Silverthorne chip to arrive by mid year, with promises of amazing battery life.
If you were as skeptical as us at Intel’s recent demo involving a GPS device, the Beijing Olympics, and a mysterious black cable, then the latest snippets on Intel’s Silverthorne chip might interest you.
Today Intel shed a few more snippets about the new chip, which will supposedly power a new breed of tiny GPS and wireless-capable PCs (think mini notebooks) with longer battery life.
The not-so-secret key to Silverthorne’s battery abilities will be a new “deep power down” state, dubbed C6, which allows the CPU to scrimp to save precious battery life at every possible opportunity. Silverthorne will power down even between slight pauses in processor activity, taking roughly 100 “microseconds” to cycle between low and high power states.
“Mainstream mobile parts are typically operating at 10 to 20 times the power level [of Silverthorne]” said Intel Vice President & Director, Corporate Technology Group and Chief Technology Officer, Justin Rattner. Silverthorne’s power levels will be as low as 1 watt, up to 2 watts.
Silverthorne will be Core 2 Duo compatible, with Rattner saying processing power will be on par with the first generation of Cetrino chips. “If you think of that original Pentium M – the Silverthrone devices are roughly in that processor range,” he said.
That’s good, because saying ultra mobile devices are slow under Vista is an understatement.
See video of Intel's Mobile Internet device here.