Intel Atom heir in rumor mill upgrade

More snippets of news emerged today about Intel’s upcoming replacement to its low-power Atom processor, set to launch in the second half of this year.

As we reported last September and updated last week, the Atom heir, code-named Pineview, will be available in both single-core and dual-core versions, each with an on-chip memory controller and integrated graphics processor (IGP), and each employing hyperthreading to nearly double each core’s performance - theoretically.

>Today the usually reliable Taipei news service, DigiTimes, reported that Pineview will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process (no surprise there), will have a clock speed higher than the Atom N270’s 1.67GHz, and that even though the IGP will be based on Intel’s existing GMA 950, its own clock will increase from the current 133MHz in the Atom implementation to 200MHz.

More interesting are new details about Pineview’s real-estate needs and the power-miserliness we discussed earlier.

Thanks to what DigiTimes confirms as “built-in northbridge functions, including a memory controller and IGP,” Pineview will require a mere 773 square millimeters of motherboard space, down 60 percent from the 2174 square millimeters needed by the Atom N270 and its support chips.

In addition - and despite the increase of the memory controller’s clock from 533MHz to 667MHz - Pineview will have a lower maximum TDP (thermal design power, a gauge of a processor’s power needs and, therefore, heat dissipation) than the N270: 7 watts instead of 8, with average power descending from 2.5 to 2 watts.

Finally, DigiTimes says that Pineview will have a four-layer construction. That’s down from Atom’s six layer, a change that should reduce costs.

So, in sum: If DigiTimes is to be believed, Pineview is shaping up to be faster, smaller, less power-hungry, and cheaper than Intel’s current fast, small, power-miserly, and inexpensive Atom. ®
source : www.reghardware.co.uk

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Chip giant whips out low-power quad-core CPUs

Intel has rolled out some new CPUs and cut the prices of old ones.The chip giant’s desktop product list now includes the Core 2 Quad 9550s, Q9400s and Q8200s. The suffix indicates they’re all low-power version of existing quad-core chips, each sporting a reduced TDP of 65W, down from 95W.

Clocked at, respectively, 2.83GHz, 2.66GHz and 2.33GHz, the CPUs all sit on a 1333MHz frontside bus. They contain 12MB, 6MB and 4MB of L2 cache, and are priced at $369, $320 and $245 when ordered in batches of 1000.

The price cuts - of between 16 per cent and 40 per cent - take the 95W Core 2 Quads down to below those prices, leaving us in the unusual situation of a 3GHz Q9650 costing less than a slower, lower-model-number part, the Q9550s.

Intel also introduced the 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo E7500 - 3MB L2, 1066MHz FSB, $133 - and the 2.8GHz Pentium Dual Core E5400 - 2MB L2, 800MHz FSB, $84.

Both the Core 2 Duo and the Pentium Dual Core lines also experience downward price adjustments, of up to 15 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively. ®

source : www.reghardware.co.uk

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