At the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei on Monday, Intel revealed the next steps that the company is taking in mobile hardware. The two most interesting revelations are the Moorestown smartphone platform and the Core i7 chip.

Intel’s senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher said at the conference that Intel and Ericsson would jointly develop High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) data modules for the Moorestown platform. These also support WiMax, but the technology is already becoming antiquated in the face of competing wireless technologies. The data modules also support Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and Mobile TV, said Intel.

The Moorestown platform itself is an integrated system-on-a-chip (SOC), including the CPU, codenamed “Lincroft”, which is a 45nm processor, a graphics module, memory controller and a video encoder/decoder, all on a single chip. Moorestown also includes an I/O Hub dubbed Langwell, which connects Lincroft to wireless network, display and storage components.

The Moorestown platform, whose processor is based on Intel Atom technology (and indeed in some ways can be seen as its successor) is, according to Intel, the means by which the company will power a new generation of Mobile Internet Devices, intended to bring about a truly mobile internet experience.

The other newcomer introduced at the IDF is the upcoming Nehalem i7 processor, of which Intel showed a number of slides, and its accompanying X58 chipset. Nehalem, according to an announcement made last week by Intel, is shipping as we speak and is due to be released officially in November.

The i7 chip appears initially as a quad-core CPU and it features a technology called QuickPath Interconnect, which allows for high-speed chip to chip communications, and “Turbo Boost”, a feature previously known as “Turbo Mode”, which basically, in the case of particularly intensive applications, turns off unused processor cores and uses the remaining active cores in a more efficient manner. This feature will also save on power consumption. The Nehalem-based processor also includes Hyper-threading, an Intel proprietary technology which allows for two instructional threads per core in these chips. Another power-saving feature built into Nehalem chips is the platform’s ability to run on independent voltage and frequency planes.

The processor also offers an integrated memory controller, which will eliminate the need for the Intel Front Side Bus (FSB) architecture. This will result in a performance increase without the necessity of a clock speed increase.

Intel also took the time at the Taipei developer conference to distinguish the difference between its “Nettop” desktop systems, which are based on Atom technology, and mainstream desktop personal computers. Intel intends Nettops for web browsing, word processing, e-mail and legacy (that is, older, less resource-intensive) games. Anything more taxing than this sort of basic applications falls outside the scope of the Nettops intended use and is not recommended for them.