pretty awesome. intel seem to enjoy working with apple and i wonder if apple put any ideas into their heads with this one.
 
That is somewhat interesting that the chip has hyperthreading, but not out-of-order execution. They are essentially the same thing, so I wonder how much Intel is really saving by dropping OOE, but still having hyper-threading.
 
1st iPhone ARM CPU an Albatross?

So the first 1st iPhone is really an Albatross, as no other iPhones will be on the same mobile CPU?! Great, thanks Apple for another dead-end...

First 68k
Second PPC
Third ARM
Fourth TBD (x86/x64?! But I have to wonder if they will migrate to Itanium?!)
 
Bad time to buy?

I was going to buy an ipod touch this week. Is it a bad time to buy? I would hate to buy it and then just a few months later see it get a big update. I don't like to wait and don't usually play that game, but if it is very imminent I would consider it. any opinions?
 
lazyrighteye said:
Why can't I shake this hunch that the iPhone is headed more towards a small, tablet-ish size/device than maintaining current 'smart phone' dimensions?
Click to expand...

If by that you mean that the form factor will gravitate towards a larger, more tablet-like shape, I strongly disagree. The appeal of the iphone is that it's your phone. You can carry it as easily and automatically as you would your phone. Make it bigger and more tablet-like and I for one would likely leave it behind frequently.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

will it be clocked down like the current iphone CPU to save battery life
 
liberty4all said:
So the first 1st iPhone is really an Albatross, as no other iPhones will be on the same mobile CPU?! Great, thanks Apple for another dead-end...
Click to expand...

I don't think it will matter really. Apple will just create Universal binaries again ;).

With regards to 68k, the Intel chips had far inferior performance in the early 80's, Intel is still big today because it was included in the IBM PC, who were the big player in the computer industry at the time.

PPC may have been a mistake when Apple switched, but PPC was a better chip at the time. Only against the G4 was Intel consistently better than PPC before the Intel switch, and that wasn't really true with the laptops until the Pentium M became good.
 
liberty4all said:
So the first 1st iPhone is really an Albatross, as no other iPhones will be on the same mobile CPU?! Great, thanks Apple for another dead-end...

First 68k
Second PPC
Third ARM
Fourth TBD (x86/x64?! But I have to wonder if they will migrate to Itanium?!)
Click to expand...

Apple is already using x86 on all Macs; I'm sure they would love to have all their products (or at least all that run some version of OS X) on the same platform. Doesn't mean that first generation phones will be "albatrosses", though, any more than my G5 is. I can sort of see why you might care what architecture your computer uses, but honestly, why would you care at all for your phone, as long as it works? It's not like there's vast quantities of software for the iPhone that would have to run in emulation if they switched.
 
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