Intel presents new Atom processors

At IDF 2016, which has just started, the US chip maker Intel has presented new Atom processors on the new Broxton core. The new chips will be soon used in drones, various Internet-of-Things gadgets, smartphones and notebooks.

Intel has announced just two new Atom chips – the Atom T5500 and the Atom T5700 but they are both based on the new Goldmont architecture, which comes with a number of improvements compared to Cherry Trail. In addition the new chips are manufactured on the latest 14 nm production process. They include four x64-enabled processing cores and in the case of the Atom T5700 they work at 1.7 GHz, reaching 2.2 GHz in Turbo mode. When a single core works it runs at up to 2.4 GHz so nice single-threaded performance is also guaranteed. The T5500 runs at 1.5 GHz but there’s no information on the Turbo clock speed. Intel says the new Goldmont Atom chips are up to 50 per cent faster than the older Atom x5-X8500 processor on the Cherry Trail architecture.

In addition the new Atom chips arrive with improved graphics capabilities thanks to the usage of Intel Gen9 graphics technology that is already in use in Intel’s Skylake processors. Thus the new chips include 18 execution units that run at up to 650 MHz. Moreover they can now decode 4K video (HEVC, H.264, VP8) and drive up to four displays. Intel says the graphics core in these two Goldmont processors is 40 per cent more powerful than the one seen in the older generation Atom chips. Furthermore the new Atom processors can work with eMMC 5.0 solid-state drives, support dual-channeled LPDDR4 memory with ECC and have several PCI-E lanes. The TDP of the chips ranges from 6W to 12W.

It is unclear when the Atom T5500 and Atom T5700 will be on the market and how much they will cost.

Source: Intel