Moore’s law Has Been Broken by the Latest Intel Atom Chips

Atom chips are paving the way for Nvidia’s chips by lacking in any extra speed boost in spite of the low cost.

June 12, 2009, Framingham – The Moore’s law seems to be non-effective in the case of Intel’s Atom Chips of the next generation. This new generation of chips, called Pineview, come at a low cost and has been designed to consume as less power as possible. The Pineview is supposed to be further improving its quality, especially in the area of these two traits. But there will be a disadvantage too. With these new chips the expectation of any enhancement in their speed will have to be given up and this is the view of none other than an authentic-looking spec, which somehow got leaked this month.

It is assumed that all the three processors will be released in both the single core ass well as dual core versions with the running speed of 1.66GHz.  The improvement in the running speed of these chips than that of the previous chips is not a significant improvement.  Currently, it is 1.6 GHz for most of the chips of Atom. So, it is also possible that the users would not be able to even notice this light modification on the terms of running speed of chips.  Likewise, the Intel’s graphics chip would also not have any significant improvement to offer on the terms of speed, although Intel has decided to build the new generation of chips that would be compatible with the soon to be released Atom’s CPU.

Even Intel has confirmed it officially that these new chips will not be providing any advantage over the previous versions on the terms of speed. But it further elaborated that the most significant change of them all in the Pineview chips would be that they would contain the memory controller as well as the graphics processor at the same time in the Atom’s CPU. But there is no need to worry about the speed of the chips, as the architecture of the complete integrated platform of the chips (called Pine Trail) will take care of that. The architecture would be somewhat like this: the graphic processors and the memory controller would be placed side-by-side, as well nearer to the CPU. This architecture will help the net-top PCs and the netbooks, using Pineview, to gain significant speed over their today’s counterparts, using today’s chips. This insight of the architecture has been given by none other than an analyst of Insight64, Nathan Brookwood.

These newer chips would also come along with a longer battery life and would generate less heat. The generation of less heat by these new chips will also help the manufacturers of the netbooks to remove the fans used inside the netbooks. But the real advantage for Intel, in making these chips, would be its capability to build even smaller chips and that also at a lower cost. This advantage is surely going to be passed on to the manufacturers of the netbooks.

The cool advantages of the Chips is heating up the market

According to some analysts this new generation of chips, going to be produced by Intel, has been designed keeping in mind the increasing popularity of the ARM chips, which are comparatively cheaper and uses less energy than the chips currently being produced by Intel. Moreover, several manufacturers of the netbooks have even started using these ARM chips into their netbooks. But as Intel is not aspiring for any significant improvement in the performance of these new chips, it is likely that the Nvidia Corporation would take advantage of this and will spread its consumer base with the multimedia-savvy Ion platform.

According to Dean McCarron, one of the analysts of Mercury Research, Intel is intended to cater to the needs of the market, which would be as large as it could afford to serve, which will prove to be a boon for the smaller companies, like Nvidia, to acquire the expertise and the faith of market in a particular area. Apple is using in their MacBook Pro, a combination of Atom N270 processor, Nvidia’s Ion platform bundles & 9400M graphics chip.

Despite providing a graphics quality that is far better than the 1080p high-definition movies display, it has failed to garner much popularity due to its formidable price. Even after that, some 20 Ion-based machines were on display this month at the conference of Computex. Intel is going to incorporate the new Pineview Atom N450 chips along with the Intel’s GMA 500 graphics chip. This decision has been taken because of some advantages that will be provided by the GMA 500 graphics chip to the Pineview, like it will increase the number of the graphics pipelines from two to four and is also capable of running with a faster clock speed. Even after that, it will still lag behind the Nvidia’s 9400M chip, as the Nvidia’s 9400M chip is twice as fast as the Intel’s GMA 500 graphics chip and provides almost four times the graphic pipelines than provided by the GMA 500 graphics chip.

The Principal at Jon Peddie Research, Jon Peddie, said that the Intel’s GMA 500 graphics chip is, no doubt, has far better performance to offer than the old 945 chip, but still it can’t be compared against the Ion.  According to Intel, although, there has been a large scale alteration in the architecture of the Pineview-class Atoms, it would still be possible to use them along with the Nvidia’s Ion.

Intel is claiming that it is not long before the Pineview will replace the Ion completely and the Nvidia will have to think some other optionss. Corroborating this statement of the Intel, Brookwood said that when the Intel’s GPU will be crafted according to the shape of the die of a CPU, there would not be any need of the GPU from the store of Nvidia. Nvidia has not released statement against this move of the Intel, despite complaining about the Intel’s intention of disrupting the flow of Ion’s sell in the market with its new tactics.

For The Customers Interested In HD Video

This will be a drawback for the Pineview not to incorporate any major improvement in its performance as compared to its previous counterparts, as the users who like to play the shooter games or the users who like to watch the HD movies, will not have anything to cheer for.

Although, it is still not clear that how many users are there who are into playing shooter games or watching HD movies, on to their net-top PCs or the netbooks. Intel is claiming that there are very few of the users of this kind. There is another noticeable thing here is that this not so better performed Pineview will save another product of the Intel itself to become obsolete and that is Intel’s more costly CPUs.

Hence, in the words of McCarron, Intel itself is not intended to make its Atom chips more successful due to its own sake. It has been reported that, for the customers interested in watching HD video, Intel is going to provide its customers with the Crystal HD video decoder chip of the Broadcom Corporation. But well before the Intel, Hewlett-Packard Co. has already been using this Crystal HD video decoder chip in its latest Mini 1101 netbook. This inclusion of Crystal HD video decoder chip in the Pine trail will bring its price at par to the price of the Nvidia’s Ion.