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Intel Cuts Atom Chips, Basically Giving Up On Smartphone and Tablet Market (pcworld.com)
Intel, the marquee PC chipmaker, has long struggled to get a foothold in the smartphone market. The company, which was late in joining the mobile platform, is still playing catchup with Qualcomm and MediaTek. And it appears it's finally giving up on this ambition. The company is "immediately canceling" Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, reports PCWorld, citing a company's spokesperson. The publication reports:Intel's mobile chip roadmap now has a giant hole after the cancellation of the chips. Intel's existing smartphone and tablet-only chips are aging and due for upgrades, and no major replacements are in sight. Sofia is already shipping, and Broxton was due to ship this year but had been delayed. Intel is also discontinuing its Atom X5 line of tablet chips code-named Cherry Trail, which is being replaced by Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake, aimed more at hybrids than pure tablets. Many PC makers are already choosing Intel's Skylake Core M processors over Cherry Trail for hybrids and PC-like tablets.The announcement comes days after its CEO outlined the company's future vision, and a week after the chipmaker let go 12,000 people.
for some things, at least.
for audio, it was great. an x86 platform with a proper network interface, proper sata interface, expandable memory to reasonable mounts (for its application) and often there was onboard atx psu parts so you gave it a laptop 18v dc brick and that was your whole psu. totally silent, with an ssd.
otoh, the recent (last year or 2) of i3 has been so cool running, you can just use the fanless i3 variant on an itx board and have more fun.
still, the atom on the board was low cost, often fanless (more than the i3 was) and good enough for some video and any audio you could throw at it. it could be a nas server, as well.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
When looking at the technical merits of Atom, it was actually quite competitive with the latest and greatest offerings from the ARM camp (with the exception of Apple's offerings, but Apple has advantages others don't).
In this case, the bullet to the head was, ironically, software compatibility. To this day, you can't just put an x86 chip in a phone/tablet and expect *everything* to work right that would've if running an ARM chip. Not to mention Intel charges way too damn much for those things and doesn't have anywhere close to a decent connectivity (WIFI/LTE/GSM) pairing solution.
Their SoC design was also shit. Codecs and DSP algorithms that others have baked in for generations are still missing from the latest and greatest Atom.
Well, they haven't lost them yet. 3 of my neighbors are Intel employees (some at Intel's flagship semiconductor plant) and one of them told me yesterday that they haven't yet decided who all they are going to let go, but the ones they do let go will get a pretty good severance. They set a benchmark goal of 10% of the workforce, and the specifics are still being sorted. Some they've immediately let go (business segments that they're closing completely) and in business segments that they want to downsize, they're notifying teams that their members can voluntarily get laid off or retire early (with full severance.) After that, if they don't get enough volunteers, they're going to do forced layoffs.
Intel hasn't made an 80x86 chip in a couple decades.
80586 / i586 was named "Pentium" because Intel could not trademark a number but still wanted to distinguish itself from AMD Am86 and Cyrix Cx486.
"80x86" has since then become a de facto generic name for all descendants of the 8086, including the x86-64 / AMD64 / EM64T / Intel64 / x64 architecture.
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As usual, people see the name of a specific flavor of an SoC and think that the entire line is being spoken about.
An SoC has a number of process cores of a given types and then a bunch of other units that are specific to the application. A different application may call for a different set of units which will have a different product name.
The older example of this when people mention the sale of StrongARM as if that were the entirety of ARM development, when in reality is was just a specific ARM-based part that today no one talks about. There are plenty of other ARM products being sold.
Today we have word-salad about some x86 SOC parts being discontinued/not discontinued. Cherry Trail is being discontinued... because it is old and crappy and its replacement is now ready. The replacement is "Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake"... except the "Pentium and Celeron" cores are actually Atom-based. Pentium and Celeron are currently just brand names that carry no technical detail about the core they are applied to.