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Intel Ramps Up 45nm Chip Production, Announces 'Atom' Line
Multiple readers have written to tell us of the latest developments out of Intel. Earlier this week, Intel announced the Atom brand of low cost, low power consumption processors. The CPUs, measuring only 25 square millimeters, are the result of the Silverthorne and Diamondville projects. The announcement has caused this CNet columnist to question whether Intel can "spur innovation in ultrasmall devices the way it has in the PC and server industry." Concurrently, Intel has increased its production of 45nm processors to a rate of roughly 100,000 chips per day. As TG Daily notes, the massive investments Intel has made into chip production will make it difficult for AMD to catch up.
By the looks of things Isaiah will wipe the floor with Atom if intel doesnt bury Via with branding power. Isaiah's out of order execution will offer much better performance than Atom's in-order execution.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
The Atom architecture is intended to give Intel a foothold in handheld devices that have traditionally been the sole domain of very low-power RISC processors. The chip itself is tiny at less than 25mm square, and, according to Santa Clara, has a TDP of 0.6W - 2.5W, as compared to a 35W TDP for a "typical" Core 2 Duo.
Sigh. They do this every year or two - Intel announces a new core that will get them into more handhelds. They're still an order of magnitude short. Typical "very low-power RISC processors" you see in a device such as a mobile phone or MP3/video player are more like 0.01W - 0.25W, or even less. They're way more efficient clock-for-clock (and MIP-for-MIP) than any x86 core Intel has ever churned out.
Unless they have a funny definition of hand-held device we don't normally use, of course.
This isn't a new market, it's a well established one. Intel already has serious competition in this market, as evidenced in the article:
The Atom architecture is intended to give Intel a foothold in handheld devices that have traditionally been the sole domain of very low-power RISC processors.
I'm not sure that anyone really cares about what the instruction set for a handheld device is, since the operating systems for handheld devices has been relatively chip-agnostic.
AccountKiller
Would this article read the same (AMD playing catch-up) if Intel didn't sponsor /. so much?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
AMD is supposed to feel threatened by that?
"Ultrasmall" is fine if you don't need a display and keyboard.
I think the utility for these new processors is reducing power consumption on devices that are the same size we normally expect.
Is anybody really satisfied with ~3 hours of battery life on a laptop? Considering this is the 25th anniversary of the Model 100, which sold 6 million units, has 20 hours battery life, lighter than most laptops today and was easier to use, instant-on, off, people should know we can do better.
-- John.
In the announcement, Intel says the area is 25 square mm,
which is a lot smaller than 25 mm square (25 mm on each side).
A nit, perhaps.
This reminds me of an economics lecture I attended once, which dealt with the topic of government subsidies. In general, the professor was extremely against subsidies, since they pervert free market dynamics and generally leads to lower overall efficiency, higher prices, etc. However, the one situation where he supported them was for industries where the cost of doing business is so high that the world market can only support a monopoly. In that case, he argued that subsidies were vital in that they enable the existence of two entities in a given space, thus creating competition and spurring innovation.
His main example was the commercial aviation industry, where the two big players are Boeing and Airbus. According to him, without large subsidies from the U.S. and E.U., one of those two would "win" and the other would cease to exist, leaving us with a single global manufacturer of commercial airplanes. I wonder if this argument now applies to Intel?
I grabbed an e8400 as soon as they became available (and I'm glad I did because they sold out quickly and are still hard to come by). I have an extremely moderate overclock to 3.5Ghz with a 1.2V Vcore and it doesn't even hit 60C when I'm torturing both cores with prime95. Additionally, the entire platform (x38 chipset, Nvidia 8800GT video card, Intel hi-def audio, gigabit ethernet, etc.) worked out of the box with Kubuntu 7.10, about the only tweak was that I manually upgraded to the newest Nvidia drivers before moving disks from my 5 year old PC. Linux runs great with this machine, right down to using speedstep to downclock the CPU when it is not under load. This is a desktop machine, but the new 45nm chips & motherboards support speedstep here as well.
The performance is also extremely good, but then again I upgraded from an old Northwood P4 that still ran fine but was starting to groan under the load of Firefox + open office.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
There's a lot of companies out there that makes chips. IBM has major chip fabs (for things like the Cell and Power chips). Hitachi does at least some work on in major chips (the Earth Simulator uses Hitachi chips for example). I don't know if they fab them, but they design them at any rate. Then there's TSMC, they don't do any design, they are just a fab for hire. They are the major source of graphics card chips out there.
It isn't that other companies couldn't compete in the desktop market, it is that they don't chose to. While you are right that the barrier for entry in to chip fabbing is extremely high, it isn't something that only a couple players do. If AMD went under and Intel decided to raise prices, you might well see one of those other companies decide to start competing in the desktop market, as it'd be more worth their while.
It also may not matter so much as time goes on. We are getting more abstracted from the ISA on the processor all the time. Assembly coding is becoming increasingly rare for desktop software. Also the tools are making it much easier to go cross platform. For example look at the MS tools for 360/Windows development. It is quite easy to port from the 360 to Windows, despite the fact that the 360 is a PPC chip and Windows is x86. This gets even easier when you use a managed language (like Java or C#) and the runtime environment takes care of everything.
While it isn't going to happen tomorrow or anything, I could very well see in 10 years that there are multiple different architectures for desktop systems. Nobody cares about that because the OS handles all the details, your apps run on any of them. People simply buy on price and performance criteria.
Now that Intel has seen people go bonkers for the Eee and similar devices, I wonder if they will put out a consumer version of the Classmate with Atom inside? A little Atom-powered mini lappie with a 1.8" HD ala the Cloudbook and a decent amount of RAM would own. Another suggestion would be to put an IBM/Lenovo/Toshiba style pointing stick "eraserhead" as the pointing device. The Cloudbook's miniature trackpad on the left and clicking buttons on the right suck ass. And the full-size trackpad on the Eee is wasteful of space which could be freed up with a pointing stick and a set of clicking buttons beneath the keyboard.
Gimme one of those, with a REAL Linux inside (Debian Lenny would be perfect, or Kubuntu) and I'd be sold.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Ooooh. That's a lot of potatoes.
- difficult for AMD to catch up
Do better on the benchmarks and it would be a smaller problem. People believe Intel is a performance winner, so AMD has to provide concrete evidence of equivalent or better performance. Easier said than done, but that's what can bring investment funding and sales.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The advantage of AMD is design. AMD has never bested Intel in fabrication. It looks that the design team of AMD has been dragged by its fabrication capability. To solve this problem, AMD can out source the fabrication to companies like TMSC or Chartered Semiconductor.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Its distinctive, high tech, and suggestive of the character of this CPU.
Intel has been running another clever commercial on TV news programs. A bunch of professionl hold the chip die (smaller than the chip case itself) and mention the remarkable contribution this tiny computer makes in some aspect of their life.
The costs are ridiculous? Yeah, at 1.5 GHz you're getting a slow CPU. Yet for a lot of server uses that's far more than enough, as well as for most of what normal citizens do with their machines if they aren't gamers or video editors. The cost of power isn't "mindless eco-babble," it goes directly to the bottom line, whether corporate or household. On the corporate side there are two routes: consolidate onto virtual machines (which AMD chips handle quite well), or go for power-efficient individual boxes (which VIA chips handle quite well). Sure, Intel plays in both of these spaces. But the price of an AMD-equivalent Intel CPU is roughly double across much of the range; and the power efficiency of the VIA chips (or ARM, for that matter) ... well, is Intel there yet? The reports don't say that it is.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Sounds like the new big market is "ultra-mobile" mini-laptops, from those links to "MID" and "UMPC" in the Wikipedia.
My purchase of an Eee PC got me to do up a presentation for the engineers at work,
"Poor Man's Computer: Cheap Internet Appliances for the Whole World"
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/pmc
on the topic. Short version: as predicted by Dan & Jerry Hutcheson in Scientific American about 1997, the market is turning from "endlessly bigger and faster at the same price point" to "smaller and way cheaper if not as fast". We're taking our "Moore's Law gains" in the form of money rather than than speed, thanks very much.
And this price drop into $300 and $200 laptops (and under in the case of the XO) is colliding with the surge in global population that make $10/day or more in the developing world. Sales in the billions beckon. 100,000 per day? Hah. If they make the right product, they'll have to ramp up to many hundreds of millions per year.
Sounds just like your description. Smaller screen, solid state storage (much less than what you expect, but one can always add a 16GB USB stick). Unfortunately its battery life is nowhere near 12 hours, but I guess it is a feasible goal.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?