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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
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.
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'm from a place that properly uses SI units, untainted by imperial natures. I went to University and picked up an engineering degree. I have never, ever heard of 25 mm square necessarily meaning (25 mm)^2 instead of 25 mm^2. I would always assume the latter, and that's how my peers and professors talked to.
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.
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.