Intrinsity’s 1-of-n domino logic saves power by switching less often. To represent 0 through 3, it uses four wires but switches only one at a time: Zero is represented by 0001, 1 by 0010, 2 by 0100, and 3 by 1000. That scheme means that many transistors will be turned off most of the time. What’s more, the 1-of-n design lets engineers make more-complex functions in a single gate, reducing the number of steps needed to complete a logic function.

Indeed, Russo says, one of the qualities Intrinsity looks for when recruiting engineers is the ability to translate standard bit-based gates into faster 1-of-n domino circuits. The real art of integrating NDL into a processor core like the A8, he says, involves discovering which parts most need the NDL speedup at the expense of complicating that part of the design with 1-of-n logic. (As much of Intrinsity’s NDL process is proprietary, Russo would say only that the trade-off isn’t always worth the extra effort, which is why Intrinsity has used NDL ”sparingly” in Hummingbird. It’s a small tweak that makes a huge difference.)

Another key trick to Fast14 is the use of multiple slightly out-of-phase clocks. Mark McDermott, the company’s vice president of engineering, likens it to a taxi’s progress along a street dotted with traffic lights. An instruction such as ”Call up memory register A and add it to the contents of memory register B” is like telling the cabbie to go 50 blocks uptown and race through as many green lights as possible on the way. A regular processor core would use a route in which every light was in sync, turning red or green at the same time. That way, the taxi driver would move only a handful of blocks before stopping. But when you add Fast14 to the processor, McDermott says, you stagger the traffic lights so that the taxicab can travel dozens of blocks before having to stop for a red light. Everything goes faster.

Intrinsity’s engineers use these and other time-shaving tricks to ensure that the CPU stands idle as little as possible. ”All it takes is one choke point, and that’s going to set your frequency,” says Intrinsity chip designer Brent Chambers.

What’s crucial to Hummingbird’s appeal is that it represents a modification of the ARM Cortex-A8 rather than a top-to-toe redesign. This means that makers of devices that now run on regular A8s can drop in a Hummingbird without changing a thing. By substituting one chip, Russo says, the manufacturer can get either a device that runs faster or a device that draws less power at a slower speed.

”There’s no one in the market right now who can deliver this kind of [clock speed] with this kind of power range,” says Russo. ”We’ve had a lot of interest from a lot of big companies to implement our technology in their designs.”

Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst at In-Stat’s Microprocessor Report, says that Hummingbird boasts some impressive performance enhancements. He says that Hummingbird’s specs, published in July, imply that the chip will consume 750 milliwatts at 1 GHz, leaking current in the ”very low milliwatt range.” Compare that, for instance, to Intel’s Atom N270, a processor for embedded systems, which clocks in at a slightly faster 1.6 GHz but guzzles 2.5 watts. (Unfortunately, power usage comparisons to the unmodified A8 are not easy, Halfhill says, because the A8 runs on less power than a Hummingbird—385 mW—but only at 650 MHz. The proper comparison would be a Hummingbird dialed down to 650 MHz. But neither Intrinsity nor Samsung has released power specs for Hummingbirds running at such speeds.)

So how much does Hummingbird’s beefed-up performance cost? ”The value of the A8 in the iPhone 3GS is probably about US $15 to $18,” says Will Strauss, a market analyst with Forward Concepts, in Tempe, Ariz. ”The Hummingbird version will carry a premium price. It’s probably going to be more in the $18 to $25 range.”

The extra dollars add up fast, too: In 2008, 139 million smartphones were sold. If Hummingbird makes Intrinsity the leading hot-rodder of smartphone CPUs, the company will surely build more partnerships with powerhouse companies—and take more offstage bows—in the months to come.

Hummingbird faces a host of competitors, but Intrinsity has the advantage of having made a great career move. Not only does the company wring superior performance from a chip, it has chosen the right chip to wring it from. ”The A8 is likely to be the dominant engine in smartphones” by the middle of 2010, Strauss says.

Probably Hummingbird’s closest competitor in 2010 will be Qualcomm’s top-to-toe redesign of the A8, dubbed Snapdragon, with two cores running at up to 1.5 GHz.

But raw power, says Microprocessor Report’s Halfhill, isn’t everything. Equally important is the ease with which Hummingbird can be integrated into preexisting smartphone designs, such as the Palm Pre and the iPhone 3GS, that already use the A8.

”If you have a whole new microarchitecture, like Snapdragon, then that could possibly change the whole rest of the chip design—all the peripherals attached to it, the coprocessors,” Halfhill says. ”If you’ve got to redo the whole chip, then you’re adding maybe another year to the project.”

And if a company decides to add that extra year of design time, by the time it goes to market it could find itself facing other smartphones powered by ARM’s dual-core next-generation Cortex-A9—it’s rated at 2 GHz and expected as soon as mid-2010. (Remember, Intrinsity is now hard at work souping up that A9.)

”I think the Hummingbird looks pretty good against Snapdragon,” Halfhill says.