Intel Atom, Celeron, Pentium lineup detailed

Intel’s Atom family has not had a major re-work since its reveal in 2008, and its been a very long time since Intel did anything substantial with the lineup. Even the latest architecture, Clover Trail, is no faster than most Pentium 4 processors and loses out to AMD’s Bobcat competitor in the low-power CPU market. Things are set to change as Intel has been very, very busy behind the scenes for Bay Trail.

Bay Trail is the company’s first Atom architecture that covers the mobile, tablet, cellphone and desktop market and it’s going to kick off some very heated competition for Intel’s biggest threat – ARM. Bay Trail addresses the tablet and mobile phone markets specifically, but can scale up in clock speed and core count to meet other needs.

The Bay Trail family is split into three distinct lineups – I, M and D for the integrated, mobile and desktop markets respectively. The I-processors will find themselves in Android devices and some tablets (likely of the 8-inch variety), while the M-models will be in larger tablets and laptops. The D-processors will be for the desktop and All-In-One market.

Intel Bay Trail	Core count	Thread count	Clock speed	GPU clock speed	TDP
Atom E3810-I	1	2	1.46GHz	400MHz	5W
Atom E3821-I	2	2	1.33GHz	533MHz	6W
Atom E3822-I	2	2	1.46GHz	667MHz	7W
Atom E3823-I	2	2	1.75GHz	792MHz	8W
Atom E3840-I	4	4	1.91GHz	792MHz	10W
Celeron J1750 -D	2	2	2.41GHz	792MHz	10W
Celeron J1850-D	4	4	2.0GHz	792MHz	10W
Celeron N2805-M	2	2	1.46GHz	667MHz	4.5W
Celeron N2810-M	2	2	2.0GHz	756MHz	7.5W
Celeron N2910-M	4	4	1.6GHz	756MHz	7.5W
Pentium N3510-M	4	4	2.0GHz	750MHz	7.5W
Pentium J2850-D	4	4	2.41GHz	792MHz	10W

That’s quite a lineup. Pay close attention to the core and thread counts here. The E3810 is capable of addressing two threads at once, which means that Intel has the ability to turn on Hyper-threading on any of these designs. Its very likely that when programs across the board take advantage of extra threads/cores that they’ll release a bunch of slightly lower-clocked and aggressively binned Bay Trail chips with hyper-threading turned on.

It looks like adding on a core to Bay Trail requires a drop of 100MHz and adds on another 1W. It’s impressive that Intel is able to get that kind of efficiency from their design and this is also down to aggressive speed profiles for these processors. Bay Trail, just like Haswell, will be able to switch from active to idle modes much faster and with greater efficiency.

Intel Bay Trail design vision

The quad-core variants are aimed directly at AMD’s Temash and Kabini processors, offering the same thread count for a minimal to moderate increase in TDP. Unlike previous Atom processors, Bay Trail is a complete system-on-chip, but still doesn’t include the VRM on-die like Haswell does. Thus the TDP covers the processors, GPU, chipset and memory controller, along with any other extra logic.

These chips won’t be gaming-capable in the near future, but they will be a great step up from the current crop of terrible Atom processors. Fitting in a Pentium N3510 into a mini-server for hosting your media looks like a strong possibility for many enthusiasts and the low TDP also means that systems will be quieter and produce much less heat.

Bay Trail will start debuting in devices launching in Q1 2014, so we’re still a long way from being able to buy devices with these processors. In the meantime, AMD has a six month-long gap in which they can plug Temash and Kabini processors to their hardware partners. Once Bay Trail hits the market, they won’t have much of a chance to make an impression.