The budget end of Intel’s desktop processor range is covered by the Celeron and Pentium brands. But in recent years Atombranding has been used for the very low power chips you find inside netbooks and soldered on to cheap mini-ITX boards. We’re about to hit a new generation of low-power Intel processors though, and it looks as though the Atom brand may disappear.
Atom chips get a mixed reaction from the consumer. On the one hand they offer a cheap, low power solution for small screen netbooks and inside nettops. But they also aren’t exactly fast, with most variants running single or dual cores at 1.6, 1.8, or 2GHz. They will run most things, bit don’t run anything great.
So it looks as though Intel has decided not to use Atom as a brand for the new Silvermont processors. That decision is not just because of Atom’s historical reputation, but also because Silvermont chips are genuinely fast and therefore deserve to carry the Celeron and Pentium brands instead.
Indeed, Intel is promising that the 22nm Silvermont microarchitecture will offer 3x the performance of the latest Atom processors while using 5x less power. If they deliver on that, you can see why the Atom name may be dropped.
Intel has yet to confirm this of course, but we should expect to see laptops, all-in-ones, and convertible laptops/tablets running Windows 8 with Silvermont Celeron and Pentium chips inside later this year. Silvermont parts will also be used for Windows and Android tablets, but won’t use the same chip branding.
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