AMD‘s Bobcat said to split Intel's Atom

Actually AMD will not hit the aimed for TDP of 1 watt but nevertheless the CPU - with 1 Gigahertz clock speed - will, according to Computerbase, use about 8 watt und thus have a low power consumption equal to Intel's Atom. The Intel solution needs only 2.5 watt, indeed, but the AMD product will have an onboard memory controller. Intel has to add the 945GSE chip, which needs additional 4 watt.

The AMD Bobcat will be a 64 bit capable Single Core processor, which will be put into a tiny package of only 27 x 27 millimeters and have 812 pins. The Hypertransport Link is addressed with 800 Megahertz. Bobcat supports DDR2 RAM. With only 256 KiByte the L2 cache is a little underdeveloped - Intel's Atom has twice as much. It looks like AMD had to make some compromises in favor of the compact design.

But since Bobcat is not expected before 2009, the direct competitor won't be the current Atom but its successor, codename Lincroft, which got an integrated memory controller, too.