Previous Intel Atom processors have used Intel GMA graphics based on PowerVR’s technology and tuned by Intel to fit its needs. With Intel’s coming Atom, Cedarview, it looks like it will use a more or less pure out PowerVR chip.
Intel has done well with Sandy Bridge and delivered graphics performance that works well with games and other tasks like hardware acceleration of video, but when power consumption becomes the most essential it hasn’t done as well since Intel Atom have become synoymous with meager performance on the graphics side.
The new Atom is called Cedarview and comes with the chip SGX545 from PowerVR and looks to remedy some of the problems. The performance target is 2x over Pine Trail, which will still be too little for gaming on the platform. The most important is hardware acceleration and support for new outputs.
Cedarview will support DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.0 and decoding of MPEG-2, MPEG-4 V2, VC1, WMV9 and H.264. The new graphics processor will be clocked at 640 MHz with desktops and 400 MHz for mobile chips and will support for two longed for outputs; HDMI 1.3a and DisplayPort 1.1. The new support for decoding H.264 could mean an anticipated support for Flash when playing videos on sites like YouTube.
Other features worth mentioning is that it is still limited to 64-bit memory bus, but it has bumped the support to DDR3 at 1066 MHz, instead of just 800 MHz.
Source: VR-Zone
