Intel releases 'Diamondville' Atom CPU
One for laptops, one for desktops
Computex Intel has begun shipping its 'Diamondville' Atom processor - the incarnation of the CPU series aimed at Small, Cheap Computers™ rather than mobile internet devices, which were the subject of April's original Atom launch.
As anticipated, Diamondville has been realised as two 22mm² chips: the N270 and the 230, the former for laptops, the latter for desktops. Both are clocked at 1.6GHz, sit on a "power-optimised" 533MHz frontside bus and pack in 512KB of L2 cache.
The differences? The N270 has Intel Enhanced SpeedStep Technology, support for the deeper, C4 sleep state and other power-conservation tricks, and it's primarily all that that allows Intel to charge $44 for the mobile part - when ordered in batches of 1000 CPUs - but only $29 for the 230.
The N270 consumes up to 2.5W of power. Intel didn't specify the TDP of the 230.
Like the Z series of Atoms announced in April, the two new parts are based on Intel's 'Silverthorne' design, a 45nm version of its 'Merom' Core architecture. Silverthorne uses a single core, but has HyperThreading on board to allow it to appear to the host OS as two cores.
Eric Reid, a director within Intel's Mobile Platforms Group, said the Diamondville chips are now available for hardware manufacturers to use, and forecast that devices based on the new chips would be appearing "in the near future".
A fair few, he said, will be announced at the Computex show, which kicks off in Taipei today, and Register Hardware will be covering these in due course. Devices known to use Atom include MSI's Wind, Dell's Mini Inspiron and of course Asus' Eee PC 901.
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COMMENTS
eeeeeeeeeePC
This is the point where I am tempted to replace my eeePC 701 with an Atom based version. Never saw the point with the latest 900 model, it was just the same thing with a larger display and more on-board flash than I needed.
If there is a performance boost with longer battery life and a decent resolution screen, I'll pay the extra and continue my love affair with the diminutive bundle of joy. ( However, I have a roaming eye )
We've been awaiting this processor for some time now, 2.5w, 1.6GHz, it had better live up to expectations and flood the market with low cost, long battery life 'netbooks'
Small, cheap and cheerful, with a nice looking model on the beach, That's all I ask for.
How would airport security respond...
to an Atom(ic)-powered notebook?
Let's hope Intel never uses U235 as its chip designation
Mine's the one with the radiation-hazard symbol
