Category: notebook components
By: Pallab Jyotee Hazarika
Intel unveils new Roadmap during the IDC
A 15nm Atom!!
At the recent IDF, Intel reportedly showed off an Atom roadmap that clearly shows the Atom sizes reducing constantly over time in the future – reports Anandtech. They are already at the 32nm level, and it shows up to 15nm size. The next generation Atom chips called Pinetrail, will have both the CPU and GPU chips in the same unit.
The Atom has become popular recently, especially with the netbook category. Almost every second netbook manufactured today has the Atom. Among them are the N270 and later the N280 which became quite popular as well. The Pine Trail platform will help to further drive down the cost of the netbook as it is said to lower the BOM (Bill of Material) cost significantly as it uses a two-chip configuration rather than the previously used three-chip configuration. According to the new configuration the memory controller and the graphics would be integrated on the same processor chip which was earlier built on a separate chipset (945GC/945GSE chipset in case of Atom processors using Intel Core Logic architecture). This move will allow motherboards to be built with just a four layer PCB since trace routing will be much simpler. Moving on to the input/output controller, the improved Tiger Point chipset will replace the existing ICH7/ICH7M chipset. Tiger Point will support SATA, USB 2.0, PCI Express and Intel HD Audio.
So as we come to realize, Atom is not going to concentrate much on an improved clock speed, but instead on energy efficiency to give the netbooks enhanced mobility. Here the advantage of Pinetrail comes as it can run faster thereby increasing processor performance and graphics performance. Moreover, the power requirements are further reduced to about 7W TDP meaning that the battery life would be increased.
Anandtech also attended a demo of the famous Arrandale, the upcoming dual-core 32nm Westmere derivative. An Arrandale notebook running full disk encryption accelerated by the CPU's hardware AES instructions.
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- New Intel Atom generation (Pinetrail) launched - 21-12-09 11:21
- Are Lenovo, HP and Dell developing SDXC compatible, Arrandale based notebooks? - 02-12-09 05:42
- Intel Pine trail’s successor is 2011 - 19-11-09 16:35
- Intel's ultra-thin notebook chips line-up for the coming year - 17-11-09 01:58
- AMD’s next-gen 32nm Roadmap leaked! - 03-11-09 07:51
- Motherboards containing Atom Pinetrail doing rounds - 31-10-09 10:33
- More details about the Intel Atom N470 processor - 09-09-09 19:12
- MSI first to use PineTrail platform - 19-08-09 10:30
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