Intel’s Atom is getting a makeover. In more ways than one. First, when Intel speaks to customers internally about micro-architectures, Atom is out, Silvermont is in, Intel told CNET on Friday. Second, some upcoming Silvermont silicon will be branded Pentium and Celeron — which is the value end of Intel’s Core-based mainstream chips. The chipmaker’s reasoning is that some variants of Silvermont now offer performance comparable to current mainstream Celeron and Pentium. That’s quite different from the Atom of old, which had a reputation — particularly in Netbooks — for being slow. Higher performance varieties of Silvermont will also ship with PC-like attributes such as PCI and SATA. But here’s where it gets interesting. These chips will debut not just in Windows PCs but Android systems too.
