14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has recently announced that the company plans to discontinue 17 SoC solutions from CE 3100 product family which are to be replaced by the CE 4100 series processors based on the Atom architecture.
The Intel CE 3100 SoC (system on a chip) series was announced in August 2008 at the Intel Developer Forum under the Canmore code-name.
These chips include an 800MHz or faster Pentium-M processing core, that is paired with 256 KB Level 2 cache, and use a 100MHz or 133MHz front side bus (FSB).
Intel designed these SoC processors for use in set-top boxes, digital TVs, media players and other multimedia devices.
As a result they feature high-definition video and audio capabilities and come with an integrated GMA 500 2D/3D graphics core that is backed by a multi-format video decoder and dual 337MHz DSP cores for audio processing.
In addition, the chips also pack a tri-channel DDR2 memory controller, a security processor with RSA/SHA/AES/3DES hardware acceleration as well as support for a pair of SATA drives and Gigabit Ethernet.
According to CPU-World, the CE 3100 were the only Intel CE chips to be based on the Pentium M architecture as the previous CE 2110 devices utilized the XScale architecture while the current CE 4100 switched to the Atom CPU core.
Compared with their predecessors, the 4100 family processors come clocked at 1.2GHz, can decode up to two 1080p video streams simultaneously and also feature 3D graphics support.
Furthermore, the SoCs also received support for MPEG4 video, sport an integrated NAND flash controller, can work with DDR2 or DDR3 memory and pack 512K of L2 cache.
To notify its customers of the change, Intel has published a Product Change Notification (PCN) that states October 27, 2011 is the last order date for the CE 3100 chips. This will continue to ship until January 27, 2012.