Intel Atom Line Gets Faster Speeds, Less Power Consumption

The Intel Atom processor line has received an upgrade that brings with it increased speeds and lower power consumption.

The Intel “Silvermont” architecture is being called the “best in class” for performance and power efficiency by the engineers at Intel.

The newly revealed line is the first Atom processor to use the 22nm fabrication process. Intel ultimately plans to move the upcoming Airmont line and others to the 14nm fabrication process.

According to Intel, Silvermont is just the first in a family line of yearly refreshes. While Intel showed off the new Atom line of processors on Monday, they were short on details. According to the company, the chip is aimed at a “wide range of low power products” from phones to servers. The chip line is said to have a three times greater peak performance over the previous line or the same performance with only 20 percent of the power consumption.

What we do know is that improvements include an Out-of-Order Execution engine, up to eight cores on a single processor, and new IA instructions that include Core Westmere SSE4.1, SSE4.2, and AES-N

Also integrated on the new chipset line are Intels’ new security and virtualization technologies which include Intel OS Guard, and support for McAfee DeepSAFE.

Intel is hoping to wow smartphone and tablet manufacturers in order to grab an ever increasing part of the tablet and smartphone markets. Currently Intel has been facing an uphill battle against Qualcomm and AMD. Both of those company’s jumped into the mobile products space early with infrastructures aimed at the mobile space.

Do you think Intel’s Atom processor family has what it takes to grab a nice sized share of the mobile products space?