Intel Atom the basis of future Celeron, Pentium chips

In an interview with PC World, Intel spokesperson Kathy Gill announced that the company’s upcoming revamp of their Intel Atom lineup, codenamed Bay Trail and based on the Silvermont architecture, would be able to scale up to cover new markets and form factors.

Intel’s Atom is a strange little chip. On the one hand, its low power characteristics meant it could fit into a variety of small devices, netbooks being the primary market. Although powerful enough for the work you’d expect a netbook to do, Atom was still very underpowered but it didn’t have a lot of competition.

Intel Silvermont improvements

Silvermont improves a lot of things in the Atom lineup, bringing the ageing 2007-era design up to modern standards thanks to Intel’s lessons learned with Sandy and Ivy Bridge processors and the Atom chips that have been powering smartphones. Bay Trail will change a lot of things for low-power devices but one thing that no-one anticipated was Intel’s plans for the budget desktop market.

In the interview with PC World, Gill said that, “because of the advancements and flexibility of the Silvermont micro-architecture, we can customize the Bay Trail feature sets and develop variants of Bay Trail that will power a new crop of computing products at a variety of price points.” Many took that to mean that Atom simply has uses in other markets like servers but what if its going to the desktop instead?

Its possible that in future Intel can scale up the clock speed and power profile of the Atom and turn on a few features to make a new, more powerful product for the desktop. Intel could use it to power the Celeron and Pentium lines, which are currently based on Ivy Bridge.

If this surprises you, consider that Intel hasn’t made desktop processors for quite some time – LGA 2011 products are from the server market, while LGA1155 Sandy and Ivy Bridge-based processors are scaled up chips from designs originally made for laptops. The last proper desktop processor the company made was the Pentium 4.