<p><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="content"> <p>Intel announced the Atom processor in 2008. That same year we were introduced to the first two members of the family: Diamondville and Silverthorne. The chips were both called Atom, but they differed in their application. Diamondville was used in desktops, nettops and netbooks, while Silverthorne was almost exclusively for MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).</p> </span></span><span class="content"> <p>&nbsp;<span style="font-size: small;">Atom continues its split personality. Silverthorne begets Moorestown, the next-generation Atom for MIDs and smartphones. Diamondville on the other hand, leads us to Pine Trail: the next-generation Atom for desktops, nettops and netbooks.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">Pine Trail is the platform codename, Pineview is the codename for the new Atom CPU.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">Pineview takes the same 45nm Atom architecture introduced in 2008 and integrates a memory controller, DMI link and GMA 3150 graphics core. </span></p> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="content">Integrating the memory controller is extremely important for Atom as it continues to be an in-order architecture. With minimal options for reordering instructions on the fly, if Atom encounters a load the pipeline stalls while the memory request completes. Despite Atom&rsquo;s sensitivity to memory latency, most synthetic tests showed a minimal improvement in memory latency from Pineview. The real world performance benefit is also less than expected but tangible, but for whatever reason that&rsquo;s not manifested in any synthetic memory latency tests. More on this shortly.</span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3692">Read more...</a><br /> </span></p>