The Future of Netbooks: Bay Trail Specs Leaked

Bay Trail is on the move again, barreling right along toward its holiday 2013 launch. Specifications for the next generation of netbook processors have been leaked alongside those for desktop and industrial Atoms, Celerons, and Pentiums, and the numbers look very promising. (Oh, you haven't heard yet? Intel's Silvermont microarchitecture is fast enough to be used in some Celeron and Pentium processors. Woof.)

An interesting thing to notice is the absence of the Atom name in the leaked Bay Trail-M model names. Perhaps Intel wanted to improve the public image of their new mobile chips by avoiding the Atom moniker, which, as you all know, has a bad reputation for being a slow, worthless piece of silicon. It's a smart move, as the names will not only avoid the bad Atom PR, but will be reflective of the architecture's massively improved performance. Basically, Silvermont is all of the improvements the Atom line should've had over its lifespan rolled up into one release, especially in the graphics department. With the slowest of the bunch, the Celeron N2805, Doom 3 will be not only playable on Ultra, but fluid on High settings. That's a huge leap over today's Cedar Trail GPU's (believe me, you wouldn't want to play Doom 3 on them unless you have an unusual tolerance for low framerates), and from the look of things, it will only get better from here.