What took so long?
While this technology has been around for a while, we're only recently seeing OEMs make lofty claims on the back of using it. These include MSI with its Wind U115 hybrid and Nokia with its Booklet. We asked King-Smith why there had initially been so little noise about this important piece of technology, in contrast to other Atom graphics boosters like NVIDIA's ION.
"The Atom is the first generation using our technology, which is integrated into the chipset." said King-Smith. "Intel has spoken about its ongoing integration path and we're heavily involved with that, but we'll say more about then when Intel are ready for us to.
"This is why solutions such as ION for us have a very short shelf life. If you have a separate chip you have extra cost from additional packages, you need extra power because you need to communicate between the chips and that's even before you start talking about performance.
We suggested that this extra power might be considered worth it for the graphics benefits. "The graphics performance is already very powerful in the Atom Z series," said King-Smith.
"Also, the thing to remember if things are described as ‘HD', is that they're often referring to its video capabilities rather than its graphics capabilities. The Atom is very good at HD video. People tend to group the two because historically chipsets have often lumped the two functions together, but they're quite different beasts in terms of how you do the computing.
"The Z series is a bit of a premium product because it's much lower-powered and much more advanced, but it's the start of where Intel is headed - the first generation that shows what it's capable of. It's showing that it can bring the power consumption of the CPU down quite a lot.
"The next one coming through - Moorestown - takes you to the next level in terms of what they can with standby power, and the GPU's coming onto the chip. So they've got a series of generations coming through and the general feeling is that, probably within two years, they will intercept equivalent ARM processors in terms of power consumption for the function that needs to be done.
The image below was taken in the Imagination demonstration suite. It shows Power VR graphics being used to run a game. It should be noted, however, that the release notes for a recent GMA 500 driver update imply its HD performance has yet to be perfected.
