Every other UK web site seems to have some snowy pictures on it, so we thought we'd post one from the New Forest.

All of that snow has melted away in the forest now and rather fittingly a Pine Trail has just appeared...an Intel Atom one that is...

We have been using Intel Atom systems in our MC400 and MC410 digital signage players for the last year or so and have been impressed with the performance, reliability and just how cool they can run. Intel announced the next generation Atom platform back in May 2009 and we've been eagerly awaiting its arrival ever since. Today, an Intel D510MO Mini-ITX board turned up and we can finally start putting the new chipset through its paces.

Pine Trail integrates the graphics and memory controllers, which traditionally sat in a separate chip, into the same chip as the CPU. This reduces component count, which obviously brings down cost, but is also supposed to improve performance and reduce power consumption too and it's the power consumption which is all important in Digital Signage.

Reducing power usage is not just about stopping polar bears melting, it's also about keeping your systems running reliably and saving a bit of money at the same time. Heat kills electronics, especially those with some mechanical parts in them, like hard drives. Yes, you can cool systems with fans, but our 15 years experience of building server appliances for schools and businesses has taught us that fan bearings don't last as long as the manufacturers say they will and however clean your server room is, vents and heatsinks will always clog with dust and sooner or later lead to something failing. The most reliable system is one that doesn't need any fans at all - which is why our MediaCAT products are all passively cooled where possible.

Power costs money too - a rough guide in the UK is that each Watt of power usage costs a pound a year when used 24/7. One of our MC400 players uses around 10W and a typical desktop PC uses somewhere in the region of 60W (more for older machines!), so a MediaCAT player can save you 50 pounds a year compared to a desktop PC based digital signage system. Not a major concern for just one or two machines, but if you have 20+ players, savings can be in the thousands of pounds a year!

Previous Atom platforms were either paired with the 945GC chipset, which is fast and power hungry, or the mobile 945GSE, which is slightly slower, but very frugal. Atom processors are available in quite a few flavours, with several variants for desktop and mobile use, including dual core versions for extra processing power. These dual core Atoms only ever seemed to be paired with the 945GC chipset, so if you wanted more processing power, you had to have a hot chipset too. A single core Atom with the mobile centric GSE chipset would only use 10-12W. A dual core processor only uses a few watts more, but the GC chipset pushes the combination to over 30W! The Nvidia Ion chipset also supports the dual-core processors and is slightly better than the GC, coming it at around 25W, but thats still quite a bit more than a GSE system.

The new Pine Trail D410 and D510 Atom processors are single and dual core respectively, both with integrated memory and graphics controllers, and very respectable power usage. The D510 comes in at a quoted rating of 13W and remember this includes the graphics/memory chipset! Now we can have double the processing power with only a slight power increase over the old single core systems.

The MediaCAT operating system is highly optimised for digital signage and electronic notice boards, so single core Atoms are more than powerful enough to run a video, slide show, text ticker and a dynamic web page all at the same time. However, the digital signage market is ever evolving and we can see the need for more raw processing power for applications such as augmented reality and 3D displays in the near future. Pine Trail has arrived just in time to allow us to bring digital signage to the next level, without impacting reliability, costs, form factors or polar bears.

Next week we'll put the Pine Trail board through it's paces and compare its power usage and performance with a few other single-core and dual-core systems.