IDF: Is there a new dual-core Atom coming soon?
The chip Intel wants to talk about this week is Sandy Bridge, but the keynote demo of Intel's WiDi wireless display running on an Atom tablet (showing a static image rather than video, but streaming from an Atom-based system for the first time) suggests a new dual-core Atom with added acceleration could be on the way soon - or some other key addition to the Atom platform.
Back in January when we first saw WiDi at CES, Intel said it needed a Core i5 or better processor; graphics product manager Joshua Newman told us "it actually uses the CPU because it's constantly encoding to the frame buffer so it takes smart CPU performance" (think TurboBoost). So when CEO Paul Otellini showed an "in-development Intel tablet with an Atom processor" streaming to a WiDi TV, we wanted to know how they'd got something so CPU-intensive working with Atom for the first time.
That was surprisingly hard.
Intel is talking about several WiDi developments, but it's keeping very quiet on what the Atom demo in the keynote actually involved. WiDi 1.2 is available now for systems with NVIDIA's new Optimus switchable graphics (you can download the update if it doesn't come on a new notebook). WiDi only works with Intel's own graphics chips, but with the WiDi 1.2 driver, although WiDi isn't available while you're running apps that use Optimus, as soon as you switch back to less demanding apps that don't require the more powerful graphics WiDi will work again. WiDi 1.2 also lets you extend your desktop onto the remote monitor, so you could have a video running on the TV and be working on your email or IMing a friend - or you have your speaker notes for the presentation you're giving. When you just want to see the remote display, WiDi 1.2 turns off the notebook screen to save power.
WiDi 2.0 will come with Sandy Bridge systems next year and that will support 1080p streaming rather than the 720p WiDi can do today, engineer Dan Moore told us. He also showed us WiDi running on a Ultra Low Voltage i5 or i7 chip, using TurboBoost (which isn't in the Core i3); just streaming the desktop from a ULV Core i5 was using 2GHz of processor power before he started playing video so it's still very demanding. So how can an Atom tablet manage it?
"We never said Atom is a bad computer!" pointed out Dadi Perlmutter, the executive vice president of the Intel architecture group. He credited significant amounts of work that the Intel team has done to improve the WiDi algorithms (the engineer who got it working has been pulling a lot of all-nighters) but Perlmutter did tell us that the demo tablet had a dual-core Atom processor (something we've mainly seen in desktop all-in-ones and Media Centre systems). "The dual-core Atom is a nice machine; it's the combination of a good micro-architecture and a lot of work that made it happen."
When we tracked down the engineer who had actually worked on the demo, he agreed that optimising the algorithms was a big part of making it work. But then he said that he wasn't allowed to talk about anything else to do with the demo and that we should wait for an announcement "in the near term - it might be one month or two months".
And that suggests that while optimising the software makes it easier to run it on lower-power processors, there's something more to it. Several people from the WiDi team cautioned that the demo is where Intel wants to get WiDi to go rather than what it can do today. And the difference between and Atom and a Core i5 is enough that we started speculating about what that announcement might be. A dual-core Atom with some dedicated video acceleration perhaps?
Mary Branscombe