Starting with Silvermont, Intel started serious investments into their Atom lineup. Historically, the Atom lineup lagged behind the mainstream Core series by a large margin. Due to the lack of investment, Intel missed the mobile train due to a lack of competitive performance. Even AMD was able to secure a stronger lead in that segment. As a sign of their continued investment, Intel is continuing to add updates to their Atom lineup with Goldmont Plus and Gemini Lake.
With Silvermont, Intel changed to a new CPU architecture for Atom. At the same time, Intel decided to continue with a Tick Tock style strategy. Due to the increased investment, Atom now gets consistent architectural updates and moves onto the new process nodes much more quickly. As a result, top end Atom processors are competitive against low-end Core series processors.
Intel Goldmont Plus CPU 33% wider than Goldmont
For Goldmont Plus, Intel is updating the CPU side of things again. Silvermont brought in out of order execution, while Goldmont increased issue size to 3. Interestingly enough, Goldmont Plus, despite being a simple optimization node, is also increasing the issue size again, this time to 4. The GPU side of things is also updated with 10bit hardware video decoding, especially for VP9. This is important for low-power chips that much struggle to decode the newer video codecs with the CPU.
Due to these consistent updates, Intel has grown Atom from a slow netbook processor into a respectable budget laptop SoC. From the looks of it, Intel isn’t that afraid of cannibalizing low-end Core series sales just yet. The CPU and GPU portions are now comparable to early Core series designs in terms of performance. It will be interesting to see where Intel takes Atom going forward.
