Intel Demonstrates Moorestown, Announces 2.0GHz Atom

One year on from Atom's debut, Intel has shown off its successor, Moorestown, at its Beijing Developer forum. Intel also officially revealed its latest Z5xx series processors.

The Z550 takes its place as the fastest Atom with a 2.0GHz clock speed, but maintains a sub-3W TDP. The Atom Z515 is Intel's first chip to use Intel Burst Performance Technology (BPT) - a sort of reverse SpeedStep - which enables it up its clock speed to 1.2GHz when such performance is needed, while running slower when it isn't. Intel hasn't specified the lower-end clock, but earlier leaks suggested 800MHz.

Moorestown is a more significant step forwards than just dynamic clock speeds. Following in the footsteps of Nehalem Moorestown integrates an Atom core, a memory controller, a graphics core, video processing and an I/O hub into the same package.

In a side-by-side demonstration with a current-generation Atom platform, Moorestown showed a 10 times decrease in idle power draw. Sadly we'll be waiting until 2010 before Moorestown is commercially available.

Link:
Intel.