Intel Atom Cedarview CPUs Won't Support DirectX 10 After All

DirectX 10.1 support was one the major features Intel promised to deliver with the introduction of its new Cedarview Atom architecture, but recent reports suggest the chip maker wasn't able to keep up to its word as the Cedar Trail platform is limited at offering just DX 9 graphics.

Intel launched the Atom Cedarview netbook and nettop chips just earlier this week without making to much of a fuss about them.

Compared to their predecessors, these new processors were expected to bring a series of improvements to the graphics core and one of the most important features was the introduction of DirectX 10.1 support.

However, according to CPU-World's findings it seems like DX 10.1 hasn't made its way the new Atom CPUs and that Intel has no plans of introducing support for this API in upcoming versions of its graphics card drivers, as some of us have believed.

For now, the DirectX 9 graphics driver for the new Atom processors is in a beta state, and the final 32- and 64-bit versions are expected to arrive in November and respectively December.

The Cedar Trail platform is comprised of the Cedarview-D processor and the NM10 chipset, which is the same controller logic used by Pine Trail.

These are the first Atom processors to be built using the 32nm fabrication process and feature a unified architecture that packs both the computing cores and the graphics core on the same die.

Speaking of the computing cores, these use the same architecture as their predecessors, but the operating frequencies have been increased in order to allow for better performance.

More important changes were brought on the graphics front, where the CPUs have gained hardware decoding support for MPEG2, VC1, AVC, and H.264 Full HD content as well as for Blu-ray 2.0.

In addition, Intel has also added support for Intel Smart Connect technology, and for the latest Wireless Display features, both of these being scheduled to arrive in Q1 2012.