Intel Bay Trail Brings New Architecture and Performance To Atom 68
Vigile writes "Today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the company officially released the Atom Z3000 series of SoCs (Bay Trail) based on the Silvermont architecture. Unlike previous Atom designs, the Z3000 and Silvermont is a completely re-architected product from the ground up and is no longer based on legacy processors. Changes include a move to an out-of-order x86 architecture with drastically improved single threaded performance but the removal of Intel's HyperThreading technology. Dual-core modules with 1MB of shared cache can be paired up to create a quad-core SoC that also includes upgraded graphics design. Intel is no longer depending on PowerVR for a GPU and has integrated a 4 EU (execution unit) Intel HD Graphics design that is very similar to the one used in Ivy Bridge. As a result, as tested at PC Perspective in both Windows 8.1 and Android 4.2.2, the Bay Trail part is as much as 4x faster in single threaded tasks and 3.5x faster in gaming and graphics. Power consumption remains nearly the same as it did with Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) but with improved power gating and support for Connected Standby, Intel's new Atom looks and feels completely different than any before it."
MojoKid notes that Intel also announced an "open" SoC architecture (where open involves you giving Intel tons of money).
Been waiting for this. (Score:2, Insightful)
This chip family is Intel's first real answer to arm SoCs. I look forward to seeing devices that feature it. Supposedly it will enable sub-100 dollar windows 8 tablets. (Well, excluding the win8 license probably. MS- You have a problem when your OS costs 2x more than the hardware itself.) - I'd love to pick up a 99 dollar tablet and see what I can do with a linux distro. I'd also love to see some ultra-small low cost SoC based boards. (Atomberry pi anyone?)
The x86 android port is supposed to be pretty damn good too, but intel seems to have a poor track record of actually getting shipping devices in to the hands of consumers.
OPEN SOURCE GPU DRIVERS!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It turns out that Bay Trail has some very solid performance numbers and that the power consumption is very good too, but frankly, you can get similar results from high-end ARM SoCs.
What you can't get, however, are 100% GLPd GPU drivers that are already in the mainline Linux kernel. THANK YOU INTEL and I hope this is a wakeup call to the ARM vendors that the days of crappy, unsupported binary blobs are hopefully coming to an end.