The system on a chip, SoC for short, design is nothing as it has been used for several years now in embedded systems but now Intel sees a great potential in this market so it prepares to launch its very own embedded processor named Tolapai. A previous attempt at the embedded systems' market ended badly for Intel's Timna project, but the computer processor manufacturing company has great hopes for the new design that will be the first Intel CPU featuring an on-die memory controller since the 80386EX in 1994. If the Tolapai project is successful it could mean the first Intel step on a market segment dominated by concurrent hardware architectures like PowerPC, ARM, and MIPS.

While slow and uninteresting when compared to a desktop or mobile central processing unit, the Tolapai nonetheless comes with some pretty impressive features for a CPU designed for embedded systems. It will use three running frequencies in the first phase, 600MHz, 1 GHz, and 1.2GHz and it will be composed of no less than 148 million transistors. The real good points of the Topalai processor is its very low power consumption that ranges between 13 and 20 watts, a small form factor of only 37.5mm x 37.5mm considering the package too and the new 65 nanometer fabrication process.

As far as processing cores go, the Topalai will come with a single one based on a Pentium M variant and because of that it will only support 32 bit software but as it is designed for embedded systems, the 64 bit support is not really necessary. Following the system on a chip design, the Topalai will come with integrated North and Southbrigde which are made up of a memory controller hub, a single channel DDR2 memory controller, a four channel direct memory access enabled controller and support for various extension slots like USB, PCI, Serial ATA, UART, RTC, WDT, PCI Express.

While the Southbridge looks a little underdeveloped this is only because much of the traditional I/O capabilities associated with it were moved on a dedicated chip, the Acceleration and I/O Complex which integrates three Ethernet ports, a local expansion bus, a sync serial port and so on. Also in this zone there is a piece of hardware designed for security features as it comes with a 256K pool of SRAM, a random number generator, and hardware acceleration for a number of encryption and signature algorithms. As the design of the Topalai SoC chip integrates a special bus called FastPath, different components can communicate with the memory controller and with each other without blocking or degrading the system's performance. While the embedded systems' market has a great growing potential, Intel's move on this market segment is posing a serious threat to VIA Technologies that features the same kind of interests.