No, I’m not talking about the city of Poulsbo in Washington State. I’m talking about the low power Intel chipset for the Atom platform that is consuming 5W instead of the 25W the 945GC (22W) + ICH7 (3W) couple used in most Atom platforms is consuming.
So, the US15W System Controller Hub finally made its way to a consumer product, the Dell Inspiron Mini 12 netbook (not the Mini 9, this one is still using the i945). Great you may think, but don’t get excited too quickly…with the US15W comes a news graphic chip: the Intel GMA 500.
This chip isn’t an Intel development, it was licensed from PowerVR and there is a huge issue with that: as far as I can tell, it doesn’t use the same Intel graphic drivers you can find in the Linux Kernel. Basically, you can’t use the Inspiron Mini 12 with Linux yet, which is a huge drawback. We’re pretty much fucked until Tungsten Graphics comes up with a new driver, I don’t even know if they were mandated by Intel for this one.
A discussion about this issue in French: http://forum.canardpc.com/showthread.php?t=30544
FWIW, the mini 12 works fine for me with vanilla kubuntu 8.04, using the VESA graphic driver at 1024×768. It’s not bad for a non-native resolution, and a definite improvement over 1024×600 netbooks.
Of course the 1280×800 mode (under Windows) is even nicer. So it will be nice to see a Linux driver for that resolution, and acceleration support won’t hurt either.