Intel has announced a new range of processors under the Atom and Centrino Atom brands that are use the Core 2 instruction set. The cores will be fabricated on a 45nm process and have a tiny area of 25 square millimetres.

A typical laptop processor has a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 35 watts. By contrast Atom will have a TDP of 0.6 - 2.5W and clock speeds up to 1.8GHz.

That's the official word from Intel but unofficially we hear that there will be a single core 1.87GHz model with 7.5W TDP in Q2 2008 and then in Q3 we'll see dual core Atoms at 1.87GHz with a TDP of 12W.

Atom Centrino will be aimed at the laptop and UMPC market but we're dead keen to see multicore Atom for the desktop, as it sounds like the ideal processor to power a Media Centre PC.

Tags: intel corporation thermal design power intel multi-core processor intel core 2 sandy bridge advanced micro devices central processing unit