Information on Cedar Trail is being tightly controlled this week at Intels IDF event in China. Launch isn’t expected until the second half of the year with devices being ready for the Oct, Nov buying season so clearly the platform isn’t final yet.
We’ve learnt that the video decoding hardware is on-board which indicates a new GPU and we’ve been told that Intel Wireless Display (with no mention of 1080p by the way) will join Wireless Audio and wireless syncing.
If you pay close attention to the video you’ll hear about four more features that haven’t been mentioned in press releases.
First, Doug Davis talks about a ‘frequency’ improvement for the CPU. This could mean a useful boost into 1.8 or 2.0Ghz territory which we already know Atom is capable of from the Atom Z500 series cpus. Combined with dual-cores and the process improvements we could see quite a significant jump in cpu power of 30% or more.
Secondly, you’ll hear a mention of a 50% lower thermal design point. That would bring the platform down to around 4 watts which is a huge improvement that would save significant battery life when used in high load working conditions. Possibly 30% again.
Listen to the mention of ‘Always Updated’ which will allow applications to get updates when in standby. That’s interesting wording be cause it doesn’t say ‘always on.’ This could be linked with the fourth feature mentioned to provide quick wake, poll, sleep cycles.
Quick boot is the fourth feature. If this is to work with Windows it could be a trick that allows very quick standby state recovery. Perhaps an on-die memory cache? I don’t know but it could be very useful, especially when coupled with a boot-and-poll sequencer.
video from Netbooknews.
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Four more features revealed in Intel Cedar Trail presentation video. http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=23576
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RT @umpcportal: Four more features revealed in Intel Cedar Trail presentation video. http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=23576
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The graphics features supported are DX10.1 and OpenGL 3.0. The only GPU that’s capable of the exact same features are the ones used in Sandy Bridge processors. I’m pretty sure they’ll use a scaled down version on Cedar Trail. Power efficiency was improved seriously compared to the previous generation which makes it possible to skip few generations and go to the latest iteration.
Interesting. So if this is true we could be looking at a significant improvement.
Another possibility is that they’re using a newer PowerVR core. Intel has used the SGX 535 (DX9) in the past, and is using it (with a higher clock) in the new Oaktrail. The SGX 545 has DX10.1 support and generation 6 should be around the corner, and probably has some of this, too. Newer PowerVR cores have much better performance than the 535, and coupled with low power consumption could be good choices for the Atom.
Even SGX535 was claimed to have DX10.1 support. Yet the drivers aren’t there. In fact, it doesn’t exist. You can also see PowerVR’s OGL support is based on OpenGL ES, which is a mobile variant. Simply there’s no chip other than Sandy Bridge graphics that support DX10.1 and OpenGL 3.0.
Either way, I don’t think performance improvement will be more than 2x though. 200MHz 6EU chip would suffice.
RT @umpcportal: Four more features revealed in Intel Cedar Trail presentation video. http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=23576
RT @umpcportal: Four more features revealed in Intel Cedar Trail presentation video. http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=23576
no, IMG have NEVER claimed DX10.1 for SGX535, only 9.0, the only core that they have that is DX10.1 compatible is SGX545. IMG re-announced SGX545 in Jan 2010, and re-affirmed that it had a lead licencee. given its DX10.1 compliance, it can really only be Intel who is the licencee. SGX545 is also the only core from IMG that is open GL 3.2 compliant. SGX535 is only 2.1 compliant.
Having said that, I don’t thing things are pointing to SGX545 being inside cedartrail.