The Atom Centrino: an officialized Silverthorne Posted on 03/03/2008 at 13:40 by Nicolas
The night before the opening of the CeBIT, Intel has unveiled the Atom, a CPU destined for MIDs (Mobile Internet Device) and Ultra Mobile PCs which up until now has been known under the name Silverthorne or Diamondville.
Engraved in 45nm, their TDPs vary between 0.6W and 2.5W for a frequency which can attain 1.8 GHz. They are also distinguished by their extremely reduced size of 25mm² for 47 million transistors. To accomplish this feat, Intel equipped them with a single core and 512 KB of L2 cache; however they do have HyperThreading technology enabling them despite everything else to offer interesting performances. Of course, they are entirely compatible with the instruction set of the Core 2 Duo and have a 16 stage execution pipeline.
You may recall, the Silverthorne is part of the Menlow platform which first and foremost is intended for MIDs while the Diamondville is the heart of the Shelton'08, an ultra portable platform. No precise information was given as to their availability but it is highly unlikely to see anything before the second semester.
Note that the Santa Clara giant also launched the Centrino Atom brand. Moreover, the Atom should enable them to easily sell their Parallel ATA SSDs for UMPCs in addition to chipsets.
The night before the opening of the CeBIT, Intel has unveiled the Atom, a CPU destined for MIDs (Mobile Internet Device) and Ultra Mobile PCs which up until now has been known under the name Silverthorne or Diamondville.
