Diamondville exposed

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of talk lately about Intel's Diamondville. People are jumping up and down about a new code name, but it's early days yet. There will be a veritable blizzard of them in the near future.

Why? First up, Silverthorne is the CPU part of the Menlow platform and it is teamed up with the Poulsbo chipset. It takes the three chips from McCaslin, Stealey (CPU), Little River (North Bridge) and a mobile ICH, and combines it to two chips, cutting power in half. With us so far?

Intel talks up derivatives of the chip, and unlike ARM, it is not talking about derivatives that licensees make, only ones it makes itself. If you only consider Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Bluetooth and a couple of accelerators, the number of combination platforms quickly escalates into the dozens. What do they all have in common? They are all Menlow++.

The base CPU, Silverthorne, is a small 25mm or so die running from 900MHz to 1.86GHz, has full 64-bit capabilities, HT, VT, SSE1-3and up to a 533FSB. The CPU is dual core, in-order, and ranges from 600mW TDP to 2W, with a few SKUs in between the 900 and 1.86 models.

So, the first model we are talking about is Diamondville, and it is aimed at the OLPC. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it will have Wi-Fi, the Wi-Max one will probably have a completely different name. Get the blizzard part now?

These in-order CPUs are all called LPIA for Low Power Intel Architecture, but you might have heard the Bonnell code name a long time ago. This is one of a long line of parts, the next one is Moorestown, in 2009. This one has a bunch of things integrated, there is a CPU/Graphics/IMC unit and an 'everything else part'. Expect another few dozen more code names with that one.

In the end, Diamondville is a small derivative of Silverthorne. It may make a big splash in the market, but it won't be all that radically different from it's daddy. Then again, now that Intel has laughed MS out of the door in this market space and is playing nice with OLPC, it may be worth watching. Closely. Very closely. µ