Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Intel Atom Z670, Oak Trail thinking of tablets and smartphones

This week was important for Intel: firstly presented the new generation of SSD, and on the other side and know the Intel Atom Oak Trail, which have been officially presented with a new model: the Atom Z670. Z6XX Intel Atom is the Intel processor family designed to tablets and advanced smartphones, ie it is the direct competitor to ARM, NVidia Tegra and with Apple A4, A5 and company.

For now it is one the only model available, but hopefully in the future or get more. Intel Atom Z6XX falls within the new architecture Oak Trail, and his name was developing Lincroft. All models will follow a process of manufacturing at 45 nanometers and may use the typical features of a mobile, such as cameras, flash drives, telephone connections (GPRS/3G, nothing is known about 4G), WiFi, GPS and optional WiMAX .

Will have frequencies between 1.5 and 1.9 GHz, GPU integrated (Intel GMA 600 Graphics model at 400 MHz) and support for DDR1 and DDR2 memory type LPDDR / MDDR (Low Power DDR / Mobile DDR, respectively, are two names for the same type of RAM). One curiosity is that its physical size is of 13.8 × 13.8 × 1.1 mm, clearly something small and ready for a device that can fit in your pocket.

Intel Atom Z670 is the name of the first model that Intel has been on the market. Have a frequency of 1.5 GHz with 1 core (that Hyperthreading will be 2 threads), 512 KB of cache and a TDP of 5 watts, in addition to the features discussed in point: GPU, MDDR2, 45 nm and much more. There are some rumors that place it as too expensive, around $ 75 compared to 20 that does a NVidia Tegra 2.

Intel has not confirmed these numbers, and we end users little we care about: what is vital is the price of finished devices, not what cost components. Where we have some catch, of course. A single model that is known is now available to manufacturers (probably for a few weeks / months) but it is unknown when implemented in a real mobile and final.

Probably later this year, but nothing is yet official. Oak Trail will run Android and Meegan systems natively, but also said that Windows 7 if it uses a special chipset called SM35 and offer full compatibility with the Microsoft system, initially for the PC version and not the Windows Phone 7.

Do not rule out a future Intel Atom Windows 8. Today we know some facts, but the final performance is still unknown. The hardware world of mobile phones and tablets is advancing very rapidly, both as to say that we already have very efficient microprocessors whose graphics capabilities are excellent.

There is the example of Apple A5 iPad included in the final 2. With this all we can do is wait for manufacturers to develop products with Intel Atom Z670, and when they are in the market - and if we can, after having played around with them - then we'll see further. So far looks good, although the actual performance - which is what ultimately matters most after all - is still completely unknown.

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