14 DAY TRIAL // On Sunday Intel has added the first Oak Trail Atom SoC (system-on-a-chip) to the company's official price list which means that it shouldn't take long until the first tablets and netbooks based on the new Atom Z670 start arriving in retail.
The Oak Trail platform was designed especially to be used inside slates and other low-power devices and is comprised of the Lincroft CPU and of the Whitney Point chipset.
The Atom Z670 is Intel's first processor in this series to see the light of day and it features a single x86 processing core, clocked at 1.5GHz, 512KB of L2 cache memory as well as a GMA 600 integrated graphics unit that supports OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL 2.1 and OpenVG 1.1, and is clocked at 400MHz.
This is actually a rebranded PowerVR SGX 535 GPU that is built using the 45nm fabrication process and run at a higher than average frequency.
Other features include an on-board 32-bit LPDDR1/DDR2 memory controller and video encode/decode logic adds hardware acceleration for MPEG-2, VC-1 and AVC video streams.
According to CPU-World, the TDP of the chip is rated at a mere 3W and its price was set at $75 when bought in 10,000 quantities. This actually makes it almost four times more expensive than the Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC which is selling for $20.
One of the first Oak Trail based consumer electronics to be announced is the Samsung Sliding PC 7 Series tablet that was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas at the start of the year.
Apart from Intel's chip, the Samsung 10.1-inch tablet also featured 2GB of RAM, an SSD that could go up to 64GB in capacity and is powered by the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system.
Fujitsu and ECS has also announced similar solutions built using the Intel Atom Z670 chip (Fujitsu STYLISTIC Q550 and ECS ElitePad V07-I).