Intel announces 32nm 'Cedar Trail' Atom platform

Seems like Intel has sorted out their graphics driver snag, which caused the delay of Cedar Trail in the first place. The chip giant has officially unveiled the their-generation Atom platform, codenamed Cedar Trail and it will replace the existing ‘Pine Trail’-based CPUs found in current netbooks, nettops and All-in-one PCs. This new series will be based on the 32nm fabrication process, just like Sandy Bridge. This helps drop the power consumption and you have the liberty to bump up the clock speeds. It will still be using the older NM10 chipset, but with added features like Intel Rapid Start Technology for faster system resume times, onboard GPU that now supports 1080p video decoding, support for DisplayPort and HDMI 1.3a and finally DDR3 memory support up to 4GB.

New features

Cedar Trail-based notebooks will start trickling in Q1 of 2012, so you can expect manufacturers to show off their creations there. The first batch will include four CPUs, two from the N2000 range for netbooks and two from the D2000 range for nettops and All-in-one PCs. The only real difference between the two series is the TDP. These CPUs will compete directly with AMD’s Fusion-based APUs like Zacate and Ontario, which by the way already has support for most of the ‘new’ features that Intel brings with Cedar Trail. Also, AMD will be launching their next-gen ‘Trinity’ APUs which will be based on the 32nm fabrication process. So it’ll be interesting to see how Intel keeps up with that. 

The new chips

Honestly, we feel all these new chips may just go by unnoticed as everyone’s attention would be on Intel’s Medfield SoC and how it compares with ARMs new dual-core and quad-core offerings.