VR-zone: Intel's cedar trail atom mobile atom pushed back again.

[cbn]

http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-s-cedar-trail-mobile-atom-pushed-back-again/14051.html

Intel's Cedar Trail mobile Atom pushed back, again
Reported by LG Nilsson on Thursday, November 24 2011 7:14 am

It's surprising how much trouble Intel seems to have with its Atom graphics drivers for the mobile Cedar Trail Atom N2600 and N2800 processors, as the company has been forced to push back the launch a second time. If you were hoping for a new Cedar Trail powered netbook for Christmas, we're sorry to disappoint, but it's not going to happen.

As we've already reported, Intel is having some issues with the graphics driver and has dropped both 64-bit support and DirectX 10 support. Even so, the company doesn't seem to have much luck passing Microsoft's WHQL certification and this means that Intel and its partners can't launch products, as they won't have a final Microsoft approved driver.

This means that Intel has now pushed back the launch date to the very end of December with its partners not being allowed to start selling products until mid-January next year. That said, the netbook market isn't what it used to be, but at least the Atom N2600 and N2800 is the best Atom processors so far, at least on paper. Intel may not be able to compete with AMD on performance in this market segment, but at least Intel finally has a platform that will do what most consumers is expecting even an entry level notebook to do.

Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-s...om-pushed-back-again/14051.html#ixzz1efJkch00

Are these still using the Power VR SGX GPUs?

 

[ThatsABigOne]

Not surprised.

 

[Fox5]

Seems like everyone's next gen ultra mobile processors (except for intel's high end ULV chips) are hitting delays.

I think the companies that were smart enough to make 'high end' tablet processors on 40nm (Apple with the A5, nvidia with Tegra 3, and AMD with the Z-01) are going to be looking fairly smart as everyone else's products get pushed back into the summer or later. Nvidia certainly has a chance to repeat the success of the tegra 2, where being first and available mattered far more than performance or power consumption.

 

[Lonyo]

THANK YOU MICROSOFT.

After the crap I had with buying a Z520 netbook and being unable to watch HD videos in Win XP because DXVA caused a BSOD (known problem), it's awesome that Microsoft's refusal to WHQL the drivers is preventing this crap from being released.

 

[wahdangun]

ha
intel and their crappy driver

 

[Idontcare]

THANK YOU MICROSOFT.

You know I had the same thought in mind when I read the OP.

Thank god someone is willing to stand up and draw a line in the sand when it comes to the crap that Intel is willing to shovel out the door sometimes.

Microsoft got screwed by Intel in delaying Vista as well as downgrading the Aero-capable requirements.

Looks like Intel failed to learn anything from that experience and Microsoft said "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me...not gonna let you fool me twice".

Of course it doesn't help Intel that Microsoft got a little bit of butthurt over Intel attempting to get into the phone market by going direct with Nokia and excluding Microsoft. That turned out to be quite the love triangle and as far as I can tell no one benefited from it so far.

 

[Olikan]

lol, they dropped the support for the dx10 and 64 bits, now they failed a 32 bits dx 9 driver

epic fail

 

[dma0991]

For a company like Intel it shouldn't have been a problem with drivers considering that they have the money to actually hire the best software engineers or at least more software developers.

Probably Intel's software department is a group of monkeys with typewriters and paid with a monthly salary of bananas. :hmm:

 

[IntelUser2000]

Many times I hoped they would stick to HD Graphics based for new Atoms since driver development is far better there. It never works to re-do everything. The Atom graphics seems to be back in the GMA X3x00 era in terms of driver development.

 

[IntelUser2000]

(Apple with the A5, nvidia with Tegra 3, and AMD with the Z-01)

The Z-01 isn't really competitive. It's a 6.0W part, and barely any models use it. The successor gets it to 4.5W or something but its coming middle of next year, and its still 40nm.

Probably Intel's software department is a group of monkeys with typewriters and paid with a monthly salary of bananas.

Their "serious development" group does well though, like BIOS and compiler writers. There's something lacking with the rest.

In graphics, the big problem is due to hardware. Pre-Clarkdale GPUs performed horrendously mostly because it lacked hardware. I wonder if few of the teething issues left in Sandy Bridge are due to the hardware too.

 

[formulav8]

Blame it on Intels trash not Microsoft. Good that Microsoft is limitiing how many bugs Intel can cause.

 

[dma0991]

Related :
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.

 

[Fox5]

The Z-01 isn't really competitive. It's a 6.0W part, and barely any models use it. The successor gets it to 4.5W or something but its coming middle of next year, and its still 40nm.



Their "serious development" group does well though, like BIOS and compiler writers. There's something lacking with the rest.

In graphics, the big problem is due to hardware. Pre-Clarkdale GPUs performed horrendously mostly because it lacked hardware. I wonder if few of the teething issues left in Sandy Bridge are due to the hardware too.

So only 1 computer uses the z-01 (msi windpad 110w), but I think it's actually a pretty competitive chip, at least for 10"-12" tablets. At those sizes, your screen is using the majority of the power on the system. The fan rarely ever spins up, the tablet is pretty light weight (although not near ipad levels), but it certainly could be a competitive product. Of course, I'm running Windows 8 on it, and feel that the metro UI is a disaster, windows 7 with extra large icons on by default and 8's on screen keyboard would have been good ideal. Windows 7 had good multi touch support (or the software pre-installed on the tablet did), which windows 8 actually took a step back with. (no two finger right click)