Intel announce new budget low-wattage processor series - Ato

[Andreas G]

Intel has announced a new budget-oriented processor series called Atom. Information regarding these processors surfaced earlier and there have been a lot of fuzz about these as they are quite different from Intel's previous processor. Diamondville and Silverthorne, the code names of the desktop and mobile versions, will both be called Atom, but are a bit different from each other. Intel has never paid much attention to this sub-market before, but is expecting this segment to grow substantially over the coming years.

Both of these are x86 processors, but built from the ground up. The desktop Diamondville will work within a 4W thermal envelope (8W dual-core), while the mobile Silverthorne sports a TDP as low as 0.6-2.5W.

The first Atom will be called Atom 230, and operate at 1.6GHz sporting 512KB L2 cache and 533MHz FSB. Silverthorne equivalents will sport frequencies up to 1.8GHz, but to reach as low as 0.6W the frequency will have to come down to below 550MHz.

The Atom series will be the first to sport Intel's new HyperThreading technology, the first to sport any kind of simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) since the old Pentium 4 series. The first models will be single-core, but dual-cores are slated for later this year. An Atom processor measures 25mm˛, contains 47 million transistors and is made with Intel's latest 45nm high-k process.

"This is our smallest processor built with the world's smallest transistors," said Intel's Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Sean Maloney. "This small wonder is a fundamental new shift in design, small yet powerful enough to enable a big Internet experience on these new devices. We believe it will unleash new innovation across the industry."

Along with the Atom brand, Intel also announced the Centrino Atom brand, and as you might have guessed, it's the mobile platform previously known as Menlow. The platform will consist of an Atom Silverthorne processor paired with a low-power chipset with an integrated graphics processor and wireless radio

MSI and Gigabyte are both expected to launch notebooks based on these very soon. We should expect even more companies to announce Atom-based notebooks in the near future.