14 DAY TRIAL // Intel certainly has high hopes for the low-power Atom Z670 processor that the company has specially developed in order to be used in tablets and other low power devices, but recent reports claim that Intel's expectations might fall short of its target as the chip is priced at a much too high $75 US.
This price tag actually makes the Z670 one of the most expensive single core CPU's in Intel's Atom lineup (it ties with the N475 for the title) and means that the chip sales for almost four times as much as the $20 Nvidia Tegra.
When compared to the second generation Tegra SoC, the Atom CPU features the same TDP, as both are rated at 5W, but Intel's solution is the only one of the two that can run the Windows 7 operating system.
Unfortunately for Intel, this doesn't mean that much in the tablet world, where Android has become the OS of choice.
Speaking of Android, the Z670 isn't in such a great position right now as it still lacks support for Gingerbread as well as for Honeycomb, but Intel promises this will come at a later date together with support for the MeeGo v1.2 OS.
Specs wise, the Atom Z670 is clocked at 1.5GHz, has to be paired with the SM35 chipset and packs a single processing core with 512KB of Level 2 cache. However, the chip can process up to two threads simultaneously since it features Intel's Hyper-Threading technology.
On the other hand, the Nvidia Tegra 2 was chosen by Google as the base for the Android 3.0 Honeycomb reference platform and packs dual 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores that are paired together with an Nvidia-developed graphics core.
For now, it's still too early to tell how Intel's chip will fare in the battle against the ARM-based processors that are used in today's tablets, but, considering the price, I don't think that Intel has an easy road in front of it. (via HardwareLuxx)