Intel and VIA Technologies are both readying new platforms aimed at ultra-mobile devices (UMDs), portable systems smaller than a laptop but still based on PC technology. If new designs can overcome the problems of limited processing power and short battery life that have so far plagued UMDs, such devices may yet find a
market as an alternative to the corporate laptop.

UMDs are somewhat loosely defined. It is a category that takes in ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) such as OQO’s Model e2 and Samsung’s Q1 Ultra but it also overlaps somewhat with the ultra-portable end of the laptop spectrum, and also includes even smaller devices such as internet tablets.

While there has been a great deal of interest around UMPCs, their small size has largely been a limitation, with many of the early devices seen as underpowered next to laptops, while still only lasting for an hour or two on battery power.

“The overall usability of UMPCs is not sufficient, while their prices have typically been much higher than laptops,” said Ovum senior analyst Carl Gressum. For example, some UMPCs have prices near £1,000 yet only have a touch screen for input, while a business laptop with a much larger screen may cost only half as much.

The first UMPC models have typically been based on standard laptop chips, but processors specially designed to meet the constraints of UMPCs should be able to provide a greater level of performance and make more frugal use of battery power.

Intel’s Silverthorne chip is due in the second quarter of 2008 and is expected to consume about half a watt of energy. This is a tenth as much as a typical laptop processor, yet it will have comparable performance to the first generation of Centrino laptops, according to Intel.

The firm gave more details on Silverthorne at last week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference, although the official name of the chip has yet to be disclosed.
“This is a ground-up new microarchitecture designed expressly for low-power operations,” said Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner.

Although it is Intel’s smallest chip since the 486, it still keeps compatibility with mainstream processors, he added. Combined with a chipset codenamed Poulsbo, the new processor makes up Intel’s Menlow platform for UMPCs.

Meanwhile, VIA Technologies unveiled its new processor last month. Code-named Isaiah, it replaces the C7 chip, which has already proved successful in several UMPC designs, such as OQO’s. Due to ship by mid-2008, it will have clock speeds up to 2GHz.

Although it will not completely replace the C7, Isaiah is claimed to offer twice the performance while keeping within the same power envelope, and is pin-compatible so that existing designs can easily be upgraded with the new processor.

A 1GHz chip based on this architecture will consume an absolute maximum of 3.5W in a worst-case scenario, according to VIA, and well below 1W when idle.

“The primary markets for Isaiah will be UMPCs, UMDs, small form factor desktops and media centres. However, with excellent power efficiency we believe chips based on the architecture will also be adopted in mainstream notebooks and PCs,” said Richard Brown, VIA’s vice president of marketing.

Brown said there are a number of features in the chip that boost performance, including a new superscalar microarchitecture, a fast floating point unit to s peed multimedia processing, and 1MB of L2 cache.

More significantly, the chip adds 64bit instructions and support for handling virtual machines, features set to be increasingly important in the corporate market.

While the launch speeds for both Silverthorne and Isaiah have yet to be disclosed, VIA has already said it believes its chip may outperform Intel’s, because of its superscalar architecture and other features.

But performance issues aside, many industry observers remain unconvinced that there is a market for UMPCs, outside of vertical applications and those few executives and IT professionals prepared to pay almost anything to have the smallest PC available.

“The problem is not the hardware, but that there is no specific area where UMPCs excel against other products, such as smartphones and laptops,” said Ovum’s Gressum.

Eszter Morvay, senior research analyst for personal computing at IDC, agreed that UMPCs and UMDs are currently a poorly defined category of client device.
“The usage scenarios for UMPCs are quite obscure, and they have only had appeal to niche markets so far,” Morvay added.

There is also a sense among some experts that the UMPC is a solution looking for a problem, and that vendors such as Intel are pushing the concept simply as a way to sell more PC chips, rather than trying to meet a specific business requirement.

Morvay argued that although the UMPC format has industry support, this does not guarantee that it will succeed.

“It’s not just VIA and Intel, but also AMD and Microsoft. Key vendors are behind it, but this doesn’t mean buyers want it ­ just look at what happened with consumers and Media Center PCs,” Morvay said.