Intel and Nokia making a mobile chip for phones, netbooks?

The announcement Monday by Intel and Nokia that the companies are teaming up on Linux development may not have told the whole story. It's possible, and perhaps even likely, that they're teaming up on chip development, as well.

Charlie Demerjian at SemiAccurate was the first to report on the existence of an Atom-based system on a chip (SoC) called Penwell, which is allegedly being jointly developed by Intel and Nokia. Demerjian doesn't have much in the way of details on the chip, beyond a codename and the fact that it's a joint Intel/Nokia effort, and those few facts have yet to be collaborated by another source. Nonetheless, the rumor is extremely compelling for a number of reasons.

First is the fact that, as Demerjian himself points out, Intel's 32nm Atom core, codenamed Medfield, will leave plenty of "uncore" available on an SoC for all sorts of third-party IP blocks. Demerjian suggests that one such IP block could be the HSPA/3G modem that Intel licensed from Nokia last summer.

Such mixed-signal (digital plus analog/RF) designs have historically been impossible to pull off at clockspeed and power profiles that work for an application processor, but since this past IDF Intel has been touting 32nm as the point at which it will be able to do "multiproduct" mixed signal SoCs that integrate analog radios with x86 processor cores. Intel also claims that its 32nm SoC process will offer a lot of flexibility and reconfigurability, so that a menu of different IP blocks can be mixed and match to make a large lineup of SoC parts.

A slide from an Intel presentation on the company's 32nm SoC process

Clues from the Nokia side are harder to come by, but they're still there. Ars Linux Editor Ryan Paul noticed at Nokia's Maemo Summit last year that Nokia was oddly resistant when it came to talking about the chip that's slated to power the successor to the N900. Ryan pushed and the only thing that Nokia would say is that it is continuing to develop on the OMAP3, the same chip that is currently in the N900. With next-generation ARM parts based on the Cortex A8 and A9, it made zero sense that Nokia would stick with OMAP3 for an N900 follow-on, leaving Ryan with the strong impression that Nokia was exploring other SoC options that it wasn't ready to talk about.

In many respects, Nokia is an ideal partner for Intel. Nokia wants a foothold in the US phone market, which has so far eluded it, and wants to move up into netbooks in a bigger way; Intel, for its part, wants to crack the mobile market and move down into phones. It seems possible that Nokia could do for Intel in handhelds what Apple has done for the chipmaker in desktops and portables—put Intel's chips inside high-end "aspirational" devices that combine really slick, consumer-friendly form factors with custom OS and software engineering.

With the right x86 SoC, Nokia could tackle the range of phone-tablet-netbook devices that Dell is currently targeting with efforts like the Mini 5 tablet. The company could also differentiate its products from competitors in the ARM ecosystem by offering support for Windows in addition to the usual roster of Linux-based mobile OSes.