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.

Comments

atom fanless mini-itx boxes are (were?) great..

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:Is it that difficult?

[imgod2u]

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.

Re:Is it that difficult?

[Koen Lefever]

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.