Every year it seems like Intel has some new idea that’s going to help push them into the mainstream where mobile processing is concerned. This year during Mobile World Congress 2015, they sure do have a new set of processors to announce, and this year the Atom line gets a little closer to its Core i3 and Core i5 cousins than ever before. This year, Intel has rebranded their Atom line with a naming scheme similar to their Core series of desktop processors. This sees the introduction of the Atom x3, the x5 and x7. Let’s take a look at what’s new this year, shall we?
The x3 is the lower-end of the scale here, and these are a line of older, 28nm processors that Intel is essentially rebranding from other lines, and they won’t be built by Intel themselves. They are however, introducing the new x3-C3440 which features an LTE modem this time around. The x5 and x7 however, are all quad-core Cherry Trail 14nm processors that are 64-bit as well. More information on these chips can be found down below in the gallery, but these are the chips that the majority of devices will be shipping with later this year.
The higher-end trio of chips here, the x5-8300, Atom x5-8500, and Atom x7-8700, are basically Bay Trail chips produced using a 14-nanometer process, thus gaining the name Cherry Trail. These chips will be shipping with Broadwell-class GPUs, and on the face of things this is not the revolutionary change that came with the 14nm chips from Samsung. Instead, this rebranding of the Atom line is little more than a logical evolution of Intel’s budget-minded processors, and there’s little to write home about here. Having said that, these new processors, specifically the x7-8700 could offer some serious performance to devices that undercut others from the likes of Samsung, HTC and Motorola. Only time will tell how effective these chips are in practice, and hopefully we’ll see devices ship with these later this year.
