Diamondville: Silverthorne in Disguise

Diamondville is based on a brand new Intel architecture, but it turns out that it's one we've already talked about: Silverthorne. The 2-issue in-order core will make its debut on both Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs, think big-pocket sized Internet computers) as well as low cost PCs in the second half of Q2 of this year (May/June).

One Diamondville SKU will be available under an unknown brand at this point (possibly Celeron), but it will carry the model number 230. The 230 will run at 1.6GHz and feature a 533MHz FSB and 512KB L2 cache, but like the first Silverthornes it will only have a single core with HT (2 logical threads but 1 physical core).

Intel lists the 1.6GHz Diamondville TDP as 4W, a bit higher than what you'll see in MIDs but I'm guessing it'll run at a higher voltage and thus be a higher yielding part that's cheaper to produce, resulting in the higher TDP.

Things get even more interesting in Q3 of this year when Intel introduces the 3xx series Diamondville chips which are dual-core designs. If the dual core Diamondvilles are just two single core designs stuck together we're talking about 4 threads per chip, but it's possible that Intel has an entirely separate dual-core design in the works.

Performance of the single core Diamondville won't be particularly great under Vista, so I'm guessing it'll be best used on Linux platforms. If you're curious about Diamondville's architecture, take a look at my Silverthorne piece from last week.