Following the release of its Silvermont Atom SoCs (system-on-a-chip) earlier this year, Intel has now launched its latest Atom range of multi-core processors codenamed Bay Trail.

This new Atom line will be used to power tablets and other mobile devices from the likes of Asus, Acer, and Toshiba, which will be available by Q4 2013.  

More processing power, less power-hungry

The Bay Trail range of processors is also based upon Intel’s low-power, high-performance Silvermont microarchitecture. According to Intel, the Bay Trail SoCs can power devices that have dual boot capability for both Android and Windows 8.1. The Atom Z3000 processor range boats Intel Burst Technology 2.0 with four cores, four threads and 2 MB of cache.

Intel stated that the Atom Z3000 processor series will deliver more than 10 hours of active battery life or three weeks of standby time, this while doubling the processing power and tripling the graphics performance compared to the previous-generation of Intel Atom processors.

T, D, and M Bay Trail ranges

The first of the Atom Z3000 SoC series is called Bay Trail-T and it will be used within tablets.  

Intel’s Atom Bay Trail M and Bay Trail D series will basically serve as extensions of the company’s Pentium and Celeron processor ranges for entry-level PCs. Bay Trail M SoCs will be available in four flavours, namely Intel Pentium N3510, Celeron N2910, N2810, and N2805, doing duty in lower priced touch-enabled notebooks.

Bay Trail D will be available in three variant namely Intel Pentium J2850, Celeron J1850 and Celeron J1750. According to Intel, these SoCs will be employed within entry-level, PC systems with a fanless or more compact form factor.

To the point

Intel has not been getting much traction with its Atom SoC range within smartphones, with these processors mostly doing duty within lower priced Windows-based tablets. This might change in the near future after the arrival of the more powerful new Bay Trail chips. The company said that it will introduce 64-bit support for tablets in early 2014 as well.

“What we have delivered with our Bay Trail platform is an incredibly powerful SoC that delivers outstanding performance, long battery life, and a great experience for the way people use these devices today. It’s an incredible leap forward,” said Hermann Eul, corporate VP and GM of Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group.

“With Bay Trail as the foundation, our OEM partners are bringing a wide variety of designs at a range of prices to delight consumers, business users and IT managers,” Eul concluded.