AMD working on Atom rival

Intel, NVIDIA and VIA are all churning out chips for low-power devices and now a leaked slide unveils AMD's plans for the MID and ultraportable notebook market. The AMD BGA CPU features a single-core 64-bit processor with a 1GHz frequency, 256KB L2 cache, 16-lane 800MHz HyperTransport and DDR2-400 support. The BGA has 812 pins and measures 27mm x 27mm.

The TDP of the CPU, Northbridge/integrated memory controller is 8W while the power consumption of Intel's Atom N270 1.6GHz chip + 945GSE IGP chipset is around 6.5W.

Considering that this new chip is to be used in low-power applications, power consumption is a critical talking point. Intel's Atom N270 -- the most popular Atom variant for netbooks -- features a 2.5W TDP at 1.6GHz. However, we can't forget the i945GSE Northbridge which adds another 4W -- more than the Atom processor itself.

AMD’s new processor, however, has an 8W TDP for the processor with its integrated Northbridge/memory controller at 1.0GHz. Although performance figures obviously aren't available at this time, it would be interesting to see how AMD's 1.0GHz processor would do against Intel's in-order 1.6GHz Atom N270.

There are no details on the launch date, so far the product is only a piece of PowerPointware.