According to CNET, Intel’s Diamondville mobile processors, due out later this year, will not be dual-core designs.:
Intel’s upcoming low-cost Diamondville notebook processor will break from Intel’s multicore strategy of the last few years and be primarily a single-core processor.
In this respect Diamondville is not that different from Celeron, a long-standing design (introduced in 1998) that has been exclusively single-core until very recently. The reason for the single-core strategy is simple: With Diamondville, Intel has a “fanatical focus” on low power and low cost, according to Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research. A single core means fewer transistors and lower power consumption.
Diamondville is not Celeron, however. “It’s a clean sheet of paper design,” McCarron said. It is a tiny 45-nanometer processor that employs a simpler design (called an “in-order pipeline”) than standard Intel processors, as spelled out in an ISSCC presentation earlier this month.
The Diamondville mobile CPUs will be used in devices like the Asus Eee PC and other “netbooks” (as Intel refers to them) and performance should be on par with Intel’s previous Pentium M offerings. Diamondville is derived from Intel’s Silverthorne platform.