Yesterday, during an Intel conference held by Gadi Singer, Vice President of Intel's Mobility Group, and Doug Davis, Vice President of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, the Santa Clara-based chip maker announced the first in a series of chips aimed at security, storage, communications and industrial applications. The new series has been designed for the embedded market and is dubbed Intel EP80579 Integrated Processor Family.

The chips are based on a chip architecture which most of you might already be familiar with. The Pentium M processor core is at the basis of a project that has been in development for some time now. The new System-on-Chip (SoC) product integrates a Pentium M core, with a Memory Controller Hub (MCH), I/O hub (ICH), TDM, and data path acceleration engines, also known as Intel QuickAssist Technology.

Intel started to develop the new product in order to prepare the company for the upcoming portable Internet computer devices that are expected to invade the market in the near future. In fact, with the new product, Intel has brought forward a competitor for ARM processors.

"We're now able to deliver more highly integrated products ranging from industrial robotics and in-car infotainment systems to set-top boxes, MIDs and other devices. By designing more complex systems onto smaller chips, Intel will scale the performance, functionality and software compatibility of IA while controlling the overall power, cost and size requirements to better meet respective market needs," said Gadi Singer.

The Pentium-based series of integrated processors will provide a core speed that ranges from 600MHz to 1.2GHz, with a TDP level of 11.5W, for the lowest performance chip, to 21W for the highest performance model.

Besides the EP80579 Integrated Processor Family announcement, Intel has revealed that it also has a number of SoC projects currently planned internally, most of which are based on the Atom core.