Tuesday, December 9th 2008
NVIDIA to Work on Intel Atom Core Logic
NVIDIA will have the opportunity to design platform core logic (chipsets) for the Intel Atom processor, in the weeks to come. The visual computing giant has had a fair bit of success with its MCP79 chipset for mainstream PCs, which could be ported to platforms with much smaller footprints, such as netbooks and nettops. The starting point in its roadmap could well be the MCP79 itself which has architectural superiority over Intel chipsets in the same range, for being of a monolithic design.
Intel's own chipset for the Atom processor faced quite some criticism from the media for being dated in both design and manufacturing processes, resulting in its high TDP. Major players in the industry, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI have said they welcome the partnership between Nvidia and Intel and believe the cooperation would give them more pricing flexibility.
Source:
DigiTimes
Intel's own chipset for the Atom processor faced quite some criticism from the media for being dated in both design and manufacturing processes, resulting in its high TDP. Major players in the industry, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI have said they welcome the partnership between Nvidia and Intel and believe the cooperation would give them more pricing flexibility.
10 Comments on NVIDIA to Work on Intel Atom Core Logic
Given the power consumption, its probably better to go with the Core 2 Mobile series Txxx and the laptop chipset.
Via older cpu's are P3 arc based but with somethings like cache size reduced to cut back on power consumption. The nano I believe is there first CPU arc not licensed from Intel and preforms pretty well but uses about 25w. I would consider a nano based system if the price wasn't so high. Via can't compete with Intel on production cost and will probably priced out of the ITX market sooner or later.
Moving to the AMD side, there is nothing that offers the same power draw, but more performance. Plenty that offers more performance with more power draw though. AMD's side doesn't offer the same power draw. The CPU alone(which is just an underclocked Sempron) consumes 8w, after adding in the chipset, power consumption for the AMD solution is nearing 20w by itself, without the rest of the components.The Semprons definitely perform better, but in this market, performance isn't the main focus. It just has to be good enough to access the internet and run Office. Which the single core Atom is more than capable of. Power consumption is king in the nettop world, people want 4+Hour battery life, which you simply can't do with a Sempron machine.They did cut features, the i945 chipset used in Atom machines is very different from the original i945. They have even gone as far as cutting out Dual-Channel memory support, which isn't really an issue as most nettops/netbooks only have one memory slot anyway.
A process shrink would definitely have been nice though, and hopefully nVidia can release some chipsets that offer a little better video experience, and maybe better power demands.