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Intel’s new Atom chips are up to 50 percent faster than Cherry Trail (but designed for different products)

08/17/2016 at 12:12 PM by Brad Linder Leave a Comment

Intel’s newest low-power Atom processors offer faster CPU and graphics performance than the Cherry Trail chips the company launched in 2015. Unfortunately you probably won’t see the new chips in tablets, laptops, or desktops anytime soon.

The chip maker is only talking about the new Intel Atom T5500 and T5700 chips this week because they’re at the heart of the new Intel Joule system-on-a-module that the company is releasing for IoT developers.

That means we may eventually see these chips powering smart home products, drones, robots, and other devices… but probably not tablets, phones, or PCs.

atom 2016_01

Intel largely gave up on pushing Atom for those systems earlier this year in a major strategy shift. The company’s upcoming Celeron and Pentium chips based on the Apollo Lake platform will fill that niche instead.

Still, it looks like the new Atom chips are certainly powerful enough to handle everyday computing tasks. Intel says the new Atom chips outperform an Atom x5-Z8500 Cherry Trail processor by as much as 50 percent.

They offer up to 10 times the performance you’d expect from an Intel Atom z34xx series “Edison” chip, which is what the company’s previous IoT developer platform was based on.

atom 2016_05

The new Atom T5500 and T5700 chips are based on Intel’s new Goldmont architecture (just like Apollo Lake), and features Intel Gen9 low-power graphcis with support for hardware-accelerated 4K video encoding and decoding in HEVC, H.264, and VP8.

Intel says the new chips offer up to 80 percent higher memory bandwidth and supports camera sensors that can capture up to 60 percent more pixels at higher frame rates.

Other improvements include support for eMMC 5.0 storage, multi-lane PCIe bus connections, and SCSI parallel interface support.

atom 2016_02

Wondering how Intel managed to squeeze so much more performance out of the new processors? Well, the move from Silvermont to Goldmont architecture surely had something to do with it… but the move away from mobile devices helps too. The new chips can consume more power than their predecessors.

Update: Actually, is possible that some of the power consumption figures listed on The charts below may relate to Intel’s new Atom E series chips, not the T series. It’s not clear how much power the new T series chips will use.

While Atom, Celeron, and Pentium chips based on Silvermont/Cherry Trail/Braswell typically had TDP ratings between 4 watts and 6 watts, the new Goldmont-based chips have 6 to 12 watt TDPs.


 

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Logik
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With their improved performance and video capabilities wouldn’t these be very good for tablets and maybe chromebooks that can have much larger batteries than a phone? And isn’t TDP max continuous power, with possibly much lower during normal undemanding use?

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2 years ago
Brad Linder
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Yep, but I think Intel’s decided there’s little profit to be had in that space, so the company is moving on and focusing on new product categories.

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2 years ago
Logik
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It will be interesting to see what the pricing is on these. That should make the difference on how they are used.
Meanwhile there may be deals as Intel continues its strategy shift:
” Intel will see its share [of tablet cpu’s] climb to over 16% in the second half amid its
efforts to clear out inventories of SoFIA chips, Digitimes Research
said.”

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2 years ago
RK
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Nah. This IoT thing is just a scapegoat. It wasn’t about “too little profit”. They’ve just now announced they’re going to produce ARM for phonestablets.

Ironically, this is roughly at the same time RISC-V is starting to look good for IoT and phonestablets…

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2 years ago
CyberGusa
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You’re talking about the licensing agreements, which also include deals to produce chips for LG Electronics, Netronome, and Spreadrum…

That doesn’t really have anything to do with it… Rumors of this move started years ago when Intel was in talks with Apple to produce iPad and iPhone SoCs and Intel has been using less than half their FAB capacities for years, which is wasting their resources… So this move was planned long before they considered giving up on mobile…

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2 years ago
Kevin Hanson
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Man. Bummer that we won’t see them… These would make for awesome Chromebooks…

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2 years ago
Jo
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What prevents these from going into PCs?

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2 years ago
dwick_OR
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Legally, maybe nothing, I don’t know… but do you really want to risk pissing off your sole-source CPU supplier?

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2 years ago
CyberGusa
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Intel wouldn’t care, they’re just trying to break into new markets and sell things they think they can make a profit on, but the limited storage would pose a issue of making it useful with only 8-16GB capacities for desktop OS usages.

While, the lack of a market would probably prevent most OEMs from considering it as it would cost more than other options that are mass produced… It would be cheaper and more practical to get an Apollo Lake based system, basically…

But that doesn’t mean a large enough OEM may not do a custom order later if a popular enough niche product presents an opportunity that this could fulfill… Intel does do custom orders, they even started taking orders for products not based on their technology to make better use of their FABs…

So, not being an official product isn’t really a roadblock, other than financially…

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2 years ago
dwick_OR
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I wouldn’t be so sure as to just blithely say ‘Intel wouldn’t care’ at a time when they’re going to some pains to re-position their Atom-based products away from PCs vs Celeron/Pentium. Intel has gotten their nose out of joint over such things in the past.
If they accept a ‘custom order’ than the OEM is presumably doing something with Intel’s blessing… but it may be a qualified blessing (e.g., no ‘Intel Inside’ stickers, etc – Intel may refuse to fully warrant the product’s fitness for purpose as they usually do since they likely haven’t run it through their full normal battery of PC-oriented validation/qualification tests – thus the OEM would be taking on additional risk/responsiblity)

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2 years ago
CyberGusa
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Uh, no… Intel isn’t trying to get away from PCs… They’re only trying to get away from the phone market. So making a PC out of this will not effect them in any way.

It just would be easier and more practical to use Apollo Lake, which is also Goldmont, but is specifically for the PC market and we’ll see products with it start to come out by the end of the year.

While these, essentially Broxton, SoCs are basically for any usage you can find… IoT isn’t limited to just Internet aware sensors and other basic devices… Kiosks, robotics/drones, etc. can all make use of this and still be classified as IoT devices… This is why it’s being sold with SDK’s… So skies the limit, just like with a Raspberry Pi, etc. similar products, just not as cheap…

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2 years ago
Sam
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Where does Intel say that the new Atoms only support up to 16 GB of storage? I’ve only seen the Intel Joule developer SoM having up to 16 GB of storage installed on the module. I haven’t seen the Atom itself being limited.

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2 years ago
CyberGusa
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We’re talking about Joule, as a development board it’s only designed to handle either 8 or 16 GB of eMMC. It’s not a limitation of the ATOM but Intel isn’t providing other new ATOM products right now except for the Apollo Lake’s that are rebranded under Celeron/Pentium that’ll come out by end of the year…

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2 years ago
Loki
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Intel made a bit of a mistake when they helped bombard the market with low cost Atom devices in 2015. These low-end devices performed very well and had a lot of the features that higher end devices boasted (2 in 1 form factors, ultra-slim profiles, non-traditional desktop shapes / sizes . . . etc.). These devices were so popular and worked so well that a lot of consumers opted to buy them INSTEAD of the higher end devices that generally have a higher profit margin. The result being that more units were sold but less profit was made. Thus Intel announced that it was “retiring” the Atom for PCs and tablets and introducing the much more powerful (and expensive) fanless CPU to replace it – the Core-M. Unfortunately, it looks like they may have rushed it a bit as the first gen Core-M seems to have a problem with thermal… Read more »

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2 years ago
Yep
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As if companies aren’t just going to use ARM for all those products anyway. They should let tablet and mini PC makers use these chips.

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2 years ago
Mark
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What part of the IoT market is Intel targeting? This (at least the Joule) is very expensive.

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2 years ago
Josh L
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They’re trying to make a stand in a new (and unproven) market to avoid getting there late like they did with mobile chips – the thing that weirds me out how the almost obsessive focus on IoT, I get that it’s new and all, but IoT is mostly about gimmicks so far and doesn’t yet ring like a long-lasting gold-paved road to success.

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2 years ago

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