Intel re-discovers the Atom, brand name for Silverthorne
Over the weekend, Intel announced the consumer branding for the new Silverthorne chipsets. They give you: the Centrino Atom. Since we’ve been following the Menlow platform for some time, the news is mainly just one of branding, but in case you’ve forgotten all the technical goodies or want to brush up on your CPU knowledge for a future Jeopardy! appearance, Intel has a few bits and videos for a refresher. Long and short of it: the small CPUs will power the next generation of UMPCs and MIDs, scaling up to clock speeds of 1.8 GHz while using 0.6 to 2.5 Watts of juice. Don’t get too excited or hung up on the 1.8 GHz figure as that’s only part of the performance equation. On-board cache is part of it too but there’s no info provided by Intel on the press release in terms of cache. Given that the chip is so small, there’s not much room for cache memory.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
At first I thought the name Atom would be a good idea for Intel’s new chip range, but the more I think about it the more I hope that their chips won’t actually be anything like an atom and actually have some substance!
Cebit this year:
New processor’s name… no real change in the processing power
+
Vista remaining vista
=
Go MID or let’s switch back to SP2 :-)
Maybe we’ll hear about new devices tomorrow at cebit, but so far its looks to me like Intel don’t have any new hardware running these devices to announce