Intel has now officially announced the next generation 22nm Intel Silvermont SoC architecture aimed at smartphones and tablets.
The Silvermont will be replacing Saltwell-based CPUs that were a key part of the Medfield, Clovertrail and Clovertrail+ SoCs. The Intel Silvermont promises three times more performance at five times less power, which sounds like quite an impressive feat. This will pull Intel very close, or at least put it in the race with ARM based offerings. The Silvermont is built on a 22nm manufacturing process.

The Silvermont features out of order execution engine, new multi-core and system fabric architecture, new IA instruction extensions and new sercurty and virtualization technologies that will all bring better performance while wider dynamic operating range and enhanced active and idle power management will bring much better power efficiency.

The Silvermont SoC will be a part of the new Bay Trail lineup and while Intel did not shed any light regarding the GPU part of the SoC it has promised double the performance when compared to current Atom processors.

Intel is on a rough road as the first devices based on the Silvermont are expected "sometimes" during this year. In any case, Silvermont looks quite good on paper but we will hold our final judgment until we see an actual device and compare its performance to the competition.







Source: Intel.com.