We have already talked quite a bit about Intel’s Silvermont architecture when Intel
The Bay Trail SoCs launched todays are called the Atom Z3600 and Z3700 series and come in dual- and quad-core variants. At a later point Intel wants to launch Pentium and Celeron branded versions for notebooks and desktops. Details can be seen on the slide.
As can be seen on the table these SoCs are clocked from 1.8 to 2.4GHz. Each two cores share 1MB of L2 cache, which means the SKUs end up with 1MB or 2MB of L2 cache. Oddly enough the models with a D added in the end are only single-channel DDR3L, albeit at a higher 1333MHz clock. The other models are dual-channel LPDDR at 1066MHz, the dual-core model is single-channel though. The supported memory amount also varies from 1GB to 4GB with usually the dual-channel models supporting double the amount than the single channel, with the exception of the Z3680 that only supports 1GB. Supported resolutions
What’s interesting is that Intel doesn’t spec TDP values for those products. The reason being that Intel believes in a new measure called Scenario Design Power (SDP), that is defined as being the power consumption at ?usual workloads?. Naturally the SDP will be only about 30%-50% of what the actual TDP would be, which is why Intel favors it for comparison purposes with the competition. Also Intel notes that SDP will be lower when the chip is operated at a lower than the maximum resolution.
The Intel HD graphics contains four EUs. These are the same graphics cores that are also found in Haswell, which only has a lot more of them ? 20 in GT2 versions and 40 in GT3. It also will be clocked a good deal lower than in Haswell, Intel talks about a maximum clock of 667MHz. Still technology wise it is a big step forward for Intel considering support of the DX11 and OpenGL ES 3.0 specs , that wasn’t present in the PowerVR graphics of Clover Trail and older Atoms.
The GPU also supports a wide variety of formats for bitstream decoding acceleration, namely H.264, VC1, MPEG2, MVC, VP8 and MPEG4 ASP. It also has bitstream encode acceleration for H.264 and hybrid acceleration for MPEG2 (only motion estimation and intraprediction). We assume this hybrid MPEG2 acceleration should appeal to different markets because it won’t be very useful for end consumers.
Intel stresses that the chips are suitable for a wide variety of workloads and run on all major platforms ? namely Android, Linux and Windows. With Bay Trail, Intel aims at the $199 up to $599 pricepoints, whereas Haswell is positioned above that. Interestingly at the IDF opening keynote Brian Krzanich noted that they also plan to go down as low as $100.
