Techotic

“Silverthorne,” the ultra-low-power processor at the heart of the “Menlow” platform, has been dubbed Atom. Intel says this new platform is designed for handheld Mobile Internet Devices, but the company’s Director of Basic Mobility Platforms, Uday Marty, stated that he also expect it to feature in clamshells notebooks as well as laptops.

Silverthorne is single-core designs built using 45nm process technology, and it’s rated for operation at up to 1.8GHz with thermal envelopes ranging from 0.6W to 2.5W. The chips are built using a new architecture, which was designed “from the ground up” for mobility and low power use, but they’re fully compatible with the instruction set used in existing Core 2 Duo processors and fully support multi threads. Atom processors feature 47 million transistors each and die areas of just 25 mm².