Reports about Intel’s launch of Silverthorne at the ISSCC in San Francisco are emerging this evening. From what I can see there are no real surprises. TDP (Max power requirement) is 0.6W for the low-speed part (Stealey is 3.5W) and up to 2W for the high speed, 2Ghz part. All this is pretty irrelevant at the moment as no details have been given about Poulsbo, the chipset/GPU that will accompany every CPU.
Idle figures down to 0.01W are being quoted but again, this is irrelevant when the biggest power drain in these states are the screen, radios and storage.
You’ll see a lot of figures thrown about in the next 48 hours but the real story to focus on is that, on terms of device power drain, the CPU is out of the equation now. It’s all about screen backlighting, storage power, radio power and an efficient board design. One year ago Intel promised the first sub-4W mobile Internet device. It looks like they are on target which means that, once everything is built down to handheld sizes (that includes the battery) we’re still only looking at 3 hours battery life. In a device as big as the Everun though, 6-8 hours could be possible. Add in the design freedom that Silverthorne brings and, while you might not see the fist x86 smartphone with Menlow, you’ll see a wide and exciting range of designs.
Source: ZDNet
