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Intel Atom SoC roadmap leaked, details Bay Trail / Valleyview

by Mark Tyson on 29 August 2012, 17:00

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabllb

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After what seems like glacial progress during the last four years since the debut of the Intel Atom things look like they are heating up for the low cost, low power chip. Today EXPreview uploaded a series of slides showing a never before published roadmap for the Atom line of SoCs offering clear insights into the future of the Atom platform. The Valleyview architecture will offer more cores, faster clock speeds, support for more memory and better integrated graphics than any Intel Atom before.

The new platform name for Valleyview SoCs is Bay Trail. Bay Trail will replace 32nm Cedar Trail SoC chips intended for industrial and embedded usage (ValleyView I), entry level desktop (Valleyview D) and Netbook (Valleyview M) systems. Small form factor consumer systems and tablets currently served by 32nm dual core Clover Trail SoCs will in the future be served by the Valleyview T series.

The Valleyview SoC is detailed in the leaked slide above. Valleyview will be powered by between one and four Silvermont 22nm cores running at speeds between 1.2GHz and 2.4GHz. Every core will get 512Kb of L2 cache. The Intel GPU the built into the SoC design will be Ivy Bridge Gen7 graphics engines similar to HD4000 and HD2500 GPUs but cut down in the number of execution units. All in all this is quite a big step above what is currently offered by Intel Atom powered systems.

Bay Trail platform Valleyview SoC key features

  • 22nm Silvermont CPUs
  • Speeds range between 1.2GHz and 2.4GHz
  • Single, Dual & Quad core options
  • 64-bit
  • Out of order execution ability
  • Support for up to 8GB DDR3 RAM
  • 1080p HD 60fps playback of most popular codecs
  • Intel HD graphics culled from Ivy Bridge
  • Up to four PCIe lanes, SATA 2.0, USB 3.0, LAN, Audio

These chips won’t be seen in the wild until Q4 2013 or early 2014 but it’s nice to have a look ahead at what is coming up on the ever more important low power consumption SoC horizon. While we have a lot more info about Valleyview we don’t know much about real world stuff like prices, performance and power consumption. However competitors like AMD and ARM-based processor makers like NVIDIA and Qualcomm won’t be standing still and letting Intel move ahead unhindered.

If you want to know more about Bay Trail/Valleyview take a look at the full extent of the leakage over at EXPreview (partly in Chinese).



HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Details about AMD Jaguar:

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/28/amd-let-the-new-cat-out-of-the-bag-with-the-jaguar-core/

This is the sucessor to Brazos and is supposed to be released next year.
That's all nice and beautiful, but I was forced to buy AMD e350 MBO for my HTPC because new Atom MBOs don't have XP drivers, and I don't want to install anything else on an underpowered PC like that. Intel has gone bonkers. Actually, they have drivers for XP but not VGA drivers… however, that's like having no drivers for XP at all, isn't it? ;) Cunning bunch of mobsters… supporting MS all the way.
I'm of the opinion that on modern, if low power hardware, you are better with W7 than XP anyway. Especially for HTPC usage.

I know that Team MediaPortal have discussed dropping XP and even Vista support for future versions of MediaPortal because there are so many fixes and work arounds needed for modern media playback. These chunks of code need maintaining and often make the whole system more difficult to manage.

To add some personal experience in here too, I know my Lenovo S10e worked much better with W7 than it did with XP as well. And it is now an old underpowered netbook :)
Looks like Intel is finally getting it stuff together with regards to the Atom. Sounds like it could give AMD a run for its money at the low end when it comes to performance and it will probably do it at a lower power envelope.

As for XP, I agree with Funkstar. Just drop the old OS. Windows 7 works pretty well on low powered devices and Windows 8 should be even faster. Besides, Intel is just doing the sensible thing. How much more sales will it make if it had XP support? 0.000001%? Probably not worth the investment.
Don't drop Vista support,it will make it only one more step until Windows 7 is dropped too,and we will all have to use the absolutely smashing OS known as Windows 8, with its brilliant MUI.

:p