Intel Atom CPU

I was just looking at the Asus range of sub-notebook Eee PCs and this got me interested in the new Intel Atom CPU the higher end models are using.

This new CPU is very small and has a very low power consumption of around 4-8W. Initially codenamed Silverthorne, these CPUs were designed with ultra mobile PCs and smart phones in mind.

This may make you think that these CPUs are going to be quite underpowered and not really powerful enough for more than PDA style applications. But you would be wrong. The CPU comes in both single and dual core versions with a TDP or only 8W for the dual core version. They also support hyper-threading! And the current clock speeds available are from 800MHz to 1.87GHz, with a FSB of 400-533 which is pretty good, and equivelent to the average home PC just a couple of years ago.

This has made me very interested in this new Atom chip. Imagine how small and silent you could make a media PC or small file server. With the CPU only having a maximum TDP of 8W it wouldn't need a fan, and only a very small heatsink at most. And with solid state drives (SSD) you would have quite a fast completely silent system. And stick a copy of Linux on there and it would run quite fast too.

You can read more about the Intel Atom CPU at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom