Intel's Diamnondville to Draw Only 4 Watts of Power

If 10 watts of power were appealing enough for the mobile market, then picture this: Intel will release a new breed of energy-efficient CPUs in the Diamondville family. Ten watts will no longer power the processor alone, but instead a whole computing system.

Intel has been aiming at high-performance computing for quite some time now, but it ultimately figured it out that the future on the market belongs to low-cost, low-performance systems, so it geared up to take over the low-cost chip market. The most recent roadmap from Intel mentions the company's newest ultra-low cost, ultra-low voltage platform codenamed Diamondville.

Diamondville is not only a codename for low-power and low-performance CPUs, but instead it refers to a complete mobile platform. It could not be otherwise, given the fact that the new processors will be directly soldered onto the motherboard. The processors in the Diamondville family are built from the ground up, and will come in both desktop and mobile flavors.

The first Diamondville processors will arrive on the market somewhere in the second half of the year, where the desktop single-core Diamondville-SC 230 processor will kick in. It will be accompanied by its mobile counterpart, the Diamondville-SC: 270. The two processors share similar technical specifications, such as 512 KB of L2 cache and the 1600 MHz default core clock frequency.

The latest information from Intel shows that the first Diamondville CPUs with dual-core architecture will be launched as Celeron 3xx stock keeping units (SKUs). The dual-core parts will not have a mobile version and will arrive in the third quarter of the year.

The chips will take up from 4 to 8 watts of power and will be designed to work with no additional cooling. The products will power ultra-mobile PCs similar to the popular Eee PC from Asustek. The Eee has proven that low-cost notebooks sell extremely well both in the emerging markets and in the European Union or in the United States. The Diamondville architecture will give the UMPC market a boost and will add growth to the low cost PC sector.