Named after a Texas town where Intel engineers have stayed during hunting excursions, the Bulverde processor is being positioned as an applications processor for smart phones and PDAs. Intel discussed its plans here at the Intel Developer Forum here, and is expected to formally announce the processor by the first quarter of 2004.

The chip will be powered by the company's Xscale processing engine, Intel's version of the RISC-based processor licensed from ARM Ltd. One big change over previous Xscale devices will be the addition of MMX instructions, which will boost performance and provide an opportunity to further reduce power consumption, said David Rogers, marketing manager at Intel.

"If you're running ARM code on an Xscale running at 400MHz and get 50 frames per second, with MMX it will be 75 MHz. What you want is to do it at 200MHz and stay at 50 frames per second. You're saving a lot of power," he said.

Many software developers are already familiar with MMX, which should ease the process of porting applications to the new processor, Intel claims. Game developer Climax, for one, has demonstrated a version of MotoGP running on Xscale, Rogers said.

Bulverde will also include an interface that connects to 90 percent of the CMOS and CCD image capture devices on the market, Rogers said. Moreover, image capture chips with 4 megapixels or less won't need a separate digital signal processor as they often do now, Rogers said.

To keep power consumption in check, Bulverde will include the power-saving SpeedStep technology, a feature of its mobile Pentium processors. Intel also added three types of idle modes, gated clocks and made changes to the process technology to further reduce power consumption.

The power-reducing features will be activated automatically and are meant to replace the company's previous dynamic voltage management technology, which required user intervention, Rogers said.

By: DocMemory
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