Intel announces successor to the Atom processor

Posted at: 5:23pm 20th August 2008 by Clive Webster at IDF in San Francisco

Due for 2010, with ‘at least ten times less idle power draw’ than original Atom

IDF Fall 08: Moorestown is the codename to look out for around 2010 as Intel revealed the name of successor to its tiny, lower power Atom mobile processor at IDF today. Design aims for the project are to reduce idle power draw by ‘at least ten times’ compared to the current chip. Moorestown is ‘tracking very nicely against our schedules’ claimed Anand Chandrasekher, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel Corporation's Ultra Mobility Group. He showed us a wafer of Moorestown chips, saying that the Intel engineers are eagerly awaiting samples to come back from the fab so that they could start the de-bugging process. Chandrasekher showed a Moorestown motherboard for a mobile device which would measure roughly 50 x 80mm (he didn’t let it out of his hands, so we couldn’t get more precise figures).

The slides indicated that while an Atom CPU is physically smaller than a one penny piece, Moorestown will be roughly four times smaller. Further details are sketchy, though we’d expect Moorestown to be dual-core as opposed to a single-core chip like Atom. Whether Moorestown will also use Hyper-Threading was unclear, though Intel is pushing this technology hard at the moment with Core i7, claiming it's the most efficient way to use all the resources in the ever-wider thread execution units of modern CPUs.