Intel has officially announced the release of two underdevelopment chipset, the Silverthorn as Atom, and Menlow as Centrino Atom. Intel Atom measures less than 25 mm², making it Intel’s smallest and lowest power processor yet. Up to 11 Intel Atom processor die — the tiny slivers of silicon packed with 47 million transistors each — would fit in an area the size of an American penny. These new chips will be manufactured on Intel’s industry-leading 45nm process with hi-k metal gate technology. The chips have a thermal design power (TDP) specification in 0.6-2.5 watt range and scale to 1.8GHz speeds depending on customer need. By comparison, today’s mainstream mobile Core 2 Duo processors have a TDP in the 35-watt range.

Both series consist low-power processors designed specifically for mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and a new class of simple and affordable Internet-centric computers arriving later this year.

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