Intel Ships New Atom Processors To PC Makers

randomErr writes "Intel began shipping the new mobile Atom, formerly codenamed 'Cedar Trail', processors to manufacturers. As with most new chips it has more features and longer battery life. Intel said today 'Computing systems using new Atom processors will debut in early 2012 through leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba.'"

Comments

Cedar Trails?

[Nyder]

http://www.cedartrailsnudistretreat.com/

Sweet.

Oh, Cedar Trail. my bad.

Re:Cedar Trails?

[Dingb]

http://i.imgur.com/SrFE0.gif

ARM

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is really afraid of ARM: they can't compete on energy efficiency and virtual machines makes their instructions unncecessary.

Re:ARM

[hairyfeet]

The problem with ARM MR AC is the same problem that has left Linux in last place, which is this: There is ALWAYS something, some program which there is simply no equivalent that is a must have. With businesses its all those one off and small company apps, everything from inventory to medical billing, and of course Quickbooks is god for a reason, its so easy it lets a single QB girl (and its ALWAYS a girl, i swear you'd think they had a union or something) run an entire SMB, everything from payroll to taxes, with just a single PC. On the home side there is games, the app that came with their printers, the lack of drivers for said printers and other gear, its ALWAYS something. That's why MSFT hasn't had to change its $100 price tag in 30 damned years, because they know folks ain't going nowhere.

I'd say what Intel needs to be worrying about is AMD in the consumer and mainstream market because lets face it, the "Must win teh benches!" types are an itty bitty portion of the market and for the vast majority PCs have gone past good enough and into insanely overpowered by now. Hell my 71 year old dad has a fricking quad! Does he need a quad? Oh hell no but AMD quads were so cheap that there wasn't any point going dual.

Which brings us to TFA and where Intel royally fucked up, and that was cutting off Nvidia to the point Nvidia bailed from the chipset market. For those that don't know Nvidia is now out of the chipset biz, all they are selling is old designs for as long as somebody will pay for them. that means no ION 3, no new features, hell most Nvidia boards won't even support NCQ which means your losing about 30% performance on an HDD. What Intel needs to worry about with Atom isn't ARM but those nice and cheap AMD E series which frankly have been selling out so fast AMD killed the entire AM3 line two quarters early so they could devote the fabs to cranking Bobcats. As someone who bought a EEE E-350 I can see why they are selling out, 6 hours on a battery watching full HD, doesn't get hot even under load, and with enough power i use mine as a portable music creation studio with Audacity. Intel never has figured out how to make truly kick ass GPUs and with AMD integrating ATI into APUs you get frankly insane levels of power for cheap money. I just finished setting up a C series for a customer and frankly it spanks the hell out of the Atom units and has enough power i was able to remote in using Remote Assistance to do the final tweaks while she sat at home. All that for $300 with Win 7 HP instead of crappy starter like you get on atom netbooks? Yeah Intel should worry.

Go to Tiger and look up the E-350 and see how the OEMs have gone nuts with AMD chips (now that Intel can't bribe them anymore) and have slapped E series into everything, they have HTPCs, netbooks, laptops, and all in ones ALL using the E series chips. Intel screwed themselves both by crippling Atom for fear of losing Celeron sales and by killing the Nvidia chipset business which ION was the only thing that made Atom units worth having. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Intel kills atom within a year and a half and just uses it for embedded while having Celeron try to fill the gap because trying some of the newer chips (last one I tried was the 525) frankly without ION its painfully slow to use. Stupid move Intel, you should have welcomed Nvidia instead of attacking them.

Re:ARM

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Honestly, it largely depends on how intel decides to price them:

If they continue with their recent trend of fairly aggressive pricing on 'real' CoreWhatever ULV chips, of which even the weakest 'celeron' branded ones are superior to the atom, and crazy optimistic pricing and deliberate crippling of Atom parts and boards, it will be hard to get worked up about them.

If, on the other hand, Intel is genuinely getting a bit rattled by some of the fancier ARM gear, and chooses to price the Atom more in line with its die size(Atoms are not fast; but they are tiny compared to Intel's punchier designs, rather than their desire to spare the lower end of the Core line, I'll take several.

Atoms aren't screaming fast, or milliwatt power sippers; but they are excellent in various appliance applications: In network attached storage, for instance, the superiority of an atom board to some horrid little SoC is downright alarming. The performance of a nasty little plastic router vs. an Atom running monowall or similar is equally unfair.

If the price is right, there are plenty of places where a bit more punch, and the ability to use 100% normal PC linux experience, are worth the modest additional power consumption. If they keep pricing them in order to save the Core line, they get a lot less exciting...

Re:ARM

[kenh]

Typically the power problem for the Atom CPU is in the chipset it is deployed with, not the CPU itself. Early Atom MBs from Intel had a fairly large heatsink on the chipset, and the CPU itself was air-cooled...

What? They are still making Atom?

[erroneus]

Where are they selling it? Don't get me wrong. I have a netbook. My wife has one. My son has one. We all use them... well, I haven't used mine for a long time ... it is something of a backup/skype device but that's about it.

All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM. Microsoft has already buried both the Atom and the netbook by blocking and discouraging them in every way they could imagine. Windows XP is no longer available through OEM and Microsoft somehow has the power to make everyone cripple their implementation of Atom to 2GB or less RAM supported. So what is Intel targeting?

Re:What? They are still making Atom?

[tepples]

All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM.

Come Windows 8, which expands support for capacitive touch tablets, Intel wants to be ready in order not to give the entire market to ARM. The big advantage of Atom is that existing non-free niche applications designed for Windows XP will likely run on an Atom-powered Windows tablet roughly as fast as they would on a PC with a comparably clocked Pentium 4. Because they're non-free, the end user can't recompile them for ARM, and because they're niche, the publisher is likely unwilling to.

Microsoft somehow has the power to make everyone cripple their implementation of Atom to 2GB or less RAM supported

Can you cite an article showing how Microsoft is responsible? Google 2 gb atom limit microsoft failed me.

Re:What? They are still making Atom?

[oldlurker]

Where are they selling it? Don't get me wrong. I have a netbook. My wife has one. My son has one. We all use them... well, I haven't used mine for a long time ... it is something of a backup/skype device but that's about it.

All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM. Microsoft has already buried both the Atom and the netbook by blocking and discouraging them in every way they could imagine. Windows XP is no longer available through OEM and Microsoft somehow has the power to make everyone cripple their implementation of Atom to 2GB or less RAM supported. So what is Intel targeting?

I have an Atom based media center PC that I'm very happy with. With SSD disk. No fans, no sounds, it is completely silent. And not much bigger than a book. Running Win7 MCE performance has been good, no issues playing back any HD format video.

And I'm doing dimensional analysis

[tepples]

and chips rarely have battery life, they have power consuption

From one you can find the other. Battery life (in h) equals battery charge capacity (in Ah) times battery voltage (in V) divided by the sum of all components' power consumption (in W). So if you reduce any component's power consumption, you increase the battery life. The goal becomes to reduce the CPU's power consumption to a rounding error compared to that of an LCD backlight, and ARM got there before x86.

Re:And I'm doing dimensional analysis

[The End Of Days]

ARM started from the bottom and is struggling to match Intel for performance. Intel started from the top and is struggling to match ARM for efficiency.

This battle is far from over, and I'm putting my money on Intel because in the end, they have manufacturing prowess no one can equal.

Re:And I'm doing dimensional analysis

[Daniel Phillips]

ARM started from the bottom and is struggling to match Intel for performance. Intel started from the top and is struggling to match ARM for efficiency.

This battle is far from over, and I'm putting my money on Intel because in the end, they have manufacturing prowess no one can equal.

In a portable device I am only interested in mips/watt, provided baseline performance is good enough to run apps and GUI without lag, which ARM A8 certainly is and it only gets better from here. As far as I am concerned, the hardware problem is solved: ARM is it. Thanks to Google skinning Linux and marketing it as Android, ARM now has access to all the device drivers it needs to really succeed on portable devices. Now the fight for usability shifts to a new front: working around Google's half baked attempt to lock down Linux behind a shiny but pathetically limited GUI, and Google's self-damaging attempt to turn native apps into second class citizens. I'm pretty sure it will all work out in the end. Google may have an evil streak here and there but they are not so far gone that they cannot be embarrassed into doing the right thing from time to time. I can even imagine Android development opening up into a proper community project instead of the Google lapdog it currently is. Otherwise what happened to Oracle with OpenOffice will inevitably happen to Google. I think the uberlords at Google will eventually grasp the logic of winning some PR points and expanding the developer community for free, versus losing control of the entire project. Sorry, rambled a little there. The point is, it's not about which processor is best for mobile any more, we already know that. Now it's all about getting usable software on that processor.

Missing bindings

[tepples]

All of them

Except all three of these virtual machines tend to have one annoying misfeature: lack of bindings within the VM to specific I/O devices on the host. In Java, Flash, or JavaScript, how does a program read a USB Human Interface Device that isn't a mouse or keyboard, such as a joystick, without requiring installation of native shims such as JoyToKey that might not be available for ARM? In Java SE or JavaScript, how does a program activate a computer's camera or microphone (after asking the user for permission)? They also tend to impose a substantial overhead in RAM, as both the bytecode and the native code need to be in RAM at once.

you can also include LLVM

How long will it take for Google to finish PNaCl so that non-free applications can be distributed to the public in the form of LLVM bitcode?

and Android

I kind of included that in Java, seeing as Dalvik isn't very different from JVM.

Re:What? They are still making Atom?

[klapaucjusz]

Microsoft somehow has the power to make everyone cripple their implementation of Atom to 2GB or less RAM supported

Can you cite an article showing how Microsoft is responsible? Google 2 gb atom limit microsoft failed me.

The following table specifies the limits on physical memory for Windows 7.
...
Windows 7 Starter 2 GB N/A

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx

Re:What? They are still making Atom?

[TeknoHog]

All the tablets and things coming out now are running ARM.

How many of those can run a proper Linux distro?

Actually, I have a couple of ARM devices doing just that (N800, N900, Buffalo Linkstations) but the majority seem to be running some kind of a phone OS, and it is not straightforward to install your own distro. I don't have much love for x86, but at least the semi-standardized platform lets me run whatever software I want.

Re:What? They are still making Atom?

[Graymalkin]

What the GP is talking about is Windows 7 Starter's 2GB RAM limit. You can stuff more RAM into a machine running Starter (which is most netbooks) but it will only actually use 2GB. To be able to use more than 2GB with your netbook you need to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium which is about $80, in addition to the cost to upgrade the RAM. This means the average $200 netbook ends up costing $400 to have a decent amount of RAM available.

I've seen very few netbooks that ship with Home Basic or Home Premium out of the box, most I've ever seen have Starter. Not only is the RAM limit a problem but it also gimps a lot of basic OS features like the ability to use multiple monitors, DVD playback, and fast user switching. Microsoft has put a lot of work into making sure the average netbook is just a crippled web terminal.

The problem is Microsoft's license terms.

[Dzimas]

I recently bought a sub-$200 Acer with an N570 dual core Atom processor. It's better than I thought, especially after bumping the RAM. It looks like the Cedar Trail chips will offer a nice performance boost and lower manufacturing costs because of the SOIC integration.

But...

The stupid hardware restrictions Microsoft places on manufacturers to qualify for cheap OEM copies of Windows Starter have absolutely crippled the Netbook segment -- 1024x600 screen resolution and a maximum 1GB RAM is absolutely ridiculous in 2011. With a slightly higher resolution display and 2 to 4GB of memory, these machines would be extremely competitive in the low end portable market.

New Atom will have PowerVR Gfx - what about Linux?

[Chewy509]

As the subject points out... The new Cedar Trail are now using PowerVR derived graphics core... anyone know what the status of Linux is for the PowerVR SGX 545?

Re:What? They are still making Atom?

[tepples]

The power of Microsoft

...is something we should figure out how to route around, as I pointed out above.