Intel today announced the next step of its mobile strategy. The Silvermont architecture is a complete departure from the Clover Trail and Clover Trail+ chips that Intel has been pushing since 2008. With a switch to yearly update cycles, the company hopes to be much more competitive in the extremely hot mobile chipset segment.
Based on the 22nm architecture, expect to see the first handsets based on Silvermont early next year while the first tablets running on the new architecture should be here by the end of the year. Silvertrail in specific is the CPU core and is a part of the Baytrail SoC for tablets, Merrifield SoC for smartphones. Without getting too technical, the platform aims to attain three times the performance of current gen Atom chips while consuming up to 5 times less power. Key enhancements include power sharing between GPUs and the SoC IP. The chip can also manage burst frequencies based on thermal, electric and power delivery constraints. Intel plans to follow up Silvermont with Airmont based on the 14nm architecture later in 2014.
[Via – ZDNet]