INTEL ATOM PROCESSORS

Atom is the new family of processors for Mobile Internet Devices. It is based on an entirely new micro architecture designed specifically for small devices and low power, while maintaining the Intel Core 2 Duo compatibility. It supports for multiple threads.

It will be the Intel's smallest and lowest power processor. It will be manufactured on Intel's 45nm processor technology. The chips will consume about 0.6 - 2.5 watt and can scale upto 1.8GHz clock speeds.
Newly designed from the ground up, 45nm Intel® Atom™ processors pack an astounding 47 million transistors on a single chip measuring less than 26mm², making them Intel's smallest and lowest power processors. All this while delivering the power and performance you need for full Internet capabilities.
                       
 For years at Intel the rule of thumb for power vs. performance was this: a designer could add a feature to a microprocessor design if you get a 1% increase in performance for at most a 2% increase in power. Unfortunately, it's thinking like that which gave us the NetBurst architecture used in the Pentium 4 and its derivatives.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 The Intel Atom was the first Intel CPU to redefine the rule of                       thumb  and now the requirement is that a designer may add a feature if it yields a 1% increase in performance for at most a 1% increase in power consumption. It's a pretty revolutionary change and it's one that will be seen in other Intel architectures as well (Nehalem comes to mind), but Atom was the first.

HAFNIUM-BASED INTEL 45nm PROCESS TECHNOLOGY45nm – A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Transistors on our latest processors are just 45-billionths of a meter wide. To get an idea of the size of the technology: you could lay over 2000 of our transistor gates side-by-side and almost equal the diameter of a strand of human hair. The new Hafnium-infused Intel 45nm process allows transistors to be packed more densely than the 65nm process. With the use of hafnium oxide replacing silicon dioxide (in use since the 1960s) the new transistors leak less energy, produce less heat and switch faster.

And what is hafnium? Hafnium (Hf) is a chemical element on the periodic table. It’s silver-gray in color, highly ductile, corrosion resistant, and is chemically most similar to zirconium. Intel engineers discovered that introducing hafnium into silicon chips helps reduce electrical leakage enabling smaller, more energy-efficient and performance-packed processors circuitry, new Intel 45nm high-k metal gate silicon technology helps to dramatically increase processor energy efficiency and equating to more powerful computing experiences and greater flexibility of design.

With this breakthrough transistor technology, Intel is manufacturing serious advantage into every hafnium-based Intel 45nm high-k chip. These revolutionary new notebook and desktop processors enable greater performance in gaming, multimedia, and multitasking—at work, at home, or on the go. Intel 45nm high-k silicon technology can deliver more than a 20 percent improvement in transistor switching speed, and reduce transistor gate leakage by over 10 fold. With roughly twice the density of Intel® 65nm technology, the Intel 45nm packs about double the number of transistors into the same silicon space. That's more than 400 million transistors for dual-core processors and more than 800 million for quad-core. Intel® 45nm technology enables great performance leaps, up to 50-percent larger L2 cache, and new levels of breakthrough energy efficiency

FUTURE

The next generation of the Atom is codenamed "Pineview" which utilizes the "Lincroft" system-on-a-chip architecture and is used in the "Pine Trail" platform. Planned to be announced at CES 2010 and available shortly after. It will be used in netbook/nettop systems, and feature a system-on-chip (SOC) with an integrated single-channel DDR2 memory controller and an integrated graphics core. It will feature hyper-threading, and is to be manufactured on a 45 nm or 32 nm process. The new system-on-a-chip design will use half the power of the older Menlow platform. This reduced overall power consumption and size will make the platform more desirable for use in smartphones and other mobile internet devices.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini has stated that, along with other improvements, Atom (specifically Silverthorne) will shrink to the 32 nm process in 2009 It has been suggested that the Atom will be the first Intel chip to transition to 32 nm due to its small size and low complexity.

The next generation platform for the netbook version of the Intel Atom is codenamed Pine Trail, which utilizes an Atom processor codenamed "Pineview" and a chipset codenamed "Tiger Point". The graphics and memory controller move into the processor, which will be paired with the Tiger Point chipset. This creates a 2 chip platform rather than the 3 chip one currently used with existing Atom chipsets.