News Intel announces Atom processor family

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/03/intel_announces_atom_processor_family/1

Intel has officially named its Silverthorne processor and Menlow platform - they're known as the Atom processor and the Centrino Atom platform.

 

Damnit, they didn't take my advice on the name (< avatar)
anyway, this does sound interesting and would kick as$ if you could fit these into an ultra-portable the size of a PSP. now if they can hook one of these up with nVidia's ultra-portable gpu and not make you pay out the as$ for them, then I'm getting at least one (even if I only have $20 spare a week)

 

bring on the next gen eee pc!!!

 

/confused

Ah, nope I get it now. I was thinking they'd branded the Nehalems "Atom". Nope, this is something totally different!

 

These are gonna be great for HTPCs and home servers!

Bring it on!!!

 

+1

 

"but also manages to maintain compatibility with the Core microarchitecture's instruction set to ensure consumers get a familiar experience to what they would get on their home computer."

-since when has a proccesor change effected my exsperiance other than speed, I don't think that at a consumer level people will be effected by the instructon set!

 

That's just their way of saying x86 compatible.

 

Interesting; but I thought Americans used cents. More importantly how many Silverthorne dies can you fit in a British penny?

 

Hopefully these will be used in mini-itx boards - but the Atom (silverthorne) will be equivalent to VIA's nano-BGA C7. Both do NOT feature out of order execution, so are significantly slower than you'd expect. Obviously the Intel chip runs at almost twice the speed and it has SMT, but it'll not equate to an ULV Core 2 CPU.

Just like inexpensive VIA machines that are being sold at Walmart, Intel will do the same thing. I'm ready to get info from all sorts of people on EeePC clones in the next few days featuring these processors.

 

Am I the only one that find the name pretty silly?

It really doesn't stand out in any way, and sounds a bit... childish.

What's next? "Biohazard"?

 

Arguably this is Intel's most logical naming choice since Core Solo and Core Duo. Atom = small, sounds reasonably accurate although unimaginative.

No Intel's amazing 45nm processors are good for the environment as they're halogen and lead free and contain less carbon (OK the carbon part isn't true but they'll put consume less electricity and as such less carbon compared to 65nm so why Intel didn't mention this in one of their marketing slides is beyond me). After all the number one thing I look for in a processor is an assurance that an alchemist can't experiment with it, oh wait they mentioned that (repeatedly) I can't turn my processor into gold.

 

Sounds pretty cool

except the name

 

UP AND ATOM!

 

groan!

 

The chip really is aimed at a not-quite-a-full-blown-pc market that may exsist somewhere between a laptop and PDA. There are some pretty interesting concepts floating around out there, one of my favorites being the4 'bookmark' concept (though I can't find the !@#$ link, bookmark is far too common a word). There is still a question of usability though, what can I do to make use of the PC features?