Stefan Mileschin

Fashion bag designer Intel has detailed plans to give its Atom chip a make over.

According to CNET, Intel plans an announcement on 6 May to announce the latest design for the Atom.

CNET's deep throats claim the new Atom will offer performance that gets closer to mainstream laptop processors and will be so far off the knee that the data centre will be visible.

It is the first time that the Atom has been redesigned since its launch in Netbooks five years ago. When the Atom processor appeared the world plus dog wanted one in their netbooks. When the netbook fad was replaced by the tablet, the Atom was left without a job. Chipzilla attempted to put them in tablets, mobile phones and supercomputers without much success.

The May announcement will be all about Silvermont micro-architecture, which will spawn Bay Trail and Merrifield processors for tablets and smartphones.

Intel has confirmed that its executive vice president Dadi Perlmutter will talk about Intel's next-generation Atom micro-architecture targeted at a range of market segments from low power tablets and smartphones, to microservers and the data centre.

The new Atom uses a higher-performance out-of-order design, just like Intel's mainstream Core processors, and a fast Intel graphics chip.

It will look a bit different from the usual Atoms we have come to know and shun on the mobile front.

Apparently it will integrate up to four processing cores based on the company's 22-nanometer 3D transistor design and will be battery friendly.

Intel had to do something. Windows 8 tablets are getting faster and should be better at multitasking applications. The current Atom calls its union rep when when it is asked to do more than one job at a time.

Hints from Chipzilla suggest that products with the Bay Trail processor should appear in time for the holiday sales. Android phones using Merrifield processors should emerge by early next year.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/fashio...signs-the-atom