Intel Develops 22 nm Atom Silvermont CPU
Intel was not kidding and is apparently already working on a 22 nm Atom CPU that will be taking advantage of the company's recently detailed Trigate transistor technology.
Cnet was able to get a first tiny scoop, which included the name of the CPU - Silvermont. It will be designed as a SoC and is targeted for a 2013 release. The chip will be two generations out from today's Oak Trail and are likely to aim for ultra-mobile markets such as tablets and smartphones. Cnet reports that Intel is accelerating the Atom roadmap beyond Moore's Law, which is an unheard of event for Intel all by itself.
There are no new details available, but given Intel's 3D transistor announcement, we would expect exceptional battery life and performance when compared to Oak Trail. The time frame for the actual introduction will be interesting: To make some noise in the Smartphone space, Intel will have to provide processor samples to phone manufacturers very early, and not miss a 2012 target in order to be able be in phones in 2013.
As far as we can see today, smartphones will still be the much more interesting market than tablets in the foreseeable time.

Not to mention Brazos will be eating Atoms up in the netbook market. If they eventually decide to move to mobile segment, we may see a 3 corner fight
Except that an Atom kicks ARM's arse on a per clock basis. It might consume more power but it can do A LOT more work.
I agree with you schmich. Its interesting that so many people see the "1ghz" and forget forget about the differences between an arm risc and an intel cisc chip. I for one am really curious how they will compare in performance at similar power usages.
I'd say the word of the day would be "obtuse". It does not flow at all, and is grueling to get through, even forgetting the grammatical issues. On a purely stylistic basis, it offends and disgusts.
LOL! What is this about?
This is not exactly difficult considering the first iteration of Atom was supposed to have a 5-year refresh. Silvermont onwards will be refreshed completely every 2 years.
This might be one of those scenarios where Intel may not win on performance, but should do exceptionally well in terms of power consumption. We'll find out in two years, however they simply must go with an out-of-order architecture if they don't want to fall behind the curve too much, and that in itself adds complexity and increased power consumption, though not as bad as originally thought - Bobcat, anyone?
Agree with you both, would also be interesting to see the processors raw performance & power drain in different scenarios/workloads. For instance h264/mp3 software encoding/decoding, software compression (rar/zip), software ray tracing and software encryption etc between atom, arm and the latest sandy bridges.
Toms Hardware, seems you got work (if your up to it =), and if you decide to go with it - Please measure both with and without dedicated logic for the specific tasks (like the aes/encoding/decoding logic in the sandys)
When you look at a diagram an Atom die, the CPU core(s) take up most of the die. Now look at an ARM CPU, the actual CPU core is only a tiny part of the SOC. They could easily throw 8 or 16 cores into one of those and it'd still be smaller than an Atom dual core on the same node, which is why ARM is having no trouble scaling their cores and clocks up.
Depends on what the device the cpu powers are intended to do really. It makes no sense to have a IT staff idle 1-2 hrs a day while the equipment finish the workload to save a few dimes in electricity. On the other hand you don't want that staff to charge their phone battery twenty times/day either...
It will be interesting to see how much Intel will manage to scale down the x86. What they try to do is make a pretty complex cpu architecture with loads of one clock instructions available to the developers consume less fuel, if they manage to get it to very low levels things will get interesting in the hand held market.
I don't care who "wins" as long as my device have good performance, don't weight a ton to support a huge battery and don't have to recharge more than once a day!
depends on what device???? huh!
wtf do you think an atom is being used for? a freaking server? Get a clue.
Actually the normal atom today is used in several nas servers and the like already, many of whom actually have basic webserver / fileserver capability's that are quite enough for regular home users/small offices.
Get a clue what will happen now that Intel manage to get the current atom line more efficient and powerful. Not only by the die shrink but also the new 3d gate tech their rolling out. Sure as hell it won't take the place as the real workhorse/mission critical servers but it could more than well serve loads of other server usages.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see more server clusters with high numbers of weaker low-power cpu's rather than a few monolith ones for several reasons, powersaving by disabling the cpu's completely when in light load, better scalability especially in virtual server environments.
The way I see it, ARM is about on par with the Atom processor, if both run a Linux system,and intel actually might be slightly better graphically speaking.
AMD's offer just consumes too much power for a netbook or tablet!