Intel unveils Silvermont microarchitecture in new mobile push

The Silicon Valley giant said its new, low-power, high-performance Silvermont chip design could be used in segments ranging from smartphones to the data center.

"Silvermont will be the foundation for a range of innovative products beginning to come to market later this year," Intel said in a statement.

Intel is the world's biggest maker of chips for personal computers, but is struggling to make inroads in the surging marker for small, energy-sipping processors for smartphones and tablets.

"Silvermont is a leap forward and an entirely new technology foundation for the future that will address a broad range of products and market segments," said Dadi Perlmutter, Intel executive vice president and chief product officer.

Intel said the new microarchitecture "will enable a significant difference in performance and responsiveness for the compute devices built around these products."

The move by Intel overhauls its line of "Atom" processors which have made little headway in tablets and smartphones.

It said the Silvermont architecture delivers three times better peak performance or the same performance at one-fifth the power consumption of current-generation Atom processors.

Intel last week named Brian Krzanich chief executive replacing the retiring Paul Otellini.