5.4 The x86 Architecture for Multimedia Devices

Figure 5.4 shows the chipset architecture Intel is offering to mobile device developers. It should be noted at this point that, unlike the OMAP chipset described above, Intel’s solution is new on the market and only a few devices are presently using this chipset. It is likely however, that as the chipset evolves, many third parties will become interested in an Intel x86-based chipset for mobile devices for the reasons discussed at the beginning of this chapter.

Like desktop and notebook chipsets from Intel, the chipset for small mobile devices consists of three chips. The main chip is an Intel x86 processor that has been optimized for use in battery-based small mobile devices. According to [12], these processors are referred to as A100 and A110 and are based on the Intel Pentium M processor architecture. They are clocked at 400 or 600 MHz and have an on-chip 2×32 kb layer 1 cache and a 512 kb layer 2 cache to store program instructions and data which reduces the waiting time when accessing memory. Like in other Pentium processors, a built-in multimedia coprocessor speeds up video streaming and other computationally intensive multimedia processes.