Intel® Atom™ – A brief overview |
| Intel® Atom™ has evolved from being an ultra low power processor platform showing surprising performance levels to a whole family of processors, chipsets and I/O hubs which alters the landscape for hardware engineers in the embedded field. There are two chip solutions and three chip ditto. Some options have an increased power consumption to give room for performance in graphics, I/O or processing in general. Anders Rundqvist, Field Sales Manager at Hectronic gives a brief overview over the existing platforms. |
| |
Z510/Z530 – Bringing PC performance to handhelds |
The first processor platform labelled Intel® Atom™ was a family of ultra low power processors, Z510 and Z530 (1.1 GHz and 1.6 GHz respectively) which made way for a variety of compact and fanless embedded applications and products offered on the market today. The embedded chipset is US15W and the platform all together have a power consumption of under, or around, 5 W. The figure is 2 W for the CPU on its own. Power consumption was lowered and sizes shrank from the introduction of the first family of Intel® Atom™ processors. Compact designs were targeted through an extremely small BGA packaging with only 0.6 mm pitch. The new Qseven COM module form factor was to a large extent a result from the new type of Ultra Mobile PC platforms that the Z510 and Z530 represent. |
| |
| |
|
|
| |
| |
The graphics in US15W is Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 500, GMA500 which, in spite of being extremely low power, has 3D acceleration, at least to some extent, and above all a powerful MPEG hardware accelerator.
In terms of price/performance Intel® Atom™ Z510/Z530 in 1.1 GHz is just above AMD Geode LX800. The power consumption of the two processors are in the same range. The difference is substantial when comparing performance only. The faster 1.6 GHz versions of Intel® Atom™ Z510/Z530 are probably successors to for instance Intel’s own Celeron M ULV processors. |
| |
N270 – Adding I/O and graphics |
| The new low power processor design seen in Z510/Z530 was soon after released in a 1.6 GHz version together with a low cost version of the 945GME embedded chipset, the 945GSE. This three chip solution with the more traditional notebook type chipset has a power consumption of about 10 W. Thus power consumption makes this platform unacceptable for applications requiring ultra low power consumption. Neither are three chips instead of two the way to go when compactness is important. |
| |
| |
|
|
| |
| |
| Other aspects of N270 are more appealing. The I/O possibilities are richer compared to Z510/Z530. The integrated graphics accelerator is GMA950 and it offers graphics performance of the same type as found in Intel® platform based notebooks. The 3D graphics is better than GMA500, but without the equivalent MPEG acceleration possibilities. |
| |
N450, D510 and D410 – Increasing performance |
A couple of families followed upon the introduction of N270. N450, D510 and D410 introduced higher performance levels to Intel® Atom™. They are all using 1.66GHz clock speed and have 512 KB and 1 MB l2 Cache respectively. The D510 is a dual core processor offering significantly better performance but of course under the condition that the application is developed accordingly. Intel’s code name used initially for these three families of processors were Pineview. They are the first Intel® Atom™ processors using the new architecture with graphics accelerator and memory controller integrated in the CPU. In this case a platform consists of the CPU and the I/O hub ICH8M. D410 and D510 have in this connection an increased power consumption, 13 W and 10 W respectively. The reason is that they are both to be considered aiming at desktop type designs and therefore lack the power management functionality that are used in the notebook type processors. N450 on the other hand keep power consumption in the lower region, 5.5 W thanks to power management functionality. The ICH8M I/O Hub adds another 3 to 4 W to the platform. |
| |
| |
|
|
| |
| |
VGA and LVDS ports are included. Designs that require support for DVI or HDMI are problematic since there is no support for SDVO. The I/O possibilities are otherwise generally speaking quite vast. GMA3150 offers improved graphics acceleration compared to platforms with similar power consumption. We’ll probably come across N450, D510 and D410 on motherboards mainly. There will certainly be one or two COM Modules as well, but not as many as we’ve seen based on Z510/Z530 or N270. Embedded applications requiring cost effective solutions in combination with increased computing performance and graphical acceleration is likely to choose N450, D510 or D410. |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
