Intel Preps Silvermont Atom Architecture

As Intel continues its preparations for the June unveiling of its next-generation Core “Haswell” chip, the company is also preparing to outline the new architecture that will underpin the upcoming low-power Atom chips.

To this end, Intel officials are expected to talk about the “Silvermont” architecture at an event at the company’s Santa Clara, California, headquarters 6 May. Silvermont represents the first new architecture for the Atom platform since it was introduced in 2008.

Atom Reach

Since that time, Intel executives have rapidly expanded Atom’s reach, making it the platform for not only many of its tablet plans and smartphones, but also for embedded devices and even low-power microservers. Silvermont will be the next-generation architecture for upcoming chips like the 22-nanometer “Bay Trail” for tablets and other devices running both Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Google’s Android operating systems, and for “Merrifield,” which will go into smartphones.

It also will be the architecture for “Avoton,” which will succeed “Centerton” in microservers such as Hewlett-Packard’s Project Moonshot systems.

Silvermont is expected to bring greater performance and lower power to the Bay Trail chips, which Intel officials are hoping will help the vendor make inroads into a tablet market where most of the devices currently run on ARM-designed chips made by the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia. The chips, which will include higher end Intel graphics capabilities, also could be a boon for Windows 8 tablets, which still lag far behind those devices running Android and Apple’s iOS.

Analysts have been critical of the performance of ARM-based tablets running Microsoft’s Windows RT OS.

Intel officials have said tablets, hybrids and convertible devices powered by the quad-core Bay Trail system-on-a-chips (SoCs) will appear in before the holiday shopping season and help drive down tablet prices to as low as $200 (£129).

Smartphones powered by Merrifield are expected to hit the market early next year.

Wintel Fightback

Analysts at Strategy Analytics said in an 25 April report that of the 40.6 million tablets shipped in the first quarter, 48 ran iOS, while 43 percent ran Android. Windows held a 7.5 percent market share. The 40.6 million tablets shipped represented a 117 percent increase over the 18.7 million shipped during the same period in 2012.

Though Microsoft saw a 7.5 percent market share, it was hindered by limited distribution, a shortage of top-tier apps and confusion in the market, according to Strategy Analytics.

Not all analysts saw that number as a bad sign for either Microsoft or Intel. Ross Seymore, research analyst with Deutsche Bank, said in a research note 26 April that Windows 8 “did surprisingly well” considering it had no market share a year earlier.

Seymore also noted that Intel powered more than 90 percent of all the Windows-based tablets, and that its chip strategy has the company poised to grow its market share against ARM. He said that Intel’s current “Cover Trail” SoCs are helping drive tablet prices to as low as $449 (£289), and that Bay Trail will help lower prices even more. The chips “offer comparable performance and power efficiency” as the ARM chips and give OEMs a solid alternative to ARM SoCs, Seymore said.