When Intel first unveiled its Atom line of processors back in 2008, it split the product family into just two categories: Nettop and netbook. The nettop category was largely ignored, but netbooks caught fire and transformed the entire laptop industry. Over the past seven years the number and types of Intel Atom processors available on the market have exploded, as have the myriad code names. This has led to a number of odd cases -- would you rather have an Atom Z3580 (quad-core, up to 2.33GHz, 12.8GB/s of memory bandwidth) or a Z3735D (quad-core, up to 1.83GHz, 10.8GB/s of memory bandwidth)? Finally, Intel is moving to simplify this situation with a new rebranding effort for the entire Atom lineup.
Going forward, Atom will be broken into three families -- Atom x3, x5, and x7. According to Intel, these will be roughly synonymous with the Core i3 / i5 / i7 distinctions, with the Core i3 being marketed towards basic day-to-day smartphone or tablet use, the x5 family offering solid midrange performance, and the x7 chip providing "the highest level of performance and capabilities." There's no word yet on which specific features will be marked off for which markets -- we don't know if all x3 chips are dual-core, for example, or if the x7 family always uses a high-end Intel GPU as opposed to a chip from PowerVR.
Intel's new brand stack
We'll have more specific details on each ranking at Mobile World Congress next week, as well as data on how the upcoming SoFIA chips from TSMC will fit into this marketing system. Presumably Intel's Rockchip products will also fit into this scheme.
On the Cherry Trail
Meanwhile, in other Atom-related news, early Cherry Trail figures have leaked out courtesy of Geekbench(Opens in a new window). The data shows Cherry Trail outperforming Bay Trail by an average of roughly 5 to 8 percent. Memory performance is a bit of a wash, but this could be caused by either an early chip rev or slower memory. This is in line with previous expectations -- Cherry Trail is a die-shrink of Atom, rather than a full core revision, and most of its improvements will come from improved burst frequency and longer burst time rather than IPC shifts. The major improvements in Atom are expected on the GPU side, where the total number of graphics units are expected to quadruple in at least some SKUs.
If Intel held to these plans, it'll be Cherry Trail's GPU performance that stands out, not its CPU cores. Power consumption is another unknown, but Intel's Core M and more mainstream Broadwell chips are said to have improved -- we expect to see similar improvements at the low end of the scale as well.
The major question for Intel is whether power consumption and manufacturing costs will have progressed enough to start bolstering its bottom line tablet market. It'll still be some time before the company's 14nm modem technology is ready for integration into its own SoC -- until that happens, Intel may find its market limited.
