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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.
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
That's like saying that a Phenom will bury Atom in performance... of course it will, but then you are missing the entire point of what Atom is about. Atom is about devices smaller than notebooks where Isaiah cannot go (look at the TDP's, Atom running full-tilt is in a much lower power envelope than Isaiah). The next generation after the current Menlow platform will even work at the cellphone level, but right now Intel is targeting MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) which predominantly run Linux BTW. The Atom/Menlowe platform could be the single biggest market for consumer-grade Linux for the foreseeable future.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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?
If Atom is cheaper than the AMD's lowest offering, then yes, they should feel threatened. We've reached a point where even the most basic processor has more power than the common person needs. Combine that with the mindless eco-babble that has tainted every aspect of North American life in the last few years, and you've got a market that's perfect for a power-miser medium-performance processor that will be at the heart of numerous little PC-like gadgets.
Via's line doesn't get much traction outside of the tinkerer circles, because they're still tied to clumsy legacy chipsets and the costs are ridiculous, considering their extremely limited performance. If Intel can release a slightly better processor for less money, that can be paired with an inexpensive chipset and tiny power supply, they could take a bite out of the microcontroller segment and ARM's small but tenacious market share.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'm not too sure about that. Software scales to make use of available resources, which can result in the same task requiring more processing power over time. There's a vast difference between using, say, Vista and Word 2007 to do word processing vs. something like Windows 95 and Word 6.0 - even though you're using the two packages for the same purpose.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
The next generation of Atom at 32nm will have the proper power envelope to run your cellphone BTW.
... who'd want to use it.
No it won't.
It won't be small enough, nor will it be integrated enough. Sure, Intel will move the GPU and Northbridge into the CPU, but that's still nowhere near as integrated as the ARM based competition.
Also it seems that people think that ARM will stay where they are now, and just happily let Intel slowly get to their power consumption over the next five years. What utter tosh. ARM have multi-core Cortex cores ready now, and on 65nm they'll make Atom and its successors irrelevant, never mind 45nm. Intel's 32nm may be what they need to get power consumption down, but that's 2011.
Intel may get into some bulky mobile phones in 2011 and 2012, but they won't be ready for slimline phones until 2015. Of course, with 20 billion ARM cores sold by then, and 20 years of extensive ARM experience and software
Not at all. Are you aware of how many embedded Intel chips there are? I am counting the older generation parts, of course. Aren't you also doing so with ARM?
Are you aware of how many embedded ARM chips there are?
Do you know how many mobile phones are sold every year? DSL modems? Cable modems? WiFi routers? MP3 players?
Are you aware that every PC with an Intel chip in it has 1 or more ARM chips in it? Every recent hard disk I've seen has at least 1 (or more) ARM cores driving it. Monitors have them. The interface controller on flash cards sometimes have ARM cores.
That's right - for every Intel CPU sold, they enabled the sale of 1 or more ARM cores because Intel doesn't make a part suitable for some peripheral device. Intel's a minnow and they just don't make the right sort of cores - even with Atom - to beat the existing players.
Being conscious of our environment is a good thing. Throwing around random buzzwords is not.
I'm all for conserving energy, and I abuse my Kill-A-Watt meter on a daily basis. What irritates me, and this also applies to health fads, is the use of pseudo-science in marketing. Gadgets are being branded as "low power" when they were never high power in the first place, and sold at a premium. Other things are remade into low power variants, sold at a premium but consume more power during fabrication than the savings incurred by the user.
Let's face it: it's common sense that using less of a limited resource will result in that resource lasting longer and/or serving more people. The fact that this conservation fad has become a daily brainwash is no accident. Just like the health food fads of the 90's, it is now profitable to market "green" products, thanks to some very lax regulations on advertising. Whether these products actually result in net savings is dubious, but they do result in net profits for the manufacturers.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I dunno. Aside from the current blog buzz, the only thing that will continue to excite folks in the developed world about the EEE, CloudBook, et al are if they add more utility. That utility needs to come as:
all day battery life
light-weight
instant on/off (like a PDA)
full-screen window manager (like a PDA)
de-bloated software
but with a full sized keyboard and display
The point for me is not a low-cost cheapie computer. The point is more utility, usability, portability when moving from the kitchen to the conference room to the park to my couch. No plugging in. It's a laptop but the opposite of a "desktop replacement."
None of this requires the fastest speeds and feeds or the worlds best LCD.
It does require a reset of the software to make it appropriate for a truly portable laptop. It does require lower power CPUs and displays and better hardware for power management and software+OS that cooperates to make that power management really work.