Intel's Atom Chips Will Become More Powerful than AMD Phenom II CPUs

Intel recently held a meeting with select members of the UK press to discuss the company's plans regarding processor design, and one of the most interesting topics that were debated included the performance expectations of the upcoming Atom chips, which should become faster than the current AMD Phenom II CPUs in about four years’ time.

This assumption is based on an Atom performance slide presented during the meeting, which showed the SPECint2000 gains the Santa Clara chip giant expects to see from future Atom designs.

According to IT Portal, the baseline for the chart appears to be the 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 CPU, which is believed to deliver about 7,700 MIPS in the benchmark used by Intel.

By using just some basic mathematics (if we assume that the benchmark scales linearly) one would find out that Intel's 2015 Airmont Atom processors should top out at about 77,000 MIPS in the SPECint2000 test.

This result could make it slightly faster than a six-core Phenom X6 1100T processor, AMD's fastest CPU to date.

Of course, all these claims have to be taken with a huge grain of salt as they are based on a benchmark that was retired from use about four years ago.

Outside of the performance claims, Intel also confirmed during the meeting that its Atom processor family will move towards a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design, which should help increase the energy efficiency of these CPUs.

The next-generation Atom processors are expected to arrive in the forth quarter of this year and these will be built using the 32nm fabrication node, while the first 22nm Tri-Gate Atom chips, code named Silvermont, will see the light of day in 2013. 

Starting with the 22nm process, Intel will also change the power envelope of Atom notebook designs, from 40W, to a 15W power target.