Reader Paul Adams points the Inside Track to The Register’s Hardware site and news of Intel’s forthcoming 45nm chip, codenamed Diamondville. The news comes from Chinese language documentation posted by hardware manufacturer Asus, who plans to use the chip in a revved version of its ultra mobile Eee PC.
The chip is positioned as a low cost PC platform, so it’s not for HPC, but it’s worth at least noting.
Diamondville can operate without a fan – a cost-cutting measure as much as an attempt to get Shelton into small form-factor PCs – and will be soldered to the motherboard. Boards will be based on either Intel’s own 945GC integrated chipset or SiS’ SiS671.
And here’s the clincher that marks Shelton down almost certainly as the desktop Eee PC’s foundation: it’s designed to work with 2-4GB of Flash storage. That said, the chipset will also handle parallel ATA and SATA devices, and other peripherals through six USB ports. Early board pictures show a single DIMM slot and one PCI connector.
More here.