Intel’s Upcoming Pine Trail-D Nettop Platform Roadmap
su Expreview ho trovato questa roadmap riguardante la nuova piattaforma Nettop :)
Nettop is a new-style and easy-to-use device for surfing on the internet. It offers various functions such as learning, entertainment, picture and videos.
As the greatest supporter of Nettop, Intel has now unveiled the plans on its next-generation Nettop platform. This new platform is named as Pine Trail-D and expected to be out in the second half of this year.
Pine Trail-D platform has inherited some Intel’s conceptions on desktop platform, and employed new CPU + PCH structure, instead of previous CPU + GMCH + IOH. This new structure will also be found on Intel’s Ibex Peak PC platform.
The codename of chips on Pine Trail-D platform is Pineview-D and Tigerpoint-D.
Based on Lincroft chip, Pineview processor will integrate GFX and IMC units, that means it will add the memory controller and graphics engine to CPU, so as to abandon the northbridge thoroughly. The structure of Pineview is almost the same as Havendale, except that Pineview features Display units, while the display output function is completed by PCH (i.e.Ibex Peak) on Havendale.
Compared with last-generation Atom processor, Pineview has higher frequency (at least 1.6GHz). Pineview is still based on 45nm manufacturing process. Even GMCH is added, the die area of Pineview still keeps at 484mm^2. Pineview supports DDR2-800, compared with DDR2-667 on last-generation platform.
Equal to the function of previous IOH chip (southbridge), Tigerpoint features 130nm FCBGA with die area of only 289mm^2 (17*17mm) and power consumption of 2W. On the last Nettop platform, the die area was 961mm^2. Featureing 8 USB2.0 ports, 4 PCIe x1 lane and 2 PCI ports, Tigerpoint communicates with Pineview via DMI bus.
The greatest advantage of Pine Trail-D platform is lower power consumption and smaller die area. The total area of two chips is 773mm^2 (484 + 289mm^2), while that of the three chips on previous platform is 2601mm^2 (484 + 1156 + 961mm^2). That is to say, the die area of new platform is only 30% of the old one. For the size-concious Nettop and Netbook, this is a quite obvious improvement.
Besides, Pine Trail-D can offer much lower power consumption. The TDP of new platform is 14W (single-core CPU + Tigerpoint) or 17W (dual-core CPU + Tigerpoint), dropping from 29W/33W on previous platform by 50%.
According to what we’re learned, the engineering sample of dual-core Pineview-D platform will be hopefully completed at the end of Q1, and that of single-core Pineview-D in Q3. But the final products won’t be available until Q4, or even later.
Expreview
