Intel’s Upcoming Pine Trail-D Nettop Platform Detailed
Nettop is a new-style and easy-to-use device for surfing on the internet. It offers various functions such as learning, entertainment, picture and videos.
As the greatest supporter of Nettop, Intel has now unveiled the plans on its next-generation Nettop platform. This new platform is named as Pine Trail-D and expected to be out in the second half of this year.
Pine Trail-D platform has inherited some Intel’s conceptions on desktop platform, and employed new CPU + PCH structure, instead of previous CPU + GMCH + IOH. This new structure will also be found on Intel’s Ibex Peak PC platform.
The codename of chips on Pine Trail-D platform is Pineview-D and Tigerpoint-D.
Based on Lincroft chip, Pineview processor will integrate GFX and IMC units, that means it will add the memory controller and graphics engine to CPU, so as to abandon the northbridge thoroughly. The structure of Pineview is almost the same as Havendale, except that Pineview features Display units, while the display output function is completed by PCH (i.e.Ibex Peak) on Havendale.
Compared with last-generation Atom processor, Pineview has higher frequency (at least 1.6GHz). Pineview is still based on 45nm manufacturing process. Even GMCH is added, the die area of Pineview still keeps at 484mm^2. Pineview supports DDR2-800, compared with DDR2-667 on last-generation platform.
Equal to the function of previous IOH chip (southbridge), Tigerpoint features 130nm FCBGA with die area of only 289mm^2 (17*17mm) and power consumption of 2W. On the last Nettop platform, the die area was 961mm^2. Featureing 8 USB2.0 ports, 4 PCIe x1 lane and 2 PCI ports, Tigerpoint communicates with Pineview via DMI bus.
The greatest advantage of Pine Trail-D platform is lower power consumption and smaller die area. The total area of two chips is 773mm^2 (484 + 289mm^2), while that of the three chips on previous platform is 2601mm^2 (484 + 1156 + 961mm^2). That is to say, the die area of new platform is only 30% of the old one. For the size-concious Nettop and Netbook, this is a quite obvious improvement.
Besides, Pine Trail-D can offer much lower power consumption. The TDP of new platform is 14W (single-core CPU + Tigerpoint) or 17W (dual-core CPU + Tigerpoint), dropping from 29W/33W on previous platform by 50%.
According to what we’re learned, the engineering sample of dual-core Pineview-D platform will be hopefully completed at the end of Q1, and that of single-core Pineview-D in Q3. But the final products won’t be available until Q4, or even later.
January 23rd, 2009 at 5:31 am
So, to resume it, we’d get a bit more power from the cpu, which is based on the new Nehalem series if I’m not mistaken, while considerably reducing footprint and power consuming, thus enabling smaller devices with longer battery life.
I’m liking this already, although I don’t think we’ll see this before Christmas…
February 4th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
So, to resume it, this kills ion, that is whole point.
February 17th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
In response to Sikahr:
To summarize this does something very different to Ion. Ion has considerably higher power consumption and much improved graphics capabilities. I suspect that Intel will offer a DirectX 10 GPU with HD processing soon enough, but from the above presentation, that is not the market Tigerpoint is aimed at.
It seems to be aimed at business and industrial users rather than the media player sector.
February 17th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
A bit of further research reveals that Intels Ion competitor is based on the Atom with a GN40 chipset, which will be released in parallel with the Tigerpoint chipset. There is no indication whether GN40 will ‘kill’ Ion or not.
March 17th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
As Tim says, this is next-gen board, based on ATOM processor, NOT Nehalem.
Potential uses: PVR set-top box, NAS, medical field, micro-desktop, integrated LCD/PC’s. (low power/small footprint)
Just Think: 17 Watts for dual core!
May 12th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
This is a great idea, as long as in the long term it works and will not break down because of heat issue. I’m excited to get one! However, with technology running at a blistering pace with new products, I don’t understand why they aren’t going with current RAM and Flash memory. If we had a all in one small low cost platform, every tech head would get one and we could actually get ahead again in the computing industry. Either way, I’ll buy one when they become available!~
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