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Intel Introduces Atom Chips For New Devices
angry tapir writes "Not only has Intel recruited another company to produce Atom CPUs, as covered earlier on Slashdot, the chipmaker also unveiled four Atom chips that will go into devices such as entertainment systems for cars, videoconferencing devices, robots and interactive kiosks. The Z500-series Atom processors are integrated chips the size of a penny that draw little power and do not require fans to operate. The chips draw 2.5 watts of power or less and run at speeds of between 1.10GHz and 1.6GHz. The chips offer integrated 2D and 3D graphics and will be manufactured using Intel's existing 45-nanometer process."
I remember going to an Intel job fair back in late 2005. During the fair, Intel told people that we are no longer in a day and age where everyone wants the fastest processor possible; for most computing tasks, the processors we have are fast enough and people are more interested in something that is inexpensive and lightweight.
Indeed, the Intel atom is a good deal faster than the original Cray.
I feel Windows XP is Microsoft's last release where they made improvements to the operating system that significantly affected the end-user's experience; it was a version of Windows with real memory protection. People's opposition to Microsoft basically shoving Vista down people's throat (however, one can easily buy XP by doing an appropriate shopping.google.com search) is well-justified. Vista doesn't really offer anything that XP doesn't have. [1]
I don't think the ARM processor is going to be real competition. Right now, a netbook can be had for as little as $200 (I have seen Dell have their low-end Linux Mini 9 on sale for $200 twice in the last month); the main expense with a netbook is the case, the screen, and the keyboard; the processor is not a significant expense. Nor is Windows XP, which Microsoft is making available for $40-$50 to netbook OEMs (and is forced to continually make available because of competition from Linux)
- Sam
[1] ClearType support for XP is a free download from Microsoft, along with the Vista fonts. Anyway, I don't like ClearType myself; I think Verdana is the perfect screen font and my eyes are trained to look at Verdana without anti-aliasing on the screeen.
Still 10 billion shipments behind ARM.
And 3 orders of magnitude short of ARM's power consumption.
We are just now remembering that there are a multitude of applications where watts matter.
It's nice that Intel wants to help in this field also.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There will be need for high clock speeds in some applications, while there will be a need for low power consumption in other applications. There will always be a competition in both those areas. But at present it seems that there is more requirement for power efficient processors because of rise in cell phones and hand held devices like internet tablets and PSPs and so on. The demand for high speed is in fields that are computationally intensive and oftentimes memory intensive.
Face your daemons!
Back when they were producing XScale/StrongARM, they had a decent instruction set (and lower power usage).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Super custom robotics, probably not. Ditto size, weight, and power constrained systems. If, though, your industrial robot is already plugging into 3 phase to power its mechanical aspects, a few extra watts doesn't much matter, and being able to have that machine vision binary you licenced Just Work would be handy...
So called "Industrial single board computers" running x86s have been around since the days when x=3(probably since the days when x=80; but I don't know), so there are clearly applications for them, including industrial automation that would be classified as "robotics.
I'm guessing, though, that the next Mars rover, or hypothetical Moon-dozer will not be running Atom.
Via's Epia boards (mini-itx, nano-itx, pico-itx, ...) probably do all of what you want, as well as coming in a range of sizes from small to crazy tiny, but you'll have to sort out an OS and software yourself. Being x86 they can of course run Linux and Windows.
I think the rise of the cheap ARM linux netbook is something that scares both Intel and Microsoft. As consumers we will be the winners of the resulting battles. Personally, I can't wait for a linx netbook with a ARM length battery life. Just don't see what the Wintel world could offer me that could possibly compete. Maybe MS could try WinCE on ARM, but that won't have the world of software ARM linux has. If all the software is portable you can go for what ever processor architecture best for the job.
I too would like to see the CISC instruction sets of our desktop PC's replaced with a simpler RISC architecture. At the same time though I am beginning to realize that the CISC/RISC question is one of aesthetics. Nobody has ever really proven that it makes any difference, and the long standing success of the x86 architecture (not even Intel was able to kill it [...Itanium...]) suggest maybe it really doesn't matter.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
"It will be interesting to see how useful of a NAS I can make that into."
The downside of the Atom motherboard for NAS is only two SATA ports. Mine is working fine as a combined SDTV MythTV box and 24/7 web/file server, but I think that eventually I'm going to have to replace it with a low-power AMD motherboard and CPU so I can add more hard drives and RAID them.