Intel to show off Silverthorne this week

We’ve been hearing about the Silverthorne chip for months and this week should mark a formal unveiling of the low-powered x86 processor. It’s widely expected that Intel will show off Silverthorne at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week. In case you’ve missed some of the chip specs, it will require 0.6- to 2-watts of power, based on the clock speed. At the upper end of the power usage spectrum, Intel expects to have the CPU cycle at 2.0 GHz. As a point of comparison, the 1.0 GHz Pentium M ULV that powers my Samsung Q1P UMPC roughly uses two-and-a-half times more power for half of the clock speed. Here’s a nice listing of the current (and past) Intel CPUs that provides more information.One interesting tidibt that I was unaware of: Silverthorne appears to be an “in order” CPU, meaning that the processor executes one instruction at a time, in a serial fashion. Did you catch the recent announcement of VIA’s Isaiah CPU? It supports “out-or-order” execution, which can lead to faster performance, all things being equal. Hmm….