Intel is now shipping its second-generation Atom chips for netbooks and nettops, the Atom D510, Atom D410, and Atom N450.  These new chips are focused on power, space, and cost savings.  Performance is basically unchanged.  We’ll come back to that in a minute, and we’ll look at what these new parts tell us about the next-gen embedded Atom processors.

Like the first-gen parts, the new chips are based on a 1.66GHz Atom core.  The big news with Atom 2.0 is that the graphics and memory controller chipset have moved onto the CPU, shrinking the chipset from three chips to two:

Atom 2.0 offers higher integration.  Shown here: N270 (left) vs. N450 (right).

This results in an impressive 60% package size savings (board-level savings will be somewhat less):

Atom 2.0 also boasts a 20% power savings.    Much of the savings comes from changes to graphics controller, which benefits both from integration into the CPU and from a process shrink from 90nm to 45 nm.

It is also worth noting that the D510 is the first “true” dual-core Atom.  The existing dual-core Atom 330 is really just two Atom chips stuck onto the same package.  In contrast, the D510 contains two cores in a single die.

The performance of Atom 2.0 is about the same as Atom 1.0—no surprise considering that the CPU and graphics engine are essentially unchanged.  I am surprised that Intel didn’t take this opportunity to improve the video capabilities.  The GPU only offers hardware acceleration for MPEG-2; H.264 and VC-1 aren’t accelerated.  This is a significant drawback for watching online video.  As AnandTech explains:

Adobe’s Flash 10.1 beta enables DXVA acceleration of H.264 encoded Flash movies, we wrote about it a few weeks ago. It’s cross platform, it works on AMD, Intel and NVIDIA hardware - all you need is a GPU core that supports H.264 hardware acceleration. Ah, now you see the problem.

Without hardware H.264 acceleration, Pine Trail can’t playback full screen Hulu/Youtube videos at higher desktop resolutions without dropping frames.

The table below shows you what you can/can’t do:

Given how popular Flash video is, I would have expected this to be a priority for Intel.  Maybe we’ll get there in Atom 3.0…  AnandTech also makes a great point about overall performance:

Interacting with your PC, opening windows, launching apps, browsing the web, is generally all bound by the performance of a single thread. In those cases, you’re still looking at a platform that’s the equivalent of a low end notebook (not desktop) from 2004.

Atom has single threaded performance worse than a Pentium 4, but multithreaded FP/SSE performance can be much better on the dual core versions

This is the main reason I decided not to get a netbook.   I don’t do any gaming or other performance-intensive work, but I am constantly opening browser windows, tabbing through apps, etc.  I really wanted to buy an Atom netbook, but I just couldn’t live with the performance issues.  I’m much happier with the Core 2 Duo notebook I bought instead.

Anyway, this is all interesting but not necessarily useful to embedded system designers.  The chip we really care about is Moorestown.  This forthcoming chip is the successor to the Atom Z5xx family.  It will offer an even higher level of integration, and it will offer acceleration for H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC1, and WMV9.  (In fact, the existing Z5xx chipset already offers hardware support for all these standards.)

Here’s what’s next for embedded Atom processors

It’s likely that Moorestown will offer roughly the same area savings as the Atom chips released today.  I’ve crunched the numbers to predict the packaging for Moorestown.  Check out my next blog for details!