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Published in PC Hardware

Braswell 14nm Atom slips to Q2 15

by on26 August 2014

Trouble in semiconductor paradise

It's not all rosy in the house of Intel. It seems that upcoming Atom out-of-order cores might be giving this semiconductor giant some troubles. The next generation products that will end up branded as Intel Pentium or Intel Celeron processors based on Braswell 14nm silicon have slipped to Q2 2015.

Originally we saw this generation slated for launch in Q1 2015, but obviously Intel cannot meet this time schedule. Currently the fastest mobile entry level tablets, notebooks and All-in-Ones are powered by Pentium N parts and Pentium N3540 remains the fastest with a 2.16GHz base clock and 2.66 Turbo clock. It is a quad-core with four treads and it supports DDR3L 1333 memory, has 2MB cache and graphics that run at 313MHz at the base clock and 896 MHz on Turbo clocks.

This processor has a 7.5W TDP and 4.5W SDP (Scenario Design Power), which is Intel's imaginary standard for power consumption using the processor for everyday task and not benchmarking FurMark and 3Dmark.

Braswell quad core based on Airmont out-of-order architecture looks rather interesting as it supports DDR3L 1600 MHz memory, has full hardware acceleration decoder and encoder, supports up to three 2560x1600 displays and has SATA 3.0 support. It also comes with much faster Intel HD graphics of the 8th generation with 16 Executive Units and DirectX 11 support as well as four integrated USB 3.0 ports and a single USB 2.0, 4-lane PCI Express 2.0 and a choice of Microsoft Windows of the latest generation or Google Chrome or even Android.

Braswell is important as it can offer a lot of performance compared to the competition in a small footprint, including All-in-One systems and can make quite cheap notebooks based on them. Intel plans to make affordable entry-level fanned and fanless designs and 2-in-1s. Some of these systems might be selling as low as $349 and getting up to $499.

The bottom line is that they won't start happening before Q2 2015 or between April and late June of 2015.

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