There’s good and bad news to be drawn out of the news that Intel will go with a PowerVR core on Cedar Trail, the next generation of Netbook platform. VR-Zone report that Cedarview (the processing engine in the Cedar Trail platform) will include an SGX545 graphics core and not Intel graphics as had previously been suggested here.

VR-Zone Cedarview to sport PowerVR graphics.

The good news is that it brings the netbook platform in-line with other Atom platforms used for TV, ultra-mobile, embedded and tablet products and simplifies the builds for MeeGo and Android. The bad news is that the drivers for past versions of the SGX core used in Menlow (Z5xx-series CPUs) were never that good. Linux support, in particular, was a big problem.

Intel will, of course, be aware of that and will have to take steps to improve it because if 30 million sales of netbooks have unstable or poorly implemented drivers, it could have a serious impact.

As for the theoretical performance of the SGX545, I can only offer these figures that I dig out of web searches this morning. They aren’t confirmed.

GMA500 (PowerVR SGX535 200Mhz) 13 million triangles per second

GMA600 (PowerVR SGX535 400Mhz) 26 million triangles per second (assumed)

GMAxxx (PowerVR SGX545 400Mhz) 80 million triangles per second (low power version)

GMAxxx (PowerVR SGX545 640Mhz) 128 million triangles per second.

There’s a potential 10x improvement over GMA500 there but these figures are fairly meaningless as memory bus, cpu processing power and other implementation issues (including driver software) will affect the true performance.  The diagram shown on VR_Zone though shows a target of 2x Pinetrail. While that’s probably not going to beat the 3D performance of AMDs Zacate platforms, it’s a welcome boost that will drive non-gaming devices well and, we assume, keep the power requirements down. For non-gamers, the balance of CPU, GPU, media and power drain is likely to be good.

My outstanding question:Will Intel enable ‘shutdown’ idle (sub 200mw system drain) for screen-off scenarios on Cedar Trail like it is trying to do on Oaktrail, Moorestown and Medfield? This is something they may work with Microsoft on for Windows 8

The news has not been officially confirmed by Intel but that might happen at Computex later this month. If not, wait for hands-on at IDF 2011 in September where we expect final launch and product availability to be announced.

Moorestown is late. There’s no way that Intel can spin it otherwise because I’ve asked officials many times and they always promised ‘products’ in 2010. All we’re hearing about is Oaktrail and the reason for that might be because there isn’t an operating system for Moorestown yet. Moblin, MeeGo and Android are all listed as supported operating systems but none of those builds are completely ready for X86 prime-time yet. It looks like Moorestown is sitting in the wings for the time being and that’s very disappointing.

While we wait, let’s remind ourselves of some of the platform characteristics.

Moorestown is  a mobile-focused platform that uses an Intel Z6xx CPU where the memory bus, display controller and graphics (3D and video) are on the main die Lincroft is the codename of the CPU. There’s no BIOS, no ACPI and no real PCI bus on the controller chip (Langwell) and therefore no Windows 7 support. The platform is designed to work with a special power control chip called Brierstown which provides the ‘power island’ support which will be critical in improving battery life and, for the first time, allowing an always-on idle mode that can be used for smartphones. It also integrates tightly with the Intel wireless module called Evans Peak.

Oaktrail is similar (but includes components to allow it to support Windows) as is Tunnel Creek. Tunnel Creek (E6xx CPUs) is intended for embedded designs but contains the same graphics core as Moorestown and Oaktrail. With 2x the 3D performance of the older Menlow platform  and a 20Mbps-capable hardware video decoder and 720p encoder, all based on PowerVR technology, it’s interesting to think about performance in terms of a handheld device.

Have a read at the Intel Embedded site here.

The GMA600 is the GPU that will appear in Moorestown, Oaktrail (Z6xx-series Atom) and Tunnel Creek (E-series Atom) platforms that are feeding in later this year and during 2011. It’s a beefed-up GMA500 (400Mhz instead of 200Mhz) with, in some cases, hardware accelerated video recording and the core design is by Imagination. At their booth at Intel’s IDF last week they were showing off some of the capabilities of the GMA600 and GMA500 that appears in the Menlow platform. We hope that this sort of capability reaches ultra-mobile devices soon and that the AppUp developers can start to take advantage of it because it looks fantastic!

One of the things I expected to find out at the Intel Developer Forum this year were details about Pinetrail and Moorestown graphics. GMA950 on the current netbook platform clearly needs a boost in the video codec department and if Moblin 2 is only going to support Moorestown and Pinetrail along with the current generation of netbooks, it makes sense that they have the same graphics core right? It fits perfectly with Intel’s ‘continuum’ of devices on the Atom platform. Unfortunately the information on the graphics was limited to notes about OpenGL 2.0 ES and a mention of a PowerVR core in a ‘Sodaville’ Atom-based media processor presentation (image right.)

During a session at IDF this week though, I had fairly concrete confirmation from people in-the-know that the graphics on the Moorestown platform would be a GMA500 (PowerVR SGX core) as you’ll find in the Menlow (Poulsbo chipset as seen on the Asus T91, Viliv X70 and other mobile and long battery-life-focused solutions.) I was a little surprised that it’s the GMA500 but have no reason to disbelieve the info I was given.

Dovetailing nicely with that information though is continuing speculation that Pineview, the CPU+GPU on the Pinetrail netbook platform is also going to use the GMA500. The original info comes from a June article by HKEPC but LinuxDevices seem fairly confident that it is in fact a GMA500 core in Pinetrail.

Its looking like we’re going to have a very closely-matched range of platforms come mid-2010 then.

• Pinetrail Netbook platform. Atom 1.66Ghz + GMA500 GPU
• Menlow MID platform. Atom ranging from 800Mhz-2.0Ghz + GMA 500 GPU (with PowerVR SGX core)
• Moorestown Atom CPU (clockrate unknown) + GMA 500 GPU (With PowerVR SGX core)
• Sodaville Atom  CPU + PowerVR SGX core.

Note: In each case the graphics may be clocked at different speeds ranging from 133 400Mhz. On current devices we see a 133Mhz graphics clock.

The exciting thing about this is that everything is aligned well to keep it simple for developers and there’s just one operating system that will sit on top of all these to provide optimised kernel, drivers, SDK and app-store. Moblin. From smartphones to netbooks through set-top boxes, PNDs, PMPs, Web tablets and more. One platform for developers that covers, in the 2010-2012 timeframe, an addressable market of over 400 million units, in just the mobile internet device and smartphone segment. Add a few hundred million on top of that for netbooks!

Intel’s ‘Continuum’ is starting to come together.

Many of you are aware that the graphics performance on the GMA500 GPU included in the Pouslbo chipset, part of the Menlow platform used in most UMPCs, Intel MIDs and even some netbooks like the ASUS T91, is not a great graphics workhorse. 3G graphics performance (from the PowerVR architecture) is extremely poor and under Windows XP, the hardware accelerated video playback capability is left unused by most programs.

Intel have just relased production version 3.0.2.32 (6.14.11.1012) of the GMA500 driver to developers and as you’d expect, many people are hoping it will unleash some hidden potential. I’m one of those people and when I heard the news I immediately grabbed the Viliv X70 and downloaded the drivers.

Yes, there’s some improvement. A measured 5x improvement in DirectDraw 2D graphics performance on the Viliv X70

Old and New GMA500 drivers. Note the D2D scores.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really translate to anything interesting for your daily ultra mobile PC usage as far as I can tell. I’ve done side by side tests with standard apps and YouTube and can’t see any differences. Full-screen HQ is, in most cases, not as smooth as it should be. I couldn’t see any differences with Google Earth either (DirectX mode.)  The release notes list a lot of fixes and I certainly can’t see any down-side to installing the drivers so go ahead, do some testing and let us know what you think.

Intel GMA500 driver download page.

Somehow, somewhere, there seems to be a problem getting quality Linux drivers out for Poulsbo’s GPU. First we hear about the delays with Moblin V2 on MIDs  and now we get this story from an experienced Linux contributor. Adam’s article explains problems with the source code and how difficult it is to get working in a new distribution. Clearly the work on the Poulsbo drivers for Linux is delayed.

Building your own distro is exactly what Moblin is all about. 12 linux distributors have signed up to use Moblin  but if they can’t work with the Poulsbo chipset there’s little hope for any Linux distro on MIDs and Z-series netbooks in the near future. Let’s hope that Intel are working hard behind the scenes and that clean, usable GMA500 drivers will be available soon

AdamW on Linux and more » Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) graphics on Linux: a precise and comprehensive summary as to why you’re screwed.