With the introduction of the E600 Atom platform, Intel is hoping to bring down the overall cost of system integration. Intel announced the Atom Processor E600 series over at the end of their keynote at IDF 2010 in San Francisco. It’s a Moorestown-like SoC designed for embedded applications.The E-series is a 45 nm part, 32nm and 22nm Atom series parts will follow.

E600 brings everything onboard for the platform, including PCI-E for using the E600 in a multitude of different capacities. Either bring your own PCH or build one yourself – Intel already showed examples of Realtek, OKI, and ST Microelectronics on stage. If you’re just building a desktop, Intel has a fairly standard platform controller hub called the EG20T for control like ethernet, SATA and USB. With a simple design and low power consumption, Intel’s hoping for the Atom to be widely used in embedded system that’ll give a much better experience for consumers, graphic wise at least.

Demonstrations at the IDF 2010 included an E600 SoC powering a car navigation system and a variety of dynamic 3D content or video on a separate passenger entertainment display, even running a PowerVR graphics demo.

The Atom E600 is a much simpler design in comparison to those Sandy Bridge, thus Intel has gone the FPGA method for development. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) is a whole bunch of gates on a die that can be programmed in the field. An FPGA can be made to function like pretty much whatever microprocessor design you program it to be. You shave off the initial manufacturing costs as you don’t need to make expensive masks. FPGAs are often used in emulating larger microprocessor designs.

The Atom E600 will come in the first half of 2011 along with an on-package Altera FPGA. This will be called the Stellarton processor, which will be made available to developers of embedded system.

SOURCE via Anandtech