Intel’s Atom chips are designed first and foremost to offer low power consumption. Generally that’s meant that they haven’t been high performance chips when it comes to tasks that require more processing or graphics power. But Intel’s Tunnel Creek platform for embedded systems actually has some pretty impressive graphics chops.
The folks at Habey have put together a tiny new PC motherboard called the SOM-6670 which uses an Intel Atom E6xx chip with GMA600 graphics. That graphics core uses 400MHz PowerVR SGHX graphics and Habey has put together a video showing the platform decoding two HD videos at the same time — one on a 1080P monitor and the other on a 1280 x 768 pixel notebook display. The graphics core is actually decoding one video while the CPU is pulling its weight on the other.
The Habey SOM-6670 only uses about 6.6 watts of power, but the power consumption jumps to 18W when you add the dual monitor setup.
The platform supports Windows Embedded, Windows 7, Fedora, MeeGo, and other operating systems.
You can check out a demo video after the break.