AMD readies rival for Intel's Atom

More details have emerged about 'Bobcat', the processor AMD has in development that's set to take on Intel's Atom processor family.

As Register Hardware reported last year, AMD let slip that it was working on a UMPC chip, Bobcat, at the Computex 2007 show.

AMD didn't say much else, but a company presentation slide that appears on German-language site Eee PC News adds some flesh to the bones.

Bobcat will contain a single, 1GHz AMD64 processor core, 128KB of L1 cache and 256KB of L2 cache. It'll have an 800MHz HyperTransport and a DDR 2 memory controller capable of connecting to 400MHz memory.

The whole thing is set to consume no more than 8W and sit inside an 812-pin, 27mm² BGA package.

That TDP is rather more than the 1W Intel's 1.1GHz 'Silverthorne' Centrino Atom consumes, but Atom needs a separate northbridge chip, which adds to the overall power consumption. The 'Diamondville' Atom N270 consumes 2.5W at 1.6GHz, but again you can add the power draw of its standalone northbridge to that.

It's not clear what process AMD expects Bobcat to be fabbed using - will it be one of its last 65nm parts, or one of its first 45nm chips?