Gizmodo
Silverthorne is a teeny processor built on the 45nm process (like the much-ballyhooed Penryn), designed for UMPCs, subnotebooks, mystery Apple products and any other smallish gadget that needs real crunching on an ultra-lean power diet.
It's about as powerful as the first Pentium M chips (Banias), but while those idled at 5W and averaged 24.5W, this little guy sips as little as 0.1W in its idle state, with peaks up to just 2W on the 2GHz model. It's really cheap to pump out too, tapped for the $200 OLPC at one point.
It comes in a couple different flavors up to that 2GHz version. To get athletic performance—it's a full-fledged x86 chip, not a half-baked cutdown—out of an anorexic processor, Intel worked all kinds of design mojo, like a new quick-wake deep sleep state. It's still a bit too hungry for smartphones, though. So, while it's a neat piece of silicon, as Ars says, it's still got a ways to go, especfially with stiff competition from ARM and TI. But that's a good thing.
Comments
Can we just put like 100 of these on 1 mobo and make a virtual cluster?
Ahh if only Apple waited two more months.
Ixnay the eefray uplicitypay, OK? I have a lot of money invested in ARM.
Couldnt you put this on motherboards and have an extra processor for doing things? Its so small that if it doesnt even get used it wouldnt matter.
Sweet sweet processor porn.
...a Silverthorne, a bloody rose,
lay crushed and broken on the virgin snow.
Now I think I know...
I'm already salivating at the thought of 4 of these, passively cooled, on a nano-itx board. Grllllllllhhhh.. chips.
Geez!! That penny is frickin' HUGE!!
majortom - That sounds like a good idea, but the trouble is in connecting it without slowing down the main processor. That means it has its own memory (expensive) or it uses the host's memory & bus. If the host is bus-bound (as it is many times), and not cpu bound, then the net effect will be worse overall performance.
Someone once said that supercomputer design was all about designing the memory system - not the processors.
I'm still excited about this - a small powerful processor would be great in a lot of applications. I built a watch that uses a processor that's 5x the speed of the original PC, so people will always find novel uses for more cpu power.
Has anyone seen The Last Mimsy? I know it was a kids movie, but what about the rabbit the little girl carried? The scientists looked at it under a microscope and found it was made of Intell chips. Hilarious for computer geeks. A talking toy rabbit from the future made of microscopic Intel chips! BC Computer Repair Fontana
@morcheeba: explain the part, "built a watch that uses a processor that's 5x the speed of the original PC" how come do you need a watch with a clock (?) that high?
I wonder what the power draw would be when clocked at like 40 MHz.
When they make dual-core versions of those I'll be truly psyched. I'm getting spoiled by multi-core processors, so I'm having more and more trouble using machines without them, even if they are specialized devices. This is definitely impressive, but for a device using one to take over common duties for me, I'll want better multitasking.
@vinchbr: If his watch uses LEDs, then the differnce in power draw of a PIC or AVR running at 25MHz vs 32kHz or so is negligible compared to lighting a pile of LEDs, even for just a few seconds a day.
Anyone else immediately think "NO THATS THE 2.5RS COLOR!!"? Bitches stole subie's color name 10 years later... well ok they added an E at the end
Vinchbr- full screen video games.
Dingus- 13uA @ 32kHz, 5.5mA @ 25MHz. OLED display takes 3.3mA & it's on all the time.
@morcheeba: Yes, but you could put it in a Vista machine and it would smoke...er, blaze...no wait. What was I saying?!
@whootowl: Damn, you still working with a monochrome monitor too?
@elislider:
LOL nice catch.
Ha! "It's about as powerful as the first Pentium M chips"
Please compare it with a Celeron M 370 (1.5GHz) so I can cry in peace.
@Brassen: Peak performance is supposedly comparable to Banias.
Wouldn't the lowest clocked one be able to go into smart phones, it's not like windows mobile needs 2ghz.
Also this would go great in the EEE or Cloudbook.
Is it SilverTHORNE or SilverTHRONE? I think I've seen it spelled both ways with equal frequency. Either way, though, that picture with the penny next to it gave me little shivers of excitement.
I am more interested in VIA's offering.
Isaiah looks like its going to run laps around Silverthorne.
x86 wristwatches in the next 3 years?
as much of an AMD fanboy as i am, silverthorne looks to be the shit.
I THINK I JUST SHAT MYSELF
sure, its small and powerful, but those sharp corners make it totally unsuitable for ass-based applications. nice try though, intel.
Yeah this thing sure sounds nice, and it would indeed be handy for many projects.
Although.. the price might be sub $200 but what board does it go on and will that board be $400 like the trend is now?
And will it be completely pulled into the ground by licenses and such making it impossible to build it in cheap systems that do anything useful?
@w00zzy: Monitors are for wimps.
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