Anonymous sources have leaked what look like genuine roadmaps of Intel’s Quark product family on the popular Chinese social network Weibo’ these point out to an acceleration in the rate of development.
Intel has apparently cancelled its Dublin Bay application specific standard processor, which was supposed to be the follow-up to its current Quark X1000 and instead bring in a whole set of new features (coupled with an increase in performance) but losing out on pin-compatibility.
"Liffey Island", which is expected to land sometimes in 2015, will still feature a Pentium-class core with ECC support, a 2W TDP, up to 512KB L2 cache and a flurry of I/O interfaces as well as AMBA compatibility.
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Its follow-up, Seal Beach, is set to be released in 2016 and will see the introduction of SSE2 instructions as well as a 2D/3D graphics controller. The path followed by Quark loosely resembles that of the Atom processor but with a much thinner manufacturing process and a more conservative target market.
One wonders whether Intel’s commitment to deliver these two generations will be enough to counter ARM as well as a resurgent MIPS.
Source: Kitguru
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