Pineview: Details about the Intel Atom successor with integrated GPU and memory controller surfaced

Pineview will be the name of the Intel Atom successor. Now first unofficial details about the new CPU and platform have been surfaced. The combination of the chipset Tiger Point and the Atom successor Pineview will be called Pine Trail.

The Pineview CPU will contain the memory controller as well as the graphics core so that the Northbridge on the motherboard becomes redundant and only a Southbridge is needed. The combination of CPU, memory controller and graphics core has several advantages: On the one hand the power consumption of the 45 nm components decreases and on the other hand the motherboard needs less layers which should lower production cost - instead of six layers only four are necessary. The required board surface has shrunk from 2,174 to 773 square millimeters thanks to the integration. The power consumption is said to have dropped from 8 to 7 Watt.

The Pine Trail platform will probably come in two versions. Like Intel's Atom CPU the successor Pineview will be available in different versions for portable and fixed devices such as netbooks and net tops. However, there won't be a significant performance leap since the successor platform Pine Trail - that is CPU, GPU and memory controller - is of the current version and apart from the integration in one core it will only allow a higher clock rate. But that's only a speculation. Intel's competitor, the Nvidia Ion, is said to become redundant then.

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