Skymont in Desktop Form: Atom Unleashed – By Chester Lam

Intel has come a long way since butchering the Atom brand. When Atom was new, it had absolutely pitiful performance - much worse than what we got from its contemporaries, particularly considering how much power they took.

It's interesting to consider that this was the best that Intel had in the low power world in 2008, and this was after seeing how much of a misstep they made when they declined to work with Apple on processors suitable for the iPhone.

Even their later Atoms, like the Atom x7-E3950, were bad in real world performance, often being beat by low power AMD CPUs that were years older, like the Athlon 5350.

I'm surprised that Intel kept the Atom name after delivering such poor performance that "Atom" became synonymous with "woefully underpowered", but it seems to make sense that Atom is now just a low power, node optimized version of a previous full performance architecture.