While most tech fans are familiar with Haswell, Intel upcoming early 2013 22 nm successor to the Sandy Bridge architecture, Intel's plans for Atom in 2013 were a bit hazier, although most assumed it had something to do with "22 nm" and "3D transistor".
Now, thanks to a slide deck published by Advantech and a set of open source graphics drivers published by Intel and analyzed by Phoronix, there's now two sources of confirmation that Intel's 22 nm Atom offering will be named Valley View (or VWV, for short).
VWV is part of a platform named Balboa Pier, which the slides indicate is a direct successor to CedarView, one of Intel's current mobile platforms. The chip will apparently ditch the third party PowerVR graphics from Imagination Technologies and instead use Intel's own in-house integrated GPU, found in Ivy Bridge. The Ivy Bridge GPU is estimated to be 20 to 50 percent faster than the GPU in Sandy Bridge, which in turn is more powerful than the old PowerVR chip.
In other words, this will be a big bump graphics-wise -- a clear effort to keep up with AMD graphics-centric approach to systems-on-a-chip. Overall graphics perfromance is expected to see a 4x bump. Intel engineer Jesse Barnes explains to a public mailing list (whoops!), "ValleyView is a CedarView-like chip but with an Ivybridge graphics core."
The analysis of the graphics driver indicated that VWV will feature a Turbo Mode, although the implementation will differ from its 22 nm brothers, Haswell and Ivy Bridge.
A second slide indicates that VWV atoms will support up to four cores, 8 GB of DDR3 memory, and USB 3.0.
