Saturday, November 26, 2011

Is the Atom N2100 Intel's single core off-roadmap Cedar Trail-M?

Details of yet another unannounced Atom N2x00 series processor have made an appearance online courtesy of various online retailers and Samsung, who will be fitting the new CPU in some of its upcoming netbooks. Currently no detailed specs are known, but according to information VR-Zone has seen, Intel is working on an off-roadmap single core Atom processors currently only known as the Cedar Trail-M which we have a feeling will be known as the Atom N2100

It's not the first time Intel has created an off-roadmap CPU, the Atom N280 was the first such Atom processor to our knowledge and the company has a habit of creating various SKUs that it didn't originally plan on due to high demand from its partners. In this case we're looking at a cost sensitive option, as odd as it might seem with Intel already having reduced the pricing of the Cedarview and Cedar Trail processor by a pretty fair amount compared to the previous generation of Atom processors.


As this is a single core CPU we'd expect half the cache, i.e. 512KB compared to the dual core models. Apart from that we're not sure about any specifics, but if history is anything to go by, we'd expect the single core model to have higher clock speeds than the dual core models or it'll be at least as fast as the N2800 at 1.86GHz. What we do know is that Samsung is planning an upgrade of its N102S netbook with the CPU set to replace the Atom N435 currently found in the N102S which is a fairly unimpressive 1.33GHz model. The potential here is that the Atom N2100 will actually be a slower clocked part, but we don't really see a reason for this, but it really comes down to how Intel is trying to sell these chips. UK pricing for the Samsung N102S with the N2100, 1GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive is £240 (S$489) including VAT, not exactly super cheap for what is a rehashed model.

In related news, Samsung is apparently getting ready to dump its range of netbooks after Q1 next year and focus on ultraportable notebooks instead with screen sizes between 11.6 and 12-inches. This would also help explain why Samsung is just rehashing old netbook models with new hardware in the case of the N102S.

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