AMD preps low-powered Atom killer

While Intel steals the limelight with its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) this week, AMD quietly prepared its own competitor to Intel's Atom. The CPU, likely named the "Sempron BGA," looks set to debut in October on a 3.5-inch SBC (single board computer) from Taiwanese manufacturer iBase.

For several months now, the blogosphere has been alive with reports of an AMD processor, reportedly code-named "Bobcat" and also referred to as the "K8 BGA" or Sempron BGA. The CPU has been rumored to use AMD's Sempron core, clocked down to 1.0GHz or 1.5GHz, and offered in a 27mm x 27mm BGA (ball grid array) package for installation in "nettops" and other low-cost devices. Dissipating about eight Watts, the Sempron BGA will reportedly include an integrated memory controller, 128KB of L1 cache, 256KB of L2 cache, support for 400MHz DDR2 RAM, and an 800MHz HyperTransport link.