14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone has been going on and on about Intel's Medfield and Clover Trail CPUs for mobile devices, but one should not forget that the corporation also has a stake in the market of home media and NES devices.
It so happens that Intel Corp. is preparing a new platform for those consumer electronics products as well, bearing the name of Evansport.
True to the trend of feature integration, it combines too many features that it can no longer be called just a CPU, even though it does have Atom cores.
The two 1.2 GHz cores are accompanied by a dual-channel memory controller, a decoder, an integrated graphics processor, audio and security circuitry, etc.
Evansport will appear soon, which is the only reason the leak actually has most of the specifications on hand.
Firstly, the two Atom cores are backed by 32 KB instruction and 24 KB data L1, and 512 KB L2 (dedicated cache memory per core).
Secondly, the dual-channel memory controller can handle 2 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM (random access memory).
Third, the IGP is called PowerVR SGX545 3D graphics and is assisted by a multi-format decoder (JPEG images, VC1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, H.264 and AVS video) and an H.264 encoder.
As for the security engine, it can encrypt data in AES, 3DES, SHA, RSA and C2/CSA standards.
Finally, Intel will ship Evansport with an HDMI 1.4a interface (supports 1080p and Blu-ray video), and controllers for USB 3.0 (3 ports), PCI Express 2.0, Smartcard, UART, I2C, SPI and Gigabit Ethernet.
Shipments will begin this quarter (Q4 2012) with support for 32-bit Linux operating systems, and there will be two SKUs, one without the encoder unit. Their TDP will be of 10-15 Watts.
What is left now is to wait and see how many network-attached storage devices and home media players choose Evansport over alternatives.