Not only has Intel teamed up TSMC to produce Atom CPUs, the company has also unveiled four Atom chips that will go into devices such as entertainment systems for cars, videoconferencing devices, robots and interactive kiosks. “The Z500-series Atom processors are integrated chips the size of a penny that draw little power and do not require fans to operate. The chips draw 2.5 watts of power or less and run at speeds of between 1.10GHz and 1.6GHz. They offer integrated 2D and 3D graphics and will be manufactured using Intel’s existing 45-nanometer process.“
Now, these chips could be really awesome in a netbook. Talk about battery life.
The CPU is the least of the worries on netbook power, currently. The 945 chipset (soon to be replaced) is the 11watt power draw on the unit, nevermind what the backlight/LCD pulls. Agreed it’s nice to see power consumption of the CPU drop, with added features, but it’s not going to help on battery life as much as you’d think.
No one ever said Intel would continue to use the high-power chipset forever though. It’d make more sense for them to drop to a lower powered chipset with these otherwise, you’re quite right, a drop in CPU isn’t going to help much if at all.
I was waiting for this step for some years now.
Seems finally someone saw a need for something closer to a “system on a chip” solution.
I hope integration continues to including northbridge, southbridge, memory and sound chip, so that in the end we only need one board with one single chip and the periphery connectors on it to get a fully equipped computer.
And all of that for maybe 30 bucks.
Edited 2009-03-03 09:46 UTC
These are the chips Nvidia was pitching a fit about. See there’s no efficient way to add a better GPU on these (and the only method is a “new” patented bus) which is what ION was all about. Intel marched in the netbook market with inadequate and fat GMA950 graphics… and then pulled the patent card when Nvidia/VIA got around to developing a real, better solution.
On top of that Intel is now buying up their supplier capacity instead of using it’s own. At this point netbooks should be back up to $1000 before these processors even hit the streets!!!
Oh my… You’re saying that ION doesn’t get along with such a processor? Are you sure?
Yeap, that is what he is saying – ignoring the fact that anyone can go down to a Sony Style store today and find that the apparent ‘not getting along’ between ION and Atom, seem to be getting along well.
Personally I’d like to see the Atom also take the low end PC market as well – I’m tempted that after the great experience I’ve had with this Atom based laptop that maybe in the future an eee box from ASUS would be a great desktop given that the most cpu intensive stuff I do is compress some music (which the Atom has no problems with).
Oh, and regarding Intel stripping out many features found in their desktop CPU’s such as instruction reordering, speculative execution, or register renaming – hopefully what we should see as a result is an emphasis on compilers doing a better job producing nicer code – because lord knows if you produce crap code and try to run it on these sorts of processors, expect to experience pain when it comes to performance. Then again, I’ve always held the opinion that the CPU’s should be suplified gradually as more work is gradually pushed off to the compiler.
Edited 2009-03-04 04:01 UTC
Which Sony product has the Atom and ION chipset? The P-series doesn’t use the ION platform.
You’re correct; I saw the Nvidia logo and assumed that Nvidia logo plus Atom equaled the Ion platform. I should have made sure before firing off a post
No worries. I just researched the hell out of the netbook, ultraportable market recently.
I ended up with a ASUS eeepc 1000HE. ION was just announced and no one makes an ION based netbook. I was surprised that I missed the Sony. I looked at the sony P, TT and Z but neither had a ION and were too expensive otherwise. Decided the 1000HE was the best bang for the buck.
Edited 2009-03-04 23:24 UTC
The Sony one is really expensive, then again, their products I find are over priced and offer nothing over Dell, Apple, HP or any of the other brands; in many cases they’re inferior to what cheaper brands offer.
Its too bad the ASUS eee pc 1000HE isn’t in NZ yet or the 901 is incredibly difficult to get a hold of – and forget about trying to get a Linux equipped Netbook in New Zealand, its almost impossible to find a retail chain willing to sell it.
AFAIK the Z series atom processors aren’t SoC desgins. They use a SCH. US15W at the moment for Memory and I/O
http://ark.intel.com/system.aspx?groupID=35463&configID=27616&chips…
Edited 2009-03-04 19:00 UTC