Comment by corresation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corresation | Hacker News Reader

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The Atom was made for the burgeoning market of low power, low performance, low priced netbooks. That was seen as the probable breakout market, though it was short-lived.

So Intel wanted a fairly power efficient chip, but they also wanted to ensure that it didn't cannibalize their own sales, so they intentionally crippled it from a performance perspective, not least by always building it on the last or second-last process. This is an aspect of the Atom that is missed by so many, sure that Intel was caught with their pants down by ARM: Intel's biggest fear wasn't ARM, but that their pricey high-end CPUs would get replaced by their low cost variants. They still fight with this paranoia to this day.

The Atom was neither inspired by the iPad (obviously given that it far preceded it) or even ARM. At best you could say Intel had some concern about Transmeta, leading to some of the early Atom work.

This isn't a minor error of "ordering". These were critical mistakes in your retelling of history.

I'm well aware of that fact, and I am also aware of the fact that BayTrail Atoms are correcting this mistake. (Finally, 22nm Atoms for realz this time.)

I have admitted my mistake with an addendum, although I cannot edit my earlier post anymore. What more do you want?

50 pushups and a $10 contribution to the EFF.

> The Atom was made for the burgeoning market of low power, low performance, low priced netbooks.

This is incorrect. The Atom CPU was initially meant for smartphones, but the first models way overshooted the available power envelope. Netbooks were created by Asus when Intel offered a lot of cheap, slow chips for sale that were good for little else, and they created a new, shortlived segment. No-one at Intel thought about netbooks when designing Atom.

Didn't we already cover this? It is revisionist fiction, built around the notion that Intel was so outclassed by ARM, when really Intel was just short-sighted about how important smartphones would become.

The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor (I have a little file server running a dual-core Atom, the processor being air cooled while the chipset has a fan. As a humorous aside, altogether that micro-PC uses about the same power as my new i7 Mac Mini under standard loads), b) completely built for traditional PC uses. Do you need IDE on your smartphone, for instance? How about an A20 line?

The "glut of inventory" notion is not realistic. It doesn't work that way.

Intel had no intentions in the smartphone industry at the time. If they did, not only would they have actually made a decent chipset (they happen to be the most advanced chipmaker in the world, with the world's best fabs), they would have made a prototype (which is what all manufacturers do when they try to enter a market - a proof of concept). There were absolutely none until later Atom variants.

People forget it now, but it was initiatives like One Laptop Per Child that initiated the netbook craze -- that program talking about ultra-inexpensive laptops, leading to a lot of people saying "You know...I too would like an inexpensive laptop that I could just bang around and leave in the car and..." (Slashdot was full of people trying to repurpose such devices), and with that an industry was born.

Yup, OLPC was what "woke up" Intel, making them begin to build Atoms. Frankly, Intel had the foresight to start the Atom project to hedge their bets a little bit.

They never "really" tried to compete in the smartphone market (which is ~2W), the Atom was instead always targeted at ~10W. (IIRC, Intel's real focus at that time were Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage, CULV processors at the 18W envelope. Today... known as Ultrabooks). However, as Smartphones became the next hot thing, it is now obvious that Intel has to scale the Atom down even further. And unfortunately, the netbook market imploded.

Its not all wasted however, IMO, netbooks "became" tablets. From a CPU perspective, there is little difference between Netbooks and Tablets. You want low-power consumption between 5W to 10W, and lower costs. In fact, as netbooks were "dying out", they slowly became tablets. See AsusTab Smart for example, it basically is a Netbook without a keyboard, but built with a touchscreen. (same price range as Netbooks of old, but just in tablet form).

Anyway, Intel hasn't forgotten the Smartphone market either. Thus the Atoms that worked closer to the 2W SoC benchmark... Medfield, Clovertrail, and soon to be Bay Trail Atoms. Clovertrail is winning a few benchmarks here and there, and Bay Trail will be built on Intel's latest process for once. So it looks like Intel is finally taking the smartphone market seriously. But only the last generation or so are actual attempts at a Smartphone chip... and even then, there isn't a single Atom out there that is built on Intel's latest 22nm process. That will only come from the future Bay Trail Atoms.

> The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor

To add some numbers:

The most popular first generation Atom, the N270, had a TDP of 2.5 W. The accompanying chipset and I/O controllers however had a combined TDP of 9.3 W.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_%28microarchitecture%29...

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