Inside Intel's 'Moorestown'

The next major version of Intel's Atom is expected to debut early next year. It's part of the 'Pine Trail' platform, the chip giant's offering for netbooks, which typically use Atom N-series CPUs. But it's not the only Atom upgrade due next year. Six months or so later, Intel will release 'Moorestown', its new platform for …

[Colin_L]

dedicated av chipset

I can't be bothered to find the articles and link, but it pisses me off that only 3-6 months ago Intel was busy denigrating NVidia's development of an A/V chipset for Atom, saying essentially that it provided no value, wasn't meaningful, etc.

And now here we have Intel making the very same thing.

This on top of the AMD anti-competitive things leaking out of the EU investigation paints a rather unflattering image of Intel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Smartphone Myth Again

There's no way Moorestown can go into any smartphone...

Even with its dramatic reduction in idle power consumption, it's still an order of magnitude above an ARM-based SoC. Peak power consumption is also an order of magnitude larger. It also takes at least twice the board area, being a two chip solution.

We'll revisit this again in 2011 with the single chip Menlow.

[IndianaJ]

Dynamic overclocking?

Sounds freaking dangerous to me. Can I opt out of having a heart monitor running this? Ta.

[Charles Manning]

Forget it

As AC has siad, these things are just too big and power hunger and expensive relative to ARM parts out there.

Sure, they will improve in time, but process improvement lifts all ships and ARM parts will also improve.

Perhaps they can sell these into tablets etc, but they'll need some significant magic to get them anywhere near phones.

[Charles Manning]

2800mm^2 motherboard?

That's what they **hope** to achieve in 2 years.

An ARM-based gumsttix (an equivalent motherboard) is only 17x58mm = 986mm^2, including connectors you don't need in a final product, That's been available since the beginning of this year.

One of these gumstix going flat out running Linux uses less power than a current Atom in standby.

[Nigel Wright]

Intel never were very good

..at power management. And still aren't.

[spencer]

Not in a mobile.

Shouldn't really be in a laptop either. ARM shits all over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets be positive

Lets not denigrate them too much - pushing these technologies into the more powerful processors used in real laptops should boost battery life no end.