Since energy efficiency was the number one priority, Atom used certain principles typical for the earliest generations of Pentium CPUs, so as to achieve the maximum possible performance per watt consumed, but also brought Hyperthreading back, this time implemented in a less aggressive way than on Pentium 4/D, especially because of the fine balance between applications which support multithreading and energy consumption, i.e. battery life.

That same year, Asus presented the new models of its revolutionary line of ultra-portable PCs, the Eee PC, using these very processors, which proved to be a bullseye – the Atoms, unlike the decrepit mobile Celerons on low frequencies, were key to increasing the usability of these computers, while further increases in battery life made possible by these CPUs were highly regarded as well. Still, a lot of time has passed since – a year and a half is quite a lot in the IT industry – and the time has come for all those flaws who have surfaced over time to be rectified.

Transfer to the New Unit

However much Atom itself was fit for the needs it was designed to fulfil, the accompanying chipset was simply not in the “energy efficiency” spirit. The electronics in the 945GSE northbridge and the 82801GBM southbridge, also known as ICH7-M, used up about four times as much power as the CPU itself (2.5 versus almost 10 watts). To make things worse, many motherboard variants containing the Atom CPU used the 945GC type, which used up 22 watts just by itself, which made all CPU efforts to conserve energy almost worthless. Energy consumption aside, the characteristics of the chipset itself were quite obsolete. An integrated GPU under the name of GMA 950 was compatible with DirectX 9 only in theory. A mere four pixel shader pipelines and the absence of hardware vertex shaders and T&L unit made this core fit only for 2D display and video reproduction. Although gaming and demanding 3D applications were not in the description of what this graphics system could do, users bumped into problems even when trying to run old 3D games which used to work flawlessly on hardware far inferior in performance, which was equally a fault of rugged drivers. Anyway, the northbridge housed the memory controller (dual-channel DDR2 at 533 MHz at most) and the graphics core, whereas there’s been a bit of relocation in Pine Trail.

The memory controller and graphics chip were transferred to the CPU socket, which reduced the number of chips to a total of two (most of the tasks done by the ICH7-M southbridge were now transferred to the NM10 Express chipset). Another interesting thing is that the new Atom D510 is now a native dual-core CPU, i.e. both cores are located on the same silicon cradle and are able to communicate directly to each other. The first dual-core Atom comprised two separate chips in the same packaging, and technically behaved as if they were two separate CPUs on a single motherboard, since the cores communicated via the FSB, which connects the CPU to the northbridge. However, the reason behind the design of a native dual-core CPU wasn’t Intel’s desire to increase performance by removing the need for each core to exit to the FSB. Since the memory controller is now common to both cores and located on the same chip as them, the cores themselves had to have a monolith design. Either way, all three CPUs currently at disposal (the single-core N450 and D410 and the dual-core D510) work at 1.66 GHz, use an FSB of 667 MHz and operate with as much as 2 GB of RAM at 667 MHz.