Intel Centrino Atom brand, uses just 'Atom'

It seems like only yesterday but it's been move than five months since Intel introduced the world to its low-power 45nm processors which it nicknamed Atom and Centrino Atom. Interestingly-enough it also took only five months for Intel to rethink its naming strategy and the result of that is the dropping of the Centrino Atom brand.

Upon release, the Centrino Atom brand was set to be used to name processors that are part of the Menlow platform and aimed at MID (Mobile Internet Devices) but since Intel has decided to simplify things a bit, they will now bear the Atom name. We can dig it.

The netbook & nettop party (BEd: Or battle) has officially begun so Intel has now started to deliver two new Atom processors which are aimed at the tw

Computex Intel is to give free rein to overclockers to tweak the settings that can be applied to its 'Eaglelake' chipset, the P45, the chip maker has revealed.

Launched today at Computex in Taipei, the P45 will come with Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (ETU), an app that the company said would bring "overclocking to the mainstream". The tool uses Wizards to allow users to adjust a range of system speed parameters to try to boost performance. It'll also operate automatically.

Intel's P45: system schematic

Officially, the P45 supports frontside bus speeds of up to 1333MHz and DDR 3 memory clocked at up to 1066MHz, but both can be tweaked with ETU.

The chipset also supports PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 to host either a single x16 add-in card or a pair of x8 boards. The accompanying ICH10 or ICH10R southbridge chip adds six PCI slots to the picture, along with six 3Gb/s SATA ports and an eSATA connector, all of which can be disabled by corporations that don't want extra drives added to their PCs.

Likewise, any of the 12 USB ports can be blocked.

The ICH10R variant adds RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 to the user's drive configuration options. Both southbridges support HD audio and sport on-board Gigabit Ethernet. It'll also automatically adjust system cooling fans to reduce noise whenever possible.

Intel also launched the P43 today, which is almost entirely identical to the P45 - it simply lacks the ability to host two graphics cards, limiting the user to a single x16 PCIe slot.

© The Register

Intel starts shipping N-series Atom CPUs

The netbook & nettop party (BEd: Or battle) has officially begun so Intel has now started to deliver two new Atom processors which are aimed at the two types of products. Coming in a 22x22 mm package (the Z-series Atoms are 13x14mm), the Atom N230 and N270 processors (codename Diamondville) are both 45nm parts clocked at 1.6 GHz, with 512kB of L2 cache and FSBs set to 533 MHz.

The N270 features a TDP of just 2W and will be used in netbooks like Asus' Eee PC, MSI's Wind, Acer's Aspire one etc while the N230, with its 4W TDP will have to settle for the less mobile but still easy to carry nettops like the Asus Eee Box. The Atom N270 will be paired up with the 945GSE chipset while the N230's partner is the 945GC.