Stefan Mileschin

Intel teased a dual-core Clover Trail+ earlier this year at CES 2013, and now it's revealed the rest of the story on the new Atom-based mobile processors at MWC 2013 in Barcelona. While based on the same 32nm architecture of the previous Medfield generation, the new Z2580, Z2560 and Z2520 chips will pack dual 2.0GHz, 1.6GHz and 1.2Ghz CPU cores, respectively, along with two PowerVR SGX 544 GPU cores. That should make the new chip a lot more competitive than the previous generation, performance-wise, though battery life may suffer next to 28nm chips from the likes of Qualcomm. Still, Intel says that the new chips will burn less juice at idle than Medfield, meaning cell life could vary widely depending on usage.

On the radio side, Intel's at last bringing support for 42Mbps DC-HSPA+ along with 11.5 Mbps HSUPA cat 7 with its XMM 6360 silicon, but there'll still be no multimode (on-chip) LTE support for now. However, it also launched its new XMM 7160 radio as a separate chip, supporting 15 LTE bands along with HSPA+ and saying that it'll appear on its upcoming 22nm SoC chips -- which the company said were on track to arrive by the end of the year. Finally, Intel flaunted a new Clover Trail+ reference design, featuring a Z2580 CPU, 2GB of RAM, a max 256GB(!) of NAND, WUXGA support (1,920 x 1,200) and a rear 16-megapixel camera. Hopefully, there'll be a large battery to go along with all that -- check the PR after the break for more.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/i...om-processors/